Greg Wilson

Edition #19 of Early 80’s Floorfillers takes a look back to July 83. 
You can see the Top 10, complete with label or record sleeve scans and individual track credits, here: 
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/greg-wilsons-top-10-floorfillers-july-83/ 
Greg Wilson – July 2013

GREG WILSON’S EARLY 80’S FLOORFILLERS: 
A fascinating insight on how the fading Jazz-Funk scene gave way to the emerging Electro-Funk movement in the early 80’s, ‘Greg Wilson’s Early 80’s Floorfillers’, marks the 30th anniversary of when these tracks first appeared. Compiled from his record lists of the time, and unfolding month by month, Greg Wilson counts down the Top 10 Floorfillers played at his venues during the key years of ’82 and ’83. Featured, most notably, on his Tuesday sessions at Wigan Pier and Wednesday gatherings at Legend in Manchester, the most cutting-edge weekly black music nights of the era, these were the clubs most associated with the evolving Electro-Funk sound.

The majority of music played on the black scene in the UK was initially only available on import, mainly out of New York during this period, with the club nights described as ‘upfront’, meaning that the DJ’s were way ahead of the curve – what they played now, others played later, or not at all. Without these DJ’s, many now classic dance tracks would never have become UK hits (many without enjoying similar crossover success in the US) – the reason they were released here in the first place was because these specialist DJ’s were breaking them via the underground.

Things would change in a big way during those 2 years; we were entering the hybrid age for dance music, and the oncoming House and Techno and Hip Hop directions would all owe a huge debt to this era of dance alchemy and groove experimentation.

This podcast is also available on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad via the Radio ditto app, which is downloadable for free from iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/app/id464200632?mt=8

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

GREG WILSON'S EARLY 80'S FLOORFILLERS - JULY 1983

This is the first live mix I’ve uploaded since restrictions lifted, two hours recorded last month by the side of the River Thames on London’s South Bank between Waterloo and Westminster bridges, next to the London Eye.

BETWEEN THE BRIDGES LONDON SOUTH BANK 21.08.21 (greg wilson live mix)

ESSENTIAL MIX - JAN 2009
Uploaded on 17.01.10 and exclusive to SoundCloud. Available for the first time without voiceovers and jingles,12 months on from original Radio 1broadcast on 17.01.09.


EMAILSHOT A FEW DAYS AHEAD OF MIX BEING AIRED:
2009 kicks in for me this weekend with my first gig of the year for Udio (1st birthday) at The Gramaphone Club in Shoreditch, London on Friday night, which coincides with the airing of my only just completed in the nick of time Essential Mix on Radio 1, made up of 43 tracks in just under 2 hours.

Given that the 5th anniversary of my DJ comeback has only just passed, I decided to take the opportunity to make the mix totally representative of this period, with all the selections being amongst the biggest tracks I’ve played since I made my second debut at Music Is Better in Manchester.

Five years represents a significant package of time, a fixed point from where I can reflect on what’s been a continually snowballing sequence of events, set in motion when Danny Webb asked me to appear in Manchester on that December night back in 2003.

There were less than 100 people there that night, but they were the right people, and I was taken aback by the response to my return, both on the night itself and during subsequent days, when people who were there began to post on the forums. I’d never expected all the feedback be so totally positive!

I’d figured that I’d play that night, using the combination of laptop and reel-to-reel for the first time, then go away and think about what worked and what didn’t before I made my next move. I would never have believed that things could come together so immediately, it was as if I’d hit a completely unexpected hole in one, especially when two of the people who were there, Ralph Lawson, DJ from Back To Basics in Leeds, and one of my fellow DJ’s that night, Richard Hardcastle (Solid State) from Society in Sheffield, both asked me to play at their nights no sooner had I finished my spot.

One thing kept leading to another and, in Sheffield, I was approached by Tony Daly to play at the now legendary Tyneside Cinema party in Newcastle, a bespoke event where he took on the substantial risk of presenting me in a city I’d never DJ’d in previously (unless you count the 1983 TV appearance on The Tube, which was filmed in the Tyne Tees studio). Then, of course, there was London, where Steve Kotey and Bill Brewster booked me for their parties, bringing me to the capital within the first few months of my return for Ouch and Low Life.

The bookings kept coming, and I found myself driving up and down the country on an increasingly regular basis. Later in 2004 I was approached by Sav Remzi, from Tirk / Nuphonic, with the idea of putting together an edits album, which would be issued the following year as ‘Credit To The Edit’. This would help bring my name to the attention of people outside the UK. There was soon a need to step things up further, now that I was receiving enquiries from Europe, and so began a fruitful relationship with my agent, Matt Johnson (Matty J), who’s done a wonderful job of representing me during recent years.

