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Dj Derek
On Big Chill Dot Net's final show on Big Chill FM at Eastnor 2003 The Legendary Jesse Belle broadcast an interview with the legendary, wonderful and a very jovial DJ Derek - the Bristol based veteran reggae DJ - taped backstage at the Club Tent on the Saturday 2nd August (Eastnor 2003), after his daytime slot which fairly rocked. This is the full transcript...Please introduce yourself and what you've just been doing…
- I'm some man's called DJ Derek, I'm from Bristol, I was introduced to Reggae and Ska music as it evolved back in the 60s through the Jamaican community and ended up being a predominantly white man on a black man's dance scene back in the 60s and 70s. And they made a film about me in 1994 and the festivals picked up on me, Womad and now, one of my favourite Festivals - Big Chill - and I'm at Eastnor. I've just come off stage having done a midday two o'clock set. It's a bit early for me, normally I'm getting in at about that time, not getting up and playing!
It must also be very difficult to play when it's boiling hot outside - and yet you packed them in even so.
- Well you can never tell what's going to happen on a lunchtime - I try to make as much noise on the basis if I can't sleep, neither shall they!
You've mentioned it already, and obviously all through your life since you picked up djing you've been asked this, but I'm going to ask it anyway - people make a very big fuss over the fact that you mix Jamaican patois and black music with very 'English' loves of real ale and quite formal wear. People make a big deal of it, but do you see a conflict?
- Not really. The real ale… one of the only beers I like is a lager, Red Stripe - which is Jamaican lager. But as for formal dress it was the standard practice among West Indian people out on a Saturday night to dress up in a suit, three piece suit, ladies in beautiful dresses. That was standard practice. And it was also quite British back in the 50s and 60s. I was in a rock'n'roll band originally - we were fairly radical - we weren't like the Stones or what happened after that, Punks, but yes smart dress was the thing. I laugh at these kids, when that torn jeans syndrome came in - they were paying hundreds of pounds for denim that was actually ripped! And they used to laugh at me because I was in a suit. And I would say, 'yeah but where I'm going tonight you can't get in with your backside hanging out of your trousers, you know. I still can't come to terms with that particular fashion!
Talking of fashion as well, you've mentioned youth and people also make a fuss about your age. How old are you exactly?
- I'm 61 going on 16. You know
You don't feel at all removed from your crowd…
- No, man, I mean I've been mixing with people of my age group and then their children and then their children. And I just feel ageless. The Stones got fed up with being called the Wrinklies, I never actually went through that stage, I became sort of 'veteran' or 'timeless' which is a wonderful thing to be known as - timeless. I've always said I'll go on doing this until people don't ask me or until I drop dead over the decks. You know.
All of us were half your age and bouncing up and down! It's absolutely brilliant, like John Peel, you're totally in touch with every generation…
- I've got a lot of respect for John Peel because he did ground break a lot of music, a lot of the stuff he actually I wish he'd just broken it not ground broken it! But yes he did put dub and reggae into the mainstream ear if you like. I mean I've been listening to that music for so long, it seems strange to me that so many people don't know it. I mean nowadays, there's a big crossover between r'n'b, hip hop and reggae, mainly through the toasters and the rappers. It sounds like a grocery shop don't it, toasters and rappers! [laughs]
Is there any music out being made today that you like or recommend?
- There's two acts. I was lucky enough to play with one of them in the Coulston Hall in Bristol a few weeks ago, Luciano - roots and culture singer, coming off the Marley mould, and there's a group of musicians, very similar in style, called Morgan Heritage, I think they're appearing in Swindon very shortly or just have. Unfortunately I was booked for a Wedding reception that day, otherwise I could have supported them. But if you listen to their music you can follow the thread of roots music Alan Marley, rasta, peace and love, you know. And beautifully played and sung, you know. When I listen to some of these pop artistes, it's so formulaic, these guys play their instruments, studied what they do, you know.
With these bands coming through then, you don't fear for roots music becoming a lost art?
- It can't get lost, because these people make music to make music. If they happen to make money along the way so well and good. But that's not the prime object. I mean Jamaica, it's a small island, and yet its influence on world music is phenomenal, absolutely incredible. Those people they love music, they're the most musically knowledgeable people I know. I mean I can't get away with playing a remix in front of one of the original 60s 70s Jamaicans, they're 'Ahh but that's not the original Derek' and I'll fool them sometimes or try to by playing a remix and then sliding the original in, see, I have got it, you know!
Have you been to Jamaica often?
