100% Dynamite! Soul Jazz DJ's Pete Reilly and Abi Clarke
Interview by Big Matt and Peter McLennan for Real Groove, 1999.
DJ's Pete Reilly and Abi Clarke look a little jaded, after flying halfway round the world. They're here in New Zealand to showcase their London-based label, Soul Jazz Records, then it's off to Australia for some more gigs. Abi's mum gave her some exercises for avoiding deep vain thrombosis - "she cut them out of the paper for me", says Abi - but they've had other worries on their minds.
"It was a real cock up with the flights," says Pete, while making the tea, polite lad that he is. "Then the records didn't turn up for a few days. But they arrived today, thank god. It was lovely when we got picked up yesterday, we got taken straight out to Piha, that was fantastic, and we went up that volcano, Mt Eden, whats the Maori name for that?" Maungawhau. "Yeah, we were quite taken aback by how amazing the scenery is, especially Piha." Welcome to Aotearoa.
Soul Jazz Records grew out of a second hand record shop in London that sold soul and jazz, funnily enough. They have developed a fine reputation for the quality of their reissues of rare funk, Latin, reggae, jazz and soul. As the name suggests, the label started out specialising in jazz and soul, but has branched out in all directions, even releasing new recordings alongside the reissues. As well as travelling the globe representing the label behind the decks, Abi and Pete also work for the label.
"I work in the shop," says Abi, "that's my thing. Pete works downstairs on the label. He does the remastering, and promotes the clubs and the live things. There's eight of us downstairs, and everybody does a little of everything really. We all muck in a bit."
They both arrived at dj'ing through very different paths. "I used to have the misfortune, you might call it, to do a jazz warmup at a Northern Soul night," says Abi,"and they were just waiting for the northern soul, really! That was my first ever gig. I started DJing when these friends of mine hired a house one xmas. their families didn't really celebrate Xmas, so they hired this big old house, and the cd player broke, and they said anyone got any tapes? And I'd done a compilation just for myself in the car, and I said 'yeah, I got a tape'. It had a track on it by Webster Lewis, and this bloke Tim was there, he was a northern soul promoter, and it totally blew him away. He said 'when I start my club up again in a few weeks, will you play there?', and I just laughed, and went 'oh yeah!' My friend rang me the next week and said 'you know you're playing at Tim's club on Thursday, don't you?' and I'd never used decks, so I went round to my friends house that had some and had a little go."
Pete says he had quite a lot of records as a teenager, "and I left school, and just after that acid house broke out, and me and my mates started doing parties, and I was the one playing Baleric, and it was an excuse to play a mix of stuff. My mates were getting into House, and at the time the music you would hear was the Clash, and Gil Scott Heron and King Tubbys all mixed in, and I was the one trying to do more of a mix of stuff, and from there, I just got more into the funk and soul stuff."
The label grew out of record buying trips by shop owner Stuart Baker. "Stuart and this guy called Alec started a shop," says Pete, warming to his history lesson, "called Sounds of the Universe, in 1988 (the name changed along the way to Soul Jazz). Stuart started the label in 1991. At the time he was selling soul, jazz, funk, Latin, a little reggae but not a lot, and they'd noticed there was a demand for certain records, so they decided to reissue them. They had met a lot of people from going out on buying trips to the States, and not a lot of people were doing that back then, and you could like go to Eddie Bo's house and just buy records from them, and then, for the guys that own the rights, it was like 'well, why don't we reissue your album?' kind of thing. It was a reasonably easy thing to do."
However, finding the people who own the rights to these great tunes is not always so simple. "It gets easier in one respect," says Pete, "in that we've been doing it for quite a long time, so you get to know the people and who owns what, and make contacts with people at record labels. Quite often it involves a lot of international directory enquiries, and just phoning round saying have you ever heard of this guy, apparently he was the guy who ran the label. Stuart will have read anything that there is to read on it, so he's usually got a list of leads, like this person owned the label, and last he was in Houston or something, stuff like that. It's a bit of detective work.
"The reggae stuff is a bit easier to find who owns it, but not always." Indeed, some of the great reggae producers are notoriously protective of their back catalogue. "Everyone told us we wouldn't get Studio One stuff (from producer Coxsone Dodd), but we thought we'd have a go anyway," says Pete, "and we sent him some of the albums that we'd done, and initially he said no, then he got the albums, and he liked the fact that we did other stuff, like we'd done jazz, cos he said that was his first love, and that seemed to swing it. We said that we wanted to present the music to people in the UK, and to people who might not know anything about Studio One. We really liked the music, and we thought that more people would too, if we could present it in the right way."