The last few months have been, to say the least, manic for me, with 25 flights, including 6 long haul, taking me to gigs in the US, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Europe. From a personal perspective I still find it remarkable the way everything has developed, pretty much organically, since I made the decision that I was going to be a DJ once again – had I concocted some sort of comeback masterplan, it could never have worked out anything like as well as it has. It’s definitely been a case of ‘from small acorns’.

It still never ceases to amaze me that people from another continent are interested in my DJ past. Back in the early 80’s, before I went into retirement for 20 years, the furthest I travelled (with the exception of the appearances I made in the South of England as part of The Hacienda Review in late ’83) was to places like Birmingham and Nottingham, when I played at All-Dayers, so to find myself in clubs on the other side of the world is pretty nuts!

Anyhow, I’d like to wish everyone all the best for 09. Big thanks to all the promoters who booked me and everyone who danced to the tunes I played during ’08 in Adelaide, Barcelona, Belfast, Berlin, Birmingham, Blackburn, Brighton, Bristol, Dublin, Dundee, Edinburgh, Fukuoka, Glasgow, Hamburg, Leeds, Lisbon, Liverpool, London, Los Angeles, Manchester, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Newcastle, Nottingham, Paris, Porto Alegre, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sheffield, Sydney, Tokyo and Warsaw. Also the festivals and special events that I appeared at - Bestival (Isle Of Wight), Big Chill (England), Camp Bestival (England), Garden Festival (Croatia), Ibiza, Lovebox (England), Notting Hill Carnival (England), Rockness Festival (Scotland), Sonar (Spain) and the Southport Weekender (England).

Hope to see you soon.

Greg


FORUM POST DURING FOLLOWING DAYS:                                                        
Thanks for all the positive words. The feedback has been pretty phenomenal, far exceeding what I’d hoped for, especially on the BBC page, where I’d expected that some people would criticize the amount of older music included - the Radio 1 audience is used to current stuff ('in new music we trust'), so I’d anticipated a more mixed reaction. What’s particularly pleasing is that they were all made without the people seeing what each other wrote (they all came online at once, having been checked first by whoever moderates the BBC pages, I presume for swearing etc following the Ross / Brand controversy).

You always hope something you've done will be well received, but the response to this has blown me away.

Greg


ANSWER TO POST RE MIXING PROCESS:                                                      
It was quite a laborious process. Before I could start the actual mixing part I had to edit every track to a coherent length of around two and a half minutes average, inclusive of in and out points. I had a pool of about 90 tracks that fitted the criteria I'd set (a representative selection of the biggest tunes I've been playing during the past 5 years). It wasn't as straightforward as just editing the 43 tracks I ended up featuring - in order to have the necessary options once I started to piece the mix together I needed to have all the tracks at my disposal, just as I would have if I was out deejaying in a club, so the only thing to do was edit all 90 to the required length, even though I knew that only half would make the cut .

Once that was finally done they were all taken across into my laptop, enabling me to vari-speed them via PCDJ whilst I recorded across to my home computer into Cool Edit Pro, where I put the mix together track by track, before adding overdubs (fx, samples, textures) in a similar way to what I do live using the Revox (reel to reel).

I could quite easily have spent another day, tweaking bits here and there and adding more overdubs (the older I get the more finicky I become), but I had a deadline to work to, so, as it moved ever nearer, it became a race against time, with me doing as much as I could before the cut off point arrived.

Greg
                       

Greg Wilson - 2009


ESSENTIAL MIX (by greg wilson for bbc radio 1 2009)

Recorded at Block 9 Genosys at 10pm. My third and final appearance at Glastonbury 2014 on 27.06.14.

PT 1 STONEBRIDGE – available here: https://soundcloud.com/gregwilson/glastonbury-trilogy-2014-pt-1-stonebridge-270614-greg-wilson-live-mix

PT 2 BEAT HOTEL – available here: https://soundcloud.com/gregwilson/glastonbury-trilogy-2014-pt-2-beat-hotel-270614-greg-wilson-live-mix

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

GLASTONBURY TRILOGY 2014 PT 3 BLOCK 9 GENOSYS 27.06.14 (greg wilson live mix)

Live recording of Greg Wilson's return visit to The Move @ The Exchange, Stoke on Trent.

GREG WILSON @ THE MOVE - STOKE - ON - TRENT - 13.12.14

Recorded at The Nest, Dalston, London 13.02.15.

