❚ A CRACKLING EXCHANGE OF OPINIONS has given Facebook some edge this week. Legendary Wag club host, the deejay Chris Sullivan poured scorn on the term “jazz-funk” and its followers, igniting a barrage of responses from 70s fans of the Gold Mine, Caister and the Lacy Lady, sampled below.
➢ Chris Sullivan at Facebook, Nov 15:“ A friend of mine asked me what I played at Novikov every Sunday. I replied “jazz and funk” and he said “jazz-funk” and so horrified was I that anyone would think I play that rubbish, I recorded the start of my set for him and here it is… ”
Paul Carter: Nuthin wrong with jazz-funk at all – was the soundtrack to many young Londoners’ lives… The Gold Mine was one of the best clubs ever… When everyone was obsessed with punk and post punk, the really cool kids (black and white) were groovin to jazz-funk and soul. Just sayin.
Chris Sullivan: When I went to the Gold Mine it was funk but later came jazz-funk like Brazilian Love by George Duke and jazz-funkers started getting their hair permed and wearing dungarees and going to Purley All-Dayers… bloody horrible… Most true funk I love and jazz, especially Blue Note, is impeccable but jazz-funk is shite… and its emergence ruined a good little scene – remember the Cortinas with the car stickers “Wayne and Shirley” for example, and the furry dice.
Paul Carter: Bit of snobbery there I think… and it is an opinion Chris, no more… I remember some incredible nights down the Gold Mine with Chris Hill, Pete Tong, and the rest of them – a lot of wedges but not a perm in sight – just great music – I think it’s a real shame that it’s been written out of club culture in favour of Northern soul (dull dull dull) and the West End scene in which you played such a large part. I was in both scenes and I always loved that the suburban scene was just about the music, not about the width of your turn-ups (much as I loved Le Beat Route and the rest). Oh and it was far more racially mixed too… / Continued at Facebook
Dressing up on Canvey, 1982: Gold Mine girls maintain the high standards set by the club over the past decade. (Photographed by Shapersofthe80s)
Hill: ushered in Age of the Dance
❚ NOVEMBER 9 SEES maverick deejay Chris Hill front the fourth Official Gold Mine Reunion back this year on Canvey Island at The Monico, a stone’s throw away from the site of the nightspot renowned as the birthplace of British jazz-funk.
Other members enlisted from the South-East’s Funk Mafia who ruled at Caister weekenders and the big soul all-dayers will be Jeff Young and Snowboy and ace record-shopkeeper for the rare groove scene, Gary Dennis. The reunion will be echoing to sounds from Donnie Hathaway to Chick Corea, from BT Express to Mastermind. But first, a taste of the Gold Mine’s tenth year as I reported it 31 years ago…
Ten years of the Canvey Island Gold Mine
[First published in The Face, August 1982]
❏ SOME SAY THE whole of today’s style scene has its roots here… The Gold Mine, Canvey Island, has passed into countless legends for the trends it has set and on August 14 manager Stan Barrett pulls a champagne cork to celebrate his club’s tenth birthday.
Mind you, feet have pounded its original sprung maple dancefloor since 1949. Southend and the towns of the Essex style triangle have reared cults since the word was invented, so when in 1972 the Gold Mine began playing what rivals then called “silly music” – My Guy and all those soul sounds – the local hipsters took their cue. It was that wild man among deejays, Chris Hill, who, as the only one south of Lancashire playing soul, put Canvey Island on the map and ushered in the soulful new Age of the Dance.
Then in 1975, for a reason no more obscure than a simple father to son legacy, came a Glenn Miller Swing revival, which triggered the then unique clubbing fad of nostalgic dressing-up.
Stan Barrett says: “Chris played Singin’ In The Rain one Saturday and of course even kids who couldn’t remember the original knew the words to it. Everyone started being Gene Kelly on the dancefloor, dressing as Gls and Betty Grable. So he played Moonlight Serenade then the Andrews Sisters’ Boogey Woogey – that’s when they all started to jive and to dress up.”
The Sun, the tabloid daily paper which has a remarkably consistent record for picking up trends first, featured the Gold Mine. “Coaches came from Newcastle, Wales, everywhere,” Barrett remembers. The rest is undisputed history for the influence of Essex stylists on emergent London nightlife scene has been visible from the 60s Mod scene to Chaguaramas and the Vortex to the Blitz and beyond.