The very successful 100% Dynamite compilations grew out of the club night of the same name. "We'd been doing it for about a year, and we thought it'd be nice to do an album of tracks that were big at the club, and a lot of them were Studio One," says Pete. "The club started looking at the link between soul and reggae, and we'd always played a lot of cover versions, playing the soul version next to the reggae version, stuff like that. We have a lot of people that say 'I'm into techno, and I didn't think I liked reggae, but one of my mates has got all those Dynamite albums, and they're wicked'. Which is always nice, cos that was part of the reason for doing it, not to say this is better, but just have a listen to it for a night and give it a chance." Once they've got permission to use a track, the next step is the mastering. "We usually remaster from the vinyl," says Pete.
However, finding a good copy can sometimes prove difficult. Is there ever a tune that is just too hard to salvage? "I don't know," says Pete, "you'd probably be better judge of that, when you hear them on the album! When we went to do Prince Buster's 'Girl why don't you answer', the record had a hole in it, an actual hole in the record we had to try and patch it up. We usually phone a few other people too, like Pete Holdsworth from Pressure Sounds, he's good, he's always got like 4 copies of everything. Usually, a couple of us might have them, but they're knackered, so its like 'have you a copy and is it in good knick and can we borrow it for a couple of days?' And we tell then what it's for, and they just say sort us out with some records."
The whole process of the licensing can take a long time. "With Chicano Power," says Pete, "that one took ages, cos you couldn't do a Latin rock album without Santana on it. CBS wanted like $10,000 for an advance for one track, just ridiculous. We've also just finished a follow-up to New Orleans Funk, called Saturday Night Fish Fry." They also run a monthly all nighter club night under the same name. "With the Dynamite nights, we played a little funk and soul, but only a little bit," says Pete. "We just wanted somewhere to play a little more funk and soul stuff really. We get guests along, like Andy Weatherall, Andy Smith, Portishead's DJ, David Holmes., and Dean Rudland, who compiles stuff for Ace, and we've got Marco Nelson doing the next one - remember the Young Disciples? He was in them. He's the bass player for Paul Weller now. "
For 100% Dynamite we have guests too," says Abi. "We've done a lot of stuff with Jerry Dammers (formerly with ska band the Specials). We get more skinheads and mods turning up when Jerry rolls into town! He was like the first guest we had at the opening night. He took a fair bit of persuading. The pub we did in, years ago, was an NF (National Front - extreme right wing skinhead group), and Jerry was like 'that's an NF pub, I can't play there!' And we asked him when was that and he said 1978. Its been a gay pub since then, so its obviously changed a bit since then!"
They''ve also hauled Mr Dammers along with them on their travels too. "We went to Ireland with him," says Abi, "and all these Specials fans were there, and he hadn't played Specials records for years, and he played them that night. It was funny, he was having to sign peoples arms, and we couldn't actually leave the building for about an hour after that, it was great. We've done New Yorica nights - we did one in Ireland. It was in an arts festival in a theatre, and I think some of the older people were expecting it was going to be a band, but it was me and Pete behind the decks! It think they were expecting an 8 piece Latin band! But you know, we managed. That was quite funny."
The quality of their compilations is very important to them, which helps the records find their way into the crates of DJ's who might not normally give reggae or Latin a second glance. "I've been to other clubs where the other person has been playing house or r'n'b," says Abi, "and they might have a Dynamite album in there. I think part of the reason that DJ's like them is that you can play them out. Pete's pressings are nice and loud, so you can play them in clubs. That's the problem with compilations now, so many of them have got great tracks, but they've got so many tracks on them, they're too quiet to play out." Their audience is not just an exclusive club of trainspotters.
"I think that a lot of the House DJs have got quite wide tastes too," says Pete. "Masters At Work really liked the New Yorica album (which is one of their topsellers), I think that's one of the reasons that sold so many, cos they bigged it up in interviews, saying this is our roots. That seems to cross over, that's a popular record in New York with the house guys."
We close the interview with a scan through the piles of vinyl Abi and Pete have bought from shops around our fair city. Abi has a pile of 45s, including Anita Baker -'great at weddings' she explains, and 3 eps by Aussie entertainer Rolf Harris with picture sleeves, which she is very excited about - 'My brother is going to love these!'