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

THE NEST LONDON 13.02.15 (greg wilson live mix)

On The Roof @ Output unfortunately rained off, but we moved indoors to The Panther Room where this was recorded 31.05.15.

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

THE PANTHER ROOM @ OUTPUT BROOKLYN NYC 31.05.15 (greg wilson live mix)

Recording from Friday afternoon appearance on The Port stage at Bestival, Isle Of Wight 11.09.15.

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

BESTIVAL THE PORT 11.09.15 (greg wilson live mix)

Full live recording from the Glitterbox Closing Party @ Space, Ibiza 25.09.15.

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

GLITTERBOX CLOSING PARTY @ SPACE TERRACE IBIZA 25.09.15 (greg wilson live mix)

Full recording from the Freeze promoted party at The Garage in Liverpool on 05.12.15 to mark the 40th anniversary of my first club appearance on December 6th 1975. For further info: http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2015/12/40th-anniversary-weekend-recorded/

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

5 HOUR 40TH ANNIVERSARY @ THE GARAGE LIVERPOOL 05.12.15 (greg wilson live mix)

Greg Wilson @ MAREH NYE 16 - Boipeba/BA (12.2015)

GREG WILSON @ THE GARAGE LIVERPOOL 09.04.16

STARRING KERMIT LEVERIDGE & THE REYNOLDS
ADDITIONAL VOCALS: THE REVEREND CLEVE FRECKLETON & TRACEY CARMEN
 
More about the project: http://www.superweirdsubstance.com/alan-moore-mandrill-meets-super-weird-substance-arts-lab-apocalypse  
 
Obey the Mandrill: www.facebook.com/mandrillifesto

Mandrillifesto words by Alan Moore.

Big thanks to: Josh Ray, Ché Wilson, Derek Kaye, Joe Brown, James Mellor, Dominic Mandrell, Marcus Hislop, The Arts Lab Northampton.
 
Artwork by Pete Fowler
 
2017
 
COMETH THE MOMENT, COMETH THE MANDRILL

In times of national demise, speaking historically,
the mulch of crumpled dream and culture is a laboratory,
that breeds outrageous saviours and monsters without warning; 
Cromwell, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jeremy Corbyn – 
emerging from a broken world to find a hole they can fill,
cometh the moment; cometh the Mandrill.

This greed and gore emporium is not how life was meant to be,
with franchises and fads reheated from a previous century,
and nothing new, a neutered future on the retro record deck,
that’s stuck and endlessly repeating in a firebombed discotheque. 
Your TV’s in a coma and you can’t get it to wake up.
What you need is a dictatorial baboon in makeup.

Overstated, aggravated and horrifically mutated,
here to see that you’re berated. What’s the last thing you created?
All those logos on your raiment, brand-name badges of enslavement,
drip-fed passive entertainment. Was this your intended statement?
When you have nowhere left to stand you'll have to take one.
If there’s no culture in the land then you must make one. 
Psychopathic, charismatic, I could go on but don’t need to:
as the higher primate it’s my long-awaited fate to lead you.
You have no choice but me, so please do not suggest so.
Hear now the poetry of my Mandrillifesto!

The light of burning corporations will repaint the sky in grenadine. 
There’ll be billions of banners and Art Nouveau butterfly bombers like this world has never seen before. 
We’ll march on ugliness and stupidity. 
We’ll make loveliness compulsory.

And the roar of our orchestra engines will soar evermore in a glorious annihilating symphony, for the tyranny of beauty is our God-given duty. 
Every child at birth is to be issued with a ukulele, 
given their own flag and granted absolute and utter sovereignty, 
and so long as it’s coloured in nicely and has an old woman on, make their own currency. And we’ll turn every urban address into a dripping Rousseau wilderness, and we’ll keep advancing until there’s nobody not dancing.

We’ll put politics in the pillory,
put the art back in artillery.
We can weaponise wonder
and our voice shall be as thunder.

From times of national demise arise new apes like me, 
with, in our leopard-scaring eyes, manifest destiny. 
I’ll lead you to a fluorescent utopia if you’ll let me: 
love me, worship me, obey me – but never pet me. 
If we can’t build a future then we’ll be its human landfill. So…
Cometh the moment, cometh the Mandrill. 
(Repeat until indoctrinated)

Alan Moore's Mandrill Meets Super Weird Substance At The Arts Lab Apocalypse (Greg Wilson Mixtape)

Live recording of Greg Wilson on Credit To Edit night at Oval Space in London 12.08.17.

