It was 12 years ago today...

In March of 1976, a book was published that was to change my life 33 years later. In those intervening years, I’d had a yearning to do it, but the opportunity didn’t arise.

The book: Emperor Rosko’s DJ Book.

As you know, I’ve loved music all my life and by the time this book came out, I’d accumulated a record collection of at least 3-4000 and I was only 15.

I’d listened to the radio and like so many, I’d recorded the chart countdown on a regular basis. After all, in those days, unless a visit to the record shop happened, this was the only way you were going to get to have the music. No downloading in those distant days!

But where I was probably different from the other teens recording the records each week, I wasn’t in a rush to edit out the presenter’s words.

I loved the DJs. I couldn’t think of a better way to earn money. To go into a studio and play all the hits sounded ideal to me.

In the book, Emperor Rosko also talked about how to set up a disco, how to organise the records in order for you to find specific records in short periods of time. In fact, he covered everything.

With us having an arcade and a bingo that was open every evening, there was no way Dad was going to let me become a superstar DJ! So it was to be one of those things that I suppose I put into the ‘bucket list’ in my mind.

I didn’t realise at the time that 1976 was to be our last at Burnham in the arcade. By the next summer, we were in Weymouth with side stuff in my uncle’s Amusement Park.

But 1977 was to be a turning point for me. My uncle used to have a yard in Charlestown, just outside  Weymouth and that’s where we had our trailer and were living. It was right next door to Charlestown Motors, and just behind that was a nightclub called ‘Stirrups.’

I didn’t discover it was there until Easter time that year. All this time, I was still spending all my money on records. I was buying Blues and Soul magazine and buying many of the records from their charts inside.

We closed at the Park at 10 o’clock and once I found out about the club, I wanted to go but Mum said I wasn’t old enough so at first, going was out.

At the time, my Brother was also in Weymouth and he helped me convince my Mum to let me go to the club and after a while she let me go.

The club used to get a lot of foreign students in and so it was always busy. The DJ played such great music, I kept gravitating toward him, asking if he needed a drink, chatting to him and eventually, being allowed into the DJ booth and even being able to flick through his records.

That year was really when I got the dance music bug properly. That summer I was hearing songs I’d never heard before, Fat Larry’s Band’s ‘Center City,’ CJ & Co’s ‘Devil’s Gun,’ Eddie Henderson’s ‘Say You Will,’ The Philadelphia International All-Stars, ‘Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto’ and Dennis Coffee’s ‘Free Spirit’ amongst so many other great records.

12” singles were starting to arrive on the Dorset coast and the first one I bought was T Connection’s ‘Do What You Wanna Do.

Within week’s I was getting the DJ to allow me to cover for him for a few songs while he took a break and by the end of the Summer, I was going in there and doing a couple of hours each night.

It was stunning, being 17 and playing cracking records to packed floors. I was totally in my element.

But it wasn’t to last because, by the end of October, we were on the move again, this time to Farnborough for the Winter.

Fast forward to 2008.

I’m DJing full-time with my own disco. I’ve built a decent reputation in Weymouth and am getting work all over Dorset with the occasional booking further afield, as far away as Peterborough and often around London.

I liked to keep in touch with past clients and used to send out a monthly newsletter detailing what the Disco was up to, talking about how I’d updated things, adding a video screen and such like, things to keep me in people’s minds.

My thinking was that if I did a good job, the people who’d booked me would recommend me to others and it was working well.

I’d stopped listening to UK radio years earlier because to my mind it had become boring. All the presenters sounded the same, the music wasn’t as wide-ranging as it had used to be. It was dull.

It’s October. One night I’m sitting in front of my computer surfing the net as you do, looking for American radio stations when I started coming across these things called podcasts.

I found one in Micronesia in which the presenter played Latin music, I found one in America called ‘The Bachelor Pad’ which I really liked – he played cool, Rat-Pack style music and it was so different to what else I was hearing. I loved it.

And then I found this show in Canada. It was proper oldies-based, like the music on my Dad’s old reel to reel tapes. He played such a wide range of songs, I was hooked.

I hunted the shows out each week, and got in touch with the presenter, ‘Big Daddy’ Donald Roberts. What a presenter, he Presented his show with such panache, such style. A booming voice in a style that you don’t hear in the UK.

I started sending him requests, and as is the way with the internet, we started chatting. Don is an incredibly modest man. I gave him praise, he thanked me and changed the subject, talking about music once more.

He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I did Discos, and over a week or two, I noticed I was talking with him every night.

Now at this time, I was looking for another way of contacting my clients. The newsletter was fine, but to my mind, becoming ‘samey.’ I was looking for other ideas that might add a bit of pizzazz to my communication with them.

I didn’t realise it, but as Donald and I were chatting, I must have been enquiring about how he did a radio show and he was gracious enough to answer my numerous questions and eventually told me that I should do one myself, after all, I had all the equipment I needed already.

I mulled over the idea for a few days and decided that it maybe a way in which I can boost my profile to my clients.

The plan was that I’d put together a radio show that was an hour-long, featuring many of the songs that were popular whenever I did a disco. I’d play songs of all genres and across the years to give people an idea of the width of my collection.