Swing revival 1975: Glenn Miller tunes inspired jiving and GI uniforms at the Gold Mine (courtesy Brian Longman, CanveyIsland.org.uk)
The key to the Gold Mine’s success? Impossible selectivity at the door, which may sound over familiar today. Barrett says: “Nobody too old. And only people into style which means your own style, not Gary Numan’s. It costs you at first but look how it pays off in the end. People have never come to the Gold Mine for a good drink up, always the music and the scene.”
Right now in summer ’82, Essex is a musical ball of confusion with the electronic camp of Depeche Mode and Talk Talk holding sway. Drinking with Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris at the Gold Mine the other night was clubrunner about Southend, Steven Brown, who sports a £100 PW Forte Sixties suit and reckons that psychedelia is still big there, heaven help us. He has also done time with a non-psychedelic local band of jokers called Doodle Sax: “It’s had about 35 people in it at various times but we’re not very serious.” One of them, synthesiser doodler Andy Norton, says the vibes are already about for much heavier rhythms. “Music has to turn much more macho.”
And if there are any visual indicators at the Gold Mine today, they are less fancy, more free. A regular called Andy “from Stanford No Hope” says: “Make up is so out of date, it’s like watching old crows trying to pull. The Gold Mine is much better now that we don’t get all the arty students down.”
Guardian of the Gold Mine, 1982: manager Stan Barrett and his wife Jayne. (Photographed by Shapersofthe80s)
Nov 11 UPDATE: MOVIN’ AS EVER TO BRASS CONSTRUCTION
Saturday night on Canvey, 2013: shonky screengrab from Trizzles Green Trees’ video at Facebook. Click to view
❏ “Banging best night in ages,” reported Essex Funker Trizzles Green Trees the morning after when she posted this video of the Gold Mine Reunion’s dancefloor heaving to Brass Construction’s 1975 classic Movin’. [Click the pic to run the vid at Facebook.] She added: “We opened the door to the main room and you were just knocked away instantly by the vibe and the atmosphere… everyone was smiling and dancing whether you knew them or not.”
One of the hosts deejay Snowboy Mark called it “a road-block event” at The Monico, Canvey Island. “There were so many old faces there, going way back to the original pre-79 days… Andrea Wingrove-Dunn, Laurence Dunn, Steve Brown, Gary Turner, and pre-76 Gold Miner Molly Brown (she was under age of course!) who loved it more than anyone and stayed right to the end dancing, singing her head off and causing a stir in her immaculate 40s clothing.
“I loved playing Shifting Gears, Inside America, Mary Hartman et al – to me, out and out Gold Mine records for those that were there in the early years.”
❏ Chris Hill interviewed during a live TV visit to the Gold Mine, Canvey Island, broadcast in 1983 on Channel 4’s weekly pop show The Tube. The club closed in 1989.
❏ Northern Soul fans will recall that their legendary venue the Wigan Casino launched its first soul all-nighter in September 1973 (a year after the Gold Mine).
“ After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972’s Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. Walk On the Wild Side, a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol’s Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and Satellite of Love was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973’s Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as avant-garde classic music, while 1978’s banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name… ” / Continued at Rolling Stone
“Lou Reed… said that the first Velvet Underground
record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years.
But that was such an important record for
so many people, I think everyone who bought one
started a band!” – Brian Eno, 1982
“ Their 1967 debut The Velvet Underground And Nico is the single most influential album in rock history. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another record that altered the sound and vocabulary of rock so dramatically, that shifted its parameters so far at a stroke. Vast tranches of subsequent pop music exist entirely in its shadow: it’s possible that glam rock, punk, and everything that comes loosely bracketed under the terms indie and alt-rock might have happened without it, but it’s hard to see how…
“ … the four gruelling songs that make up side two of his 1973 concept album Berlin are quite astonishing expressions of coldness and cruelty… [but] he could write songs that were impossibly moving, that spoke of a tenderness and sensitivity: the lambent, peerless Pale Blue Eyes; Halloween Parade’s heartbreaking lament for New York’s gay community, devastated by Aids; his meditation on death, Magic And Loss… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
“ Heavy rain, flooding, strong winds and falling trees are forecast for Sunday night in parts of England and Wales. An amber alert has been issued by the Met Office, which warns buildings could be damaged as a result. There could also be disruption to Monday morning’s rush hour.