CREDIT TO THE EDIT @ OVAL SPACE LONDON 12.08.17 (greg wilson live mix)

Recording from the Credit To The Edit event at the House Of Rum at Portmeirion's Festival No.6 09.09.17

FESTIVAL NO.6 CREDIT TO THE EDIT @ HOUSE OF RUM PORTMEIRION 09.09.17 (greg wilson live mix)

Glitterbox @ Hi Ibiza: po.st/GBHI14.

@GregWilson, the reel-to-reel master, delivered this stunning set at Glitterbox over the weekend.

Featuring music from Chic, First Choice, Oliver Cheatham and many more.

See y'all on the dancefloor...!

Greg Wilson @ Glitterbox, Hï Ibiza (15.09.17)

NO SELL OUT - ELECTRO RETROSPECTIVE
LEGEND / WIGAN PIER MAY 1982 – DEC 1983
MIXED BY GREG WILSON FOR A GUY CALLED GERALD - SAMURAI FM 2005

This is the most involved mix I’ve ever put together, even more so than my Essential Mix in 2009, for which ‘No Sell Out’ very much provided the prototype. I intended it as a definitive document to the period May 82 – Dec 83, when Legend and Wigan Pier were at their most influential, the new Electro-Funk sound turning the black scene on its head as the old gradually gave way to the new.

As I wrote at the time:
“The tracks on this mix represent this now distant time of both musical and cultural change. I’ve selected the records that were regarded as controversial at the time within black music circles, the ones that the traditionalists were up in arms about. I’d originally chosen 50 of the biggest tracks played at Legend and the Pier, but this was upped to 60, all of which needed to be edited down to an average of a minute and a half in length, which was no small task in itself! Realising that there were still other tracks I wanted to include, I decided to keep it to the main 60, but drop in snippets of additional records from the period, not only Electro, but also other big floorfillers from my nights. I never played purely Electro, but mixed it in alongside Soul, Funk and Disco (or as people refer to it nowadays, Boogie), and this is reflected by the numerous ‘references’ sprinkled throughout the mix.

It’s good to be able to place some of these tracks back into their original context. Tracks like ‘The Message’, ‘Rockit’ and ‘Buffalo Gals’ would become big hits in the UK, but they were completely unknown when first played at Legend and the Pier. A perfect example would be ‘White Lines’, which was an underground favourite for many months before the penny finally dropped with the mainstream audience and they came to appreciate it as the wonderful record it is, resulting in a chart stay of over a year! Nowadays, ‘White Lines’ can be played pretty much anywhere to a great response. It’s a sure-fire floorfiller, regarded as a dance standard, but it wasn’t always that way - without the initial specialist support it could quite easily have ended up as just a minor hit.

The title of the mix, ‘No Sell Out’, comes from the opening track. It seemed an appropriate name, given the fact these records were very much regarded by the purists as the selling out of black music, rather than its salvation (something which pretty much everyone can now, with hindsight, clearly see). Listening back to these tracks you can trace the evolution of Hip Hop, Techno and House. This was the point in time when black music fully embraced the available technology and took dance to new dimensions. Hearing these records for the very first time, we knew that the future was upon us and that dance music had entered a whole new phase of its development.”

The ‘No Sell Out – Electro Retrospective’ page at Electrofunkroots gives the full lowdown and complete tracklisting. It includes an introduction by Gerald Simpson (aka A Guy Called Gerald), for whose Samurai FM podcast this mix was originally put together.

http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/mixes/no_sell_out.html 

Greg Wilson – February 2012

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

NO SELL OUT ELECTRO RETROSPECTIVE (by greg wilson for a guy called gerald - samurai fm 2005)

GREG WILSON’S 20 CHOICE EDITS & REWORKS 2017
http://secretlifemusic.com/greg-wilsons-20-choice-edits-reworks-2017/

Another selection from Greg Wilson, now for the 6th year, listing some of the edits and reworks that have featured in his DJ sets during 2017. Further info: http://blog.gregwilson.co.uk/2017/12/20-choice-edits-reworks-2017/

GREG WILSON'S 20 CHOICE EDITS & REWORKS 2017

Following the success of the Return To Legend night at The Refuge in Manchester, a second night was quickly arranged for those unable to get tickets for the first. Once again I feature music from my time at Legend in the early '80s, both original tracks and re-edited variants.

RETURN TO LEGEND PT2 @ THE REFUGE MANCHESTER 07.04.18 (greg wilson live mix)

Live recording from the Main Stage at the Garden Festival in Tisno, Croatia on 06.07.12.

Check out my label's music at: https://superweirdsubstance.bandcamp.com

Greg Wilson

Bruce McLean