My thinking was that it would show the versatility of what I was able to play at my disco.

I was pretty confident that there weren’t many DJs in Dorset who could compete with me music-wise.

I’d been converted my music over to mp3s since the early 2000s and had been DJing using my computer since 2006, so I already had over 20,000 different tracks available to play, and with my playout system being totally computer based, I could find any one of those songs in a matter of seconds.

This gave me an advantage over many DJs – in fact, I only knew of one other who was computer-based alongside me, and we often passed work to each other if we couldn’t do it ourselves.

And so on 12^th January 2009, I did my very first radio show podcast, ‘People Hold On,’ which was sent out to clients instead of a newsletter.

I’ve not listened to it for a long time, but I do recall it making me cringe as it was so poor when I compared it to Don Robert’s professional production. But it was a start.

I did a show week by week to try and improve and started to post them on a website called Podomatic and I’d tell my friends that they could have a listen.

5-6 weeks into doing the shows, I was enjoying myself tremendously. Don was listening, giving me hints and tips to improve my technique and encouraging me all the time.

It was around this time, two showmen friends of mine, John Cogger and John Edwards said that I should start doing a show playing all the soul and disco records we’d loved in our Disco days of the late 70s and the early 80s.

And on 10^th March 2009, Pure Grooves was born. An hour show comprising of hits such as Shalamar’s ‘There It Is,’ Brothers Johnson’s, ‘Stomp!’ and D Train’s ‘You’re The One For Me’ it was such fun to do.

I sent the show out to people who wanted to have a listen and they all said they liked it so I started to do a weekly one of that too. I was now doing two shows a week.

Soon, people started saying that I should try and get my shows on one of the new Internet Radio stations that were springing up and I sent a demo of the Pure Grooves show to a few stations, one of whom wanted to take it.

My first show had 7 listeners! I was elated that 7 people tuned in and listened. The next week, one of my listeners got in touch to make a request for a future show and she was a nurse in Germany! I was so excited. Just two shows in and I was an International radio presenter.

I remember thinking then about my book. I was 15 when I bought it, and I was now 48 and finally doing it.

However, I have to say that this was probably the start of the end of my marriage.

I was so happy, I was only interested in doing the radio shows. At the time, I was doing my discos and we still had fairground equipment that we were using for fetes, shows and fairs but I was rapidly losing interest in the fairground side of it.

I’d only restarted the fairground side of things to give my boys who’d been settled down since birth, a look at their heritage. I wanted them to learn about where we came from as a family and the work we had to do. I’d even come close to buying an adult ride and starting travelling full time to get them out and about with showmen but they weren’t too interested.

My eldest son was at college and my youngest was doing an apprenticeship at a local engineering firm and I realised I was trying to make them do what I wanted them to do which wasn’t fair.

Once I’d worked that out in my head, I was no longer interested in the fairground side of things and wanted to focus on the radio alongside my discos.

However, me being me, I dove in headfirst and worked my heart out, trying to learn more. I’d waited so long to do this. It had been waiting patiently for me to decide to have a go and now I was all in.

The owner of the station, after a couple of weeks, told me that she thought my show was too good for her station and that I should apply to another station, Morpher Radio, which was a dedicated soul station.

I sent a demo to the owner, Dave Marley and he got in touch with me to invite me to do a show, but it would need to be two hours long.

I wasn’t sure at first, but in the end, I decided to go for it, and on the 23^rd of May, I did my debut show on Morpher Radio.

Within a few weeks, I was getting requests from the station's listeners and I was loving it. The station had its own chatroom and people from all over the world were in there chatting.

It was around this time that one of the listeners got in touch with me and asked me if I would be interested in interviewing Shakatak member Bill Sharpe, as he was a friend of hers.

Being new to the station as well as still new to doing radio, I thought it would be liberty-taking to do the Interview when there were others including the owner, who could do it so much better than I would be able to. And as the listener was already a station listener before I joined, I didn’t want to appear as if I was muscling my way in.

I decided to speak to someone about it. As well as that, I was new to this and didn’t have too much of an idea about how to go about promoting myself.

The station had someone who did promotion for it. I’d seen her in the chatroom but hadn’t spoken to her properly but maybe this was the time to call her and not only talk about this interview and whether I should offer it to the owner, but also ask her if she would be interested in promoting my shows. Her name on the chatroom was debzpromo.

I called her and during our first phone call, she told me she wasn’t really a promotions person, but she did try to get the station more coverage. She agreed with me that I should probably pass the interview over, which I did, and she then said that although she wouldn’t become my promotions person, she would give me any ideas she had. That was the start of my friendship with Debz Green.

I could spend the next two hours telling you about the play by play of my radio career, as well as how my marriage fell apart but I won’t.

For starters, I haven’t got all day and secondly, in regard to my marriage, that’s personal. I hurt a lot of people and I’m not about to talk about one of the most painful parts of my life.