- I've never been to Jamaica. I picked up my Jamaican the same way as black children who're born here picked it up from their parents. I picked it up from their parents as well. Deliberately, because I was involved so much in the 70s with sound systems - and if you sit down and you're discussing money and everybody is talking so fast you can't understand them, you always feel you're being stitched up! So I sat in a Jamaican barber's shop in St Paul's in Bristol for several months and picked up the rhythm of the language until I got to a state where I could ring up a black record producer in London to try and obtain a record. And when I turned up at his door, after having rung him on his phone, he said, 'Jesus Christ, man, I thought you were the tax inspector, you're a white man!
Would you never want to go to Jamaica though?
- When they made a film about me in 1994 - that was BBC 2 - Massive Attack, who were kids, and Nellee Hooper, used to sit outside the pub in Bristol I used to play at, I didn't know and they didn't know what they were going to end up as, but when they became famous and they saw me on the television, they contacted me and said, 'You were one of our biggest influences'. Which is staggering. I mean, I met Daddy G at the Festival today - he always makes a point of bowing down to me - and as he's 6'6″ it's quite a sight to see! But Nellee Hooper sent me a letter saying any time I wanted to come to Jamaica there was a ticket for me. Now it's 7 years outstanding - but what I'm doing here ain't broke, so I don't intend to fix it yet. I'll know when it's right for me to go.
When did you start Djing and what brought you into it?
- Well, I'd always been buying Jamaican music from the 60s when Jamaicans came over here just over Studio 1 opened in 1958/9, when they were first able to record their own music, they were doing versions of American black r'n'b - not what people call r'n'b these days - but proper rhythm and blues from New Orleans, Florida, people like Fats Domino and Louie Jordan, those people, and their first recordings you can hardly tell the difference - whether it's an American recording or an early Jamaican recording.
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- Now I loved that music. I didn't like what happened to that music, when rock'n'roll came in after Presley, because then you got exactly what happens with any decent black music, it gets picked up by the white artists 20 years later, commercialised and prettied up. It happened to reggae music, you know, they used to send tracks across - record them in Jamaica - and 'string them up' as they'd say, put strings in the background to make it acceptable to English folk. To me, you lose the heart and the soul of the music when you do that. Like rockabilly, it's a rip off from rhythm and blues but it's all, and heavy metal, it's all top end, there's no soul, no substance in it at all.
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- So I was buying the same r'n'b records as they were when I got access to them. And then we had a Jamaican club called The Bamboo Club in Bristol in the 60s. And I used to go down there and see all the people like Desmond Dekker and Marley before he was famous, Toots, all those guys, now I end up supporting them, as a DJ when they come to Bristol. It's like a huge extended family.
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- I was an accountant for 10 years, well more than that, 18 studying to be one, and in the mid-70s I had five years of crisis, I went through two marriages and lost both my parents. And I didn't feel like sitting behind a desk totting up figures relating to chocolate bars. I was working for Cadbury's at the time. And I jacked it in, I nearly had a nervous breakdown actually, and a Jamaican friend of mine took over a local pub called The Star and Garter in St Paul's, and he said, I know you've got the records - come down and play records for me. Because it's traditional in Jamaican pubs, they have DJs. Usually it's black guys. But they knew I had the music. They said to me, 'if you don't play for us we'll have to go to Jamaica to get a DJ. You're the only guy we know got all the music. And I just started doing it and then another guy opened a club and he said the same thing, 'You must come and play for me' and I started doing wedding receptions and parties and everything like that. Until apart from when a white guy or girl was marrying somebody of the opposite colour, predominantly the dances I was doing were black dances. 500 people from all over the country [and DJ Derek breaks into a Jamaican accent] 'Why have you got a white DJ' - 'You wait till you hear his music!' And then they'd come back to me at the end - 'Where do you get your music, man - sweet memories' And I called myself DJ Derek - Sweet Memory Sounds. That's what the name came from. And in 1994 there was a Trinidad guy in Bristol studying Media Studies, to get into television, and he was involved with the BBC 2 project doing a series called Picture This, half hour documentary on so-called ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and he said he said he'd never seen a white man so at ease in Black society, and would I be interested in doing a film. And I was very wary, I know what media people - present company excluded I hope - can be like. I was a typical case to be set up like, you know, a twerp. That's a good English word - twerp! Or some sort of old eccentric, which I suppose I am in a way. I don't think I am, you know, they're all mad except you and me, and you're a bit daft!
Why is it you feel so at ease in Black company?
