Paul Fitzpatrick: London July 2023

If you’d told me 45 years ago that a DJ could be worth $300 million I’d have asked you what you were smoking.

But it stacks up when you learn that Calvin Harris can charge up to $400k per show… which will probably rule him out of spinning the discs at any weddings or bar mitzvah’s this weekend. Not bad for a former shelf-stacker from Dumfries.

Up till the age of sixteen, 90% of the music I listened to came via the radio – the transistors on the daily-school-bus-run belting out Radio One; the hushed tones of late night jocks like Tony Prince/Emperor Roscoe, and of course the chart show on Sunday afternoon’s for the big reveal, or as per usual, the big let down –
“Yes pop-pickers, for the fifth week running little Jimmy Osmond stays at #1“.

My favourite Radio One DJ was always Johnnie Walker.

Walker famously got sacked by Radio One for calling The Bay City Rollers “Musical Garbage” at the height of their popularity, which was fair enough…. I’m not sure it impacted his target audience that much, or gave him many sleepless nights.
There were no gimmicks with Johnnie, you could tell that he was passionate about the music he thoughtfully curated, and most importantly, he had pretty good taste.

He was the guy who championed the 1975 Fleetwood Mac album when everyone else had written them off, and his show is where I would hear nuggets from Steely Dan and Little Feat that no one else on British radio was playing at the time.

The only other DJ’s we were exposed to at that age were the mobile variety at various youth club & school discos…. who were portrayed pretty accurately by Ray Von and his ‘wheels of steel’ in Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights.

On leaving school we started going to clubs in Glasgow and our favourite haunt for a couple of years was the aptly named Clouds, (atop the famous Glasgow Apollo venue).

The resident Friday night DJ at Clouds was Tiger Tim Stevens, a Radio Clyde DJ who would dress up (as a teddy-boy or a frog) and charm the natives.

This was late 1974 just as Tiger was becoming a local celebrity with his… ‘The Aff its Heid Show’.
By 1975 Tiger had outgrown Radio Clyde & Clouds with the aim of being a pop-star, but before long he was back at the station spinning discs.

I couldn’t really tell you what type of music Tiger liked, his Clouds playlist was pretty eclectic, he would play a bit of disco (Gloria Gaynor, Barry White), some chart stuff (Bowie, Roxy) and then throw in curveballs from the 50’s like Dion’s – “The Wanderer” or Clarence (Frogman) Henry’s – “I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do”, and he ended every evening with the perfect last-dance or ‘moonie’ as we called it in Glasgow – Eddie Holman’s “Hey There Lonely Girl”.

Glasgow was pretty lively in the mid 70s with new venues sprouting up regularly and a new club opened in competition to Clouds called Shuffles.

My Shuffles highlight came when the legendary Emperor Rosko of Radio Luxembourg fame rocked up with his roadshow.
Whilst we may not have been clambering to the front to grab ourselves some souvenir chest hair like some, it was still a thrill to see the original medallion man in person…. “Have Mercy!”

Bizarrely, Clouds and Shuffles were both unlicensed despite the fact you had to be 18 to gain entry, which was fair enough as most of us were a couple of years shy of 18 anyway.

As we got a bit more sophisticated and progressed to licensed clubs, Craig Davis was the main man in town.

‘Craigy Baby’ had a few residences around Glasgow and was the DJ at Maestros night club, which is where the real poseurs hung out.
Craig may have been a superfly DJ by night but by day he worked with film distributors, liaising with local cinemas to book and plan their movie schedules.

I got to know Craig through a family friend who we shared an office with and he was always good enough to drop off movie posters for films he knew I liked… I just wish I’d kept them.

Craig hit the headlines when he got pulled over and breathalysed by the police one evening after a festive gig and was staggered to learn that he was over the drink-driving limit, Craig was tea-total, and never drank.

Despite his protestations the officers took him back to the station for a second test, which was borderline…. whereupon a befuddled Craig remembered that he’d scoffed a box of chocolate liqueurs during the course of the evening that a fan had gifted him.

Fortunately for Craig the police bought his story and released him without charge.

The next day, the DJ was plastered all over the Evening Times telling his story… his cheery smile pictured next to a box of cherry liqueurs.

It kinda went with the territory that most male DJ’s enjoyed a fair bit of female attention, and I expect this was the primary motivation for the Argentinian dudes we came across at a club near Barcelona in 1975.

It didn’t take long for us to work out why there were 3 of them – they would each take a turn on the decks so that the other two could strut around to meet and greet their adoring public…

Not only did these guys look the part, they were also brilliant dancers and to top it off they were damn good DJ’s as well… (now that’s what you call a triple threat!).

I remember the one that looked most like Mario Kempes used to play this killer 4-song sequence every night…
“Sex Machine” by James Brown, “Trampled Underfoot” by Led Zeppelin, “Disco Stomp” by Hamilton Bohannon and “Why Did You Do It” by Stretch… I’d never heard anyone mixing Zep with the Godfather of Soul before, but it was a 20 minute jam that brought the house down every time.

These guys were on it every night and knew how to draw the crowds in, especially the girls, which in turn meant there were plenty of guys in attendance too, you could say it was a win-win-win.

On the other side of the coin there were DJ’s like Gerry Kennedy, who just played great music with no fuss.
Gerry was the resident DJ at the Boulevard Hotel in Clydebank, a regular Sunday haunt for a crowd of us back then…

Gerry wasn’t interested in being the centre of attention he just wanted to keep everyone on the dance floor, and his weekly finale of moonies was always the perfect way to end the evening & the weekend.

I actually met my wife at the Bouli so DJ Gerry and The Commodores have a lot to answer for!

Apart from a few exceptions I’m not a big listener of radio these days so I’m pretty clueless about the current DJ scene, in fact the only time I get to see or hear any of the current crop is when they pop up on Celebrity Gogglebox or the like.

Hopefully they’re not as bland as they come across but perhaps after everything that’s gone down it’s understandable that this era’s radio stars need to be a bit more ‘vanilla’ than their controversial 70s counterparts.

Fortunately for me a few of the OG’s are still going strong –
Johnnie Walker with his 70s Show on Radio 2, Robbie Vincent with his Soul show on Jazz FM and Robert Elms on BBC Radio London.

Just goes to show, quality never goes out of style.