international news _ 9th March, 2006 _ JONTY SKRUFFF
Joey Negro Guiltiest Pleasure
Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
UK house/ disco icon Joey Negro (aka Dave Lee) chatted to Skrufff this week about his retro themed soul/ pop compilation The Trip and revealed that he's a massive fan of School Disco style retro club/ compilation series Guilty Pleasures (GP).
"I've got all their CDs, I think they're very good compilations, especially for people like me who grew up in that era." the super-successful house legend confessed.
"I don't like all the tracks but probably 50 or 60% of them: they include lot of tracks that are one-off hits that I'd like to have but not enough to go out and track down the original. I think they're very good compilations. They're not really dance music as such but they're good compilations of pop from that era." he said.
Both the club and compilation series have received the same wildly euphoric media embrace that School Disco did five years ago, with the Guardian describing GP as 'a putative global phenomenon\.
"The superclub bible has been torn up," the paper gushed, "God is no longer a DJ. Clubbers jerk no more to repetitive beats. Where Ministry of Sound once ruled, the homely ethos of Guilty Pleasures is fast taking over: dance all night to unfashionable tunes you are ashamed to admit you love," they added.
Guilty Pleasure resident DJ Terry Hall (bizarrely, once the uber-cool frontman of agit-prop 2 Tone stars The Specials) was similarly over-excited, telling the paper "Guilty Pleasures reminds of 1975; the only difference is that there aren't glasses being put in people's faces" a point that struck a chord with Dave Lee's own memories of clubbing in the days before acid house exploded.
"Essex was always quite rough and I remember going to a club called the Tartan House where there were often fights, you kind of got used to it and expected it," Dave recalled.
"I was never someone who'd get involved but what would happen would be that there'd be a fight, the bouncers would come in and throw some people out and you'd go back to normal. Unless it was a really big one and someone got stabbed," he chuckled.
"I remember a jazz funk act called Second Image who played at the Tartan House once and the lead singer got stabbed," he continued.
"I knew lots of people who used to go to those clubs who weren't violent at all, but there was always a violent contingent who were there for a fight. It used to be the soul night where people would dress up in smart clothes, there'd be the people there perceiving it as a cool place," he added.
"They'd be there because there were lots of girls and, if they couldn't pull, then glassing someone was the next best thing."
http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/health/402004.htm ('In a report official statistics are showing that there is a massive increase in the number of women seeking treatment at hospital casualty units after being injured in drunken brawls.
A&E departments regularly have to treat facial wounds caused by "glassing", broken jaws and bleeding scalps, where girls have had their hair pulled out . . . In Manchester an average of the 400 patients treated in A&E over a typical weekend, over 55 were women wounded in drunken and often extremely vicious fights. . .', 2004)
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