Nor will I talk about my ongoing friendship with Debz and our getting together – suffice it to say, my marriage ended when I moved out in February 2010. The fact is, we drifted apart and I take the blame for that. I wanted to move away from Weymouth, I wanted to follow this route into radio, I wanted to pursue a different life as a soul DJ. My family were on a different road. It’s most definitely my fault for it ending the way it did. It can be said that I was selfish and I won’t argue with it. I wanted to take this opportunity. And I did.

Without going into a long play by play of the next few years, I ended up leaving Morpher Radio and striking out on my own applying to many stations in order to syndicate my Pure Grooves show amongst others I was developing.

In March 2010, by which time I was living in Longstanton, near Cambridge,  I received a phone call from one of the owners of Solar Radio, at the time, the best Soul Radio station in the UK.

Earlier in the year, I’d sent a demo to one of the Solar presenters, known as ‘Ginger Tony.’ I’d asked him if he wouldn’t mind listening to it and letting me know what areas I needed to improve and what I was doing OK. He said he’d be happy to and once he’d listened properly, he’d let me know what I needed to improve on.

When he phoned me back, he told me there was nothing wrong with my demo and that he’d passed it on to Tony Monson as he thought I might be a good fit for Solar. That hadn’t been the reason I’d sent him a demo. I wasn’t looking to be part of Solar as I didn’t think I was anywhere near close to being in their league. I just wanted some advice.

When Tony phoned me, he said he’d heard my show, liked it but didn’t have any gaps on the station and that down the road, he might call me and we could talk then if I was interested. To say I was, was an understatement.

Anyway, at the end of April, I received another phone call from Tony, telling me he’d been at Kiss FM’s 25^th birthday party the night before and 2 different people he was acquainted within the business had mentioned my name and told him that he should get me on the station.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. ‘Johnny Nobody’ in radio being talked about.  And that was how I found my way on to Solar Radio which was an 18-month stay whilst I pursued my plan for syndication of my shows because, by that time, I’d developed some ideas for new shows and started them.

I’m going to jump forward to 2017 now, but before I do I just want to share some stats that I’m quite proud of.

Starting my radio career with 7 listeners, by the time I called it a day in September 2017, I developed a listenership in excess of 95 countries and territories around the world.

In China alone, I was getting in excess of 800,000 listeners to my weekly shows and getting over 25% of the listenership of the areas in which the show went out.  When you put that in perspective, that’s a quarter of an estimated 2 or 3 million people in a couple of towns and the adjoining main highway who were available to listen. Not only that, but I was told that 25% was more than the combined totals of the 3 competing station’s listeners.

And one night, after I started playing The Doors, ‘Light My Fire,’ the listeners to my show crashed the Chinese equivalent of Google trying to find it online to see if they could buy it.

There were three English speaking presenters on that station and my mentor in radio, ‘Big Daddy’ Donald Roberts (real name McEachern) was another, and was indeed the man responsible for getting me on that station.

I did a breakfast show in Spain on Power FM for 6 months which even got me asked to write a column in the local Lanzarote Grapevine magazine. You never know what comes from an idea.

I also owned and ran two online radio stations, Smile 101 and Rewind Central. I tried owning stations twice, but in the end, decided that being a station owner wasn’t for me. I have total respect for someone who takes on a radio station. It’s a huge task. Expensive to run and also a time-consuming role, that in the end I decided wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.

Not forgetting the 'Pure Grooves magazine that myself and Debz ran for just over a year until we realised how much hard work it was to put it together on a weekly basis.

I didn’t get into mainstream radio. I applied for a few positions but was told that although my presenting style was good, I needed to change my technique so that I fit the station's style.

I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to sound exactly like any other presenter on any other station in the country. I wanted to do my shows my way – and syndicating worked best for me.

I’ve had shows on stations all across Europe, many in small-town America, my shows are still being replayed even now in New Zealand and I guested on Don’s podcast for over 5 years.

In March 2017, after taking three months out of radio to recover from my kidney operation, I resumed the shows, but as soon as I started back, I realised that my enthusiasm had gone. It started to become a grind for me.

I carried on for three months but was no longer enjoying the research, the time spent choosing playlists, the preparation required to do the show and not enjoying doing the shows.

In June I decided that it was time to call it a day. I gave notice that I would be finishing in September and continued giving it my very best to the last show.

I’m so happy I had the chance, finally, to do something I’d longed to since I was a kid.

In the 8 years, I was doing shows, I did in excess of 1000. I met some fantastic people I’d never have met had I’d not done it.

I met people like Don who literally, gave me the support and encouragement from the start and continued with valuable advice along the way. Had it not been for him those amazing years would never have happened.

I accomplished a dream and had so much fun along the way.

You talk about turning points in your life.

Had I not bought that book as a 15-year-old, none of this might ever have happened. The childhood dream of having my own radio show may have withered alongside so many of my others.

And let’s not forget that at the end of the day, had I not bought that book, not one of those tenuous links may have happened and I’d have never have met Debz who I’ve been happy to be partners with having moved in together back in 2013.

So all in all, although I don’t miss it and I wouldn’t want to go back to it – it was great while it lasted and just goes to show you what can happen if you have a dream.