- I just love their mannerisms, the way they react to each other, and the fact that once they realised there was no edge to me, no ulterior motive, I was just totally and utterly accepted and now that's gone right through the generations, the only white man at the party. But their kids grew up to accept me to the point their kids respect me and regard me now. It's just an extra extended family I've got spread all over the country - as I've played out and people have come to listen to me, it's something money could never have bought and certainly something I never expected to happen, but I'm glad it did!
What would you say is the most rewarding thing about Djing?
- The interreaction between myself and the crowd, it was quite freaky in the set I just done, I was playing a tune and I thought I'll follow this with Ring The Alarm and the first track was playing and somebody attracted my attention and they threw a CD over to me and it was some dub thing and it was called www.ringthealarm.com! And I just set that record I played! Now one of the first big West Indian dances I did, 500 people from all over the country, perhaps only 100 West Country people only really knew me, it was in Bath Pavillion, which is a massive place, and a band was due to come. And just as the dance started and I started playing somebody said the steel band had broken down and wouldn't be there. And I was looking down at 500 black faces thinking more than half of these people had never seen me before, and I've got to entertain them from now till 2 o'clock in the morning - that's quite scary! But I just - there's a lot of what we call small island, Barbados, Trinidad, who like soca and calypso, so I started playing a sequence of that and got everybody up dancing. And after about four tracks I could see - it was very hot - they were flagging a bit, edging off towards the side. I thought, right, I've got to find a good reggae track. And I picked up Eddie Lovett, 'Gipsy Woman', and as soon as the first bar started they all came back onto the dance floor and I thought - 'got 'em'! And throughout the rest of that evening people were coming up and asking me for tunes that I'd just put on the turntable. I got goosebumps up my back, it happened about four times! And that really convinced me, yeah I can do this job. Alright you get the occasional one where you don't go down too well for whatever reason, but that reaction and the adrenalin flow which comes from it, it's like any kind of performer, I mean, I people regard me as an act rather than just as a DJ, Womad sent me all over the world, put me on main stages in the early hours of the morning - there's little old me with my little tiny minidisk system and a huge main stage and an endless crowd in front of me! And security guards pushing youngsters off the stage who were trying to get on to dance! And I can't believe it sometimes at my age, I think, this is staggering! I'm the happiest man on earth. I can honestly say I wouldn't change places with anybody else on earth.
- I mean, just being here, I walked to Ledbury this morning, two miles there, two miles back, and I hadn't slept all night - and the sun was up, and I thought - and I'm being paid to do this! Next week I've got a nice wedding reception, the week after that, Notting Hill Carnival weekend, I'm playing Notting Hill pre-carnival festival in Notting Hill Arts Centre, I'm doing the 333 on the Saturday, I'm doing Brighton with Stick It On, who I'm playing after tonight in the Cocktail Bar and on Monday I'm coming back for the actual parade itself - where I'm supposed to be on a float. I mean it's fantastic! And I'm getting paid for it?
When was your first Big Chill and what was it like?
- That would have been at Larmer Tree, not the last one, the year before. I'd never heard of Larmer Tree before - you know it's not an advertised site, and it's hardly on the map! But I've done Womad several times, but it was nice to come to something on a less commercial scale. And it was chilled out, a very very enjoyable experience. Then I did the one last year and Eastnor and this year I did the actual Larmer Tree Festival. And I did a wedding reception in there in the same building two weeks before that! So I now Larmer Tree gardens pretty well by now! From every direction!
Are you going to stay on site and enjoy the weather and the Festival?
- I have to get back because I play in Bristol on Sunday nights on the farm. So I've got the coach tickets and everything. I love Festivals but to be quite fair, apart from the acts, all the stalls are the same everywhere, at a big festival there's three of everything, at a small one there's one of everything. I'm on my own, quite happy to be so I may say so, but I want to go into Ledbury, go to the tourist information office, pick up the latest bus timetables - that's my other hobby, travelling around by buses and coaches visiting Weatherspoon pubs, I've gone all over the country, I've done thousands of miles doing that.
Which is the best pub?
- Well, my local. But not because it's my local, but because it's the cheapest! All the best bitters are £1.29! There isn't a cheaper one in the country and I know because I've been to nearly every other one!
Well, thanks for talking to me
- Thank you - it's been a great pleasure. Big Chill - long may you continue because I've got nothing to say bad against Womad, they gave me so many chances to do what I've been doing. But it's like Glastonbury, it tends to get too big and a bit too remote from its original foundations in the end and I hope that never happens at this particular festival. God Bless You All!
Interview: Susanna Glaser
Written: 5th Aug, 03
Read: 15285 times