“ Update Friday 17:15 – as things stand, Sunday night’s storm is set to be the worst across England and Wales since January 2007. ”
BRITISH FACEBOOKERS RESPOND:
Michael Chapman I blame David Cameron
Joanne Phillips If they didn’t prepare us we’d moan, if they get it right and it does damage we’ll moan, if it comes to nothing we’ll moan they got it wrong.
Martin Adil-Smith … ummm, isn’t this how Dad’s Army began?
Davey Pipe Watch out for that big arrow as well.
Kevin Phillips I wonder if they will get Michael Fish out of retirement to do the weather forecast?
Geoff Rogers You forgot the pestilence and plague of locusts.
Flashback to 1987
Oct 15, 1987 “No hurricane coming”: Hours before the Great Storm struck, Michael Fish has egg on his face, despite those extreme depressions glaring from the weather map. (After the event colleague Bill Giles owned up to the gaffe)
❚ BOY GEORGE WAS ONCE TOP OF THE POPS. He was, as they say, big in the 80s, when his band Culture Club topped the UK singles chart twice and the albums chart once. He then squandered the next 20 years of his life. Now at age 52 he says he has shed six stone (38kg) in weight and decided to resume being a pop singer again. Today The Sunday Times Magazine publishes an interview with him in which the only real topic of interest remains his refusal to express remorse for his past misdeeds. Yet the reasons why still appear to escape him…
“ … After well-documented cocaine and heroin addictions in the 1980s, [George’s] drug problems resurfaced in the noughties. In early 2009 he went to prison to serve four months of a 15-month custodial sentence, for the assault and false imprisonment of a Norwegian male escort. He was accused of shackling the 28-year-old man, Audun Carlsen, to a wall and lashing him with a chain in a drug-fuelled frenzy. There was another accomplice who still hasn’t been identified.
George has never spoken publicly about the incident. “No,” he smiles calmly, “and I’m never going to.”
Why not? “Because it doesn’t benefit anybody. I went to prison, due process was had and that’s the end of it. It’s not part of my life, it’s in the past and I don’t even think about it. It’s almost like it didn’t happen.”
That hasn’t stopped everyone else having their say. The judge sentencing him described the “wholly gratuitous violence” that George inflicted on his victim. In 2011, Carlsen himself gave an interview to The Times in which he described the attack in graphic detail. He said he had first met George through a gay dating website, that the singer had asked him to pose for nude photographs, but then accused Carlsen of stealing the pictures. On the night of the attack, he said, George and a friend had beaten him up, dragged him across the floor and handcuffed him. The friend left, but George came back into the room with a metal chain and started hitting him – it was a purely violent attack, Carlsen said, nothing sexual. Eventually he managed to escape and ran into the street, where he was found in his underwear, bloodied and screaming.
It’s hard to reconcile the brutality of that description with the carefully composed man sitting opposite me today, but without George’s version of events, it’s all we have to go on. Does he feel the need to set the record straight?
“It’s not part of my life, it’s in the past
and I don’t even think about it.
It’s almost like it didn’t happen.”
“No, no. Who for? For titillation? I don’t need to, I’ve made peace with myself, which is the most powerful thing I’ve ever done. It wouldn’t be dignified for me to talk about it now. It wouldn’t help anyone. It would probably hurt him and I’m not prepared to do that. I’m very proud of myself for not talking about it.” He says all this with zen-like control.
One of the problems with not talking about it though, I venture, is that people assume he has no remorse.
“Um… surely that’s something I have to…” he catches himself. “That’s such an attempt to get me to talk about it!” he squeals. “Nice try! All I can really say about all of that period of my life… when I was younger if you’d have said to me ‘Do you regret anything?’ – and I’m not specifically talking about that incident – if you’d said to me 10, 20 years ago, I’d have absolutely said, ‘No, I don’t regret anything’. I would have been so arrogant about it, but as an older man I have so many regrets, and having regrets has allowed me to have boundaries with myself. It’s allowed me to say, ‘This isn’t acceptable, this isn’t acceptable’, and to know myself much more…” / Continued online
❏ All of which suggests no change since 2010 and George’s first cosy breakfast TV chat after being released from jail. No mention of remorse, just an additional layer of psychobabble.
➢ Choose “View full site” – then in the blue bar atop your mobile page, click the three horizontal lines linking to many blue themed pages with background article
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
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A UNIQUE HISTORY
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VINCENT ON AIR 2026
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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