by Dave Spikey
Then Bernard, one of my colleagues, got a car, a Triumph – the car, I mean – and we would go to Placemate or Rowntrees Spring Gardens, which were Manchester clubs that were in a different league to The Crom; or sometimes we’d go to the Elizabethan Ballroom at Belle Vue, a huge place where thousands packed the dance floor. Me and Bernard got thrown out one night for having a drunken gunfight to ‘Ride Your Pony’ by Lee Dorsey. There’s a bit in it when Lee sings ‘Ride your pony and shoot! shoot! shoot!’ accompanied by gunshots, and me and Bernard drew our imaginary guns and shot each other. We got thrown out for that!
Then a terrible thing happened. The monthly discos held for hospital staff suddenly stopped. The DJ wanted more money; mobile discos were few and far between in 1970 and he was in demand. The hospital couldn’t afford his new fee and so these brilliant nights – when doctors, nurses, lab staff, cardiology techs, physios, radiographers, cleaners, porters and Uncle Tom Cobley let their hair down on pay day – were to come to an end. Outrageous.
But Sean and I had a plan. I had a load of singles I’d collected – mainly Tamla Motown, Stax, Atlantic and Brit Soul; like the Foundations and Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon, but with a fair number of Beatles, Kinks and Stones thrown in too – and Sean was quite a whizz with audio and electrical stuff (he was also into the Moody Blues, which was to pose a problem later …). We decided to start a mobile disco!
Where to begin? A pair of record decks would be an idea, then an amp and a pair of speakers might also be useful. I’d got an old dansette record player, we could use the deck out of that, but what to put it into? My mum’s bedding box was just the right size; and with her being on holiday, it seemed like fate was playing a part. Get the tools out, install a base plate, cut a hole for the deck, drop it through – perfecto. Now down to HW Audio to buy another cheap deck and see if they’ve any secondhand amps and speakers. They have – an old Carlsbro guitar amp (!) and a pair of Peavey speakers. Sean fitted them all together with suitable connections and now the moment of truth as I bang on ‘Bringing Down the Walls of Heartache’ … It works! It all works!
We go to see the administrator in charge of social functions and convince her that the show can go on. We advertise the new Friday night sessions as ‘THE PAY DAY RAVE – WITH SEAN AND DAVE!’ Genius.
We sort of get away with the first one, even though the vibrations from people dancing make our flimsy bedding box bounce about like mad, causing the record to jump all over the place and occasionally one of the decks to fall through the hole we’ve cut out not quite precisely enough. And we are certain we have enough records, but you get through quite a lot in four hours, and some were recycled more than once. But we are DJs: the crowd are too pissed to care and are so happy that the party is back on that they’ll tolerate Stevie Wonder being ‘Up up up up up up tigh tigh tight’ three times in one night.
We realize one major flaw to add to the smaller flaws and that is that we are without disco flashing lights. The next week we go back to HW Audio, but discover that the light boxes (plus control units that enable them to flash in sequence, or randomly, or more impressively ‘sound to light’, when the music bass and treble govern the flashing) are way out of our price range.
Hmm. What to do? I know! We’ll make one. We buy three lamp holders plus lamps, some cabling – ‘What rating do you need, lads?’ (Who knows?) ‘Give us some of that thick white stuff ’ – and three button touch switches and Sean works his magic. He completely reconstructs the speaker cabinets, so that the speaker is at the top and a bright coloured lamp surrounded by Bacofoil is housed in the bottom, and he wires the lamps through the button switches to a plug. Simple to operate: while one of us plays the records, the other will sit and push the button switches sequentially or randomly or to the beat – our own sound-tolight unit at a fraction of the price! We should have got more substantial switches really, but everyone’s wiser in hindsight.
At the next ‘Pay Day Rave with Sean and Dave’, I was IC Lighting FX. I noticed quite quickly that the small buttons on the wooden box, sorry ‘unit’, seemed to be getting hot. It’s fair to say that the crowd were loving the light show right up until the moment of the explosion.
We got a booking for a wedding at the Brooklyn Hotel near the hospital, so Sean went down to the electrical suppliers again and bought more substantial switches and new connectors to replace the old ones, which had melted a bit in the explosion. We hastily drafted Sean’s cousin Martin and his Triumph Herald into the set-up, having realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that an intrinsic part of operating a mobile disco was actually being mobile, and neither Sean nor I had a car or could actually drive.
I still remember the excitement I felt as we unloaded our gear from Martin’s car, carted it up the three flights of stairs and set it up on the dance floor. In our haste to set up, we didn’t notice that the new connector for the lights (with power going through them) was exactly the same as the connector for the speakers (which had sound going through them). We connected them the wrong way round – and it was all going well until the explosion. One of the wedding guests, who by coincidence had seen our most recent performance at the ‘Pay Day Rave’, was awestruck. ‘Brilliant, wow! What a light show! You guys rock!’ We had to slowly pack up and walk out. They still paid us! Must’ve been a cracking light show.
We did eventually get our act together and, after a few successful paid gigs and more in the diary, we decided to invest in better equipment. We bought the now legendary ‘Hawaii Citronic’ twin decks, a new Vox amp and bigger and better speakers. We bought better lights and a sound-tolight unit and called ourselves ‘Atlantic Mobile Discos’. ‘Discos’ plural because we wanted to suggest that we were a large professional outfit who managed multiple roadshows nationwide (!), and ‘Atlantic’ to indicate that we played the best in music from both sides of the pond – American soul and UK pop.
It was a source of endless arguments between Sean and myself about which records to buy. I would want the new Chairman of the Board or George McCrae single, while Sean insisted that The Moody Blues and Bread were the way to go. Over the months, we built up a decent collection and I picked up a load of cheap ex-jukebox bargain hits from a shop I passed near Victoria station on my way to Manchester Polytechnic.
It’s fair to say that in our excitement and enthusiasm at being DJs, we didn’t always think through our selection of records. During the buffet at wedding receptions, our LP of choice was usually The Carpenters’ Greatest Hits. Someone pointed out that it was somewhat insensitive to play Karen Carpenter’s plaintive rendition of ‘Yesterday Once More’ while everyone was stuffing their faces with mini quiches, given she’d only recently died after a long battle with anorexia.
It also took us ages to realize that Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’ was perhaps not the record to play as the opening dance track at weddings. We’d simply thought, ‘“Band of Gold”? That’s a wedding ring; this is a wedding: perfecto.’ We were mystified as to why couples were reluctant to dance to this guaranteed floor-filler … until we actually listened to Freda. ‘Since you’ve been gone, all that is left is this band of gold, all that’s left of this dream I hold, is a band of gold.’ Singing as she sits ‘waiting in the silence of my lonely room, filled with sadness, filled with gloom’. Hmm.
Then, the big time beckoned. We got a regular gig at Farnworth Old Vets club. On our first night, we supported an old-time famous woman singer – like Vera Lynn, but not. Alma Cogan! That’s who it was, remember her?
The second gig there was an amateur football club end-of-season awards night, which finished prematurely when rival teams, fuelled by Tetley’s bitter, decided to start a war. We hid under the decks as the bottles and glasses flew and blood ran in rivers. We packed up our gear and negotiated the walking wounded (and there were some serious injuries) as we carried it to the car. A couple of weeks later, the place burned down … so we lost our regular gig.
Atlantic Mobile Discos wouldn’t be defeated tha
t easily though, and in time we picked up a monthly gig at Harwood Golf Club. This residency lasted for years and they were always great nights.
After one such gig, we were invited to Kay’s (she who gave me leukaemia) twenty-first birthday party at her parents’ posh house on Harpers Lane. She’d banished her mum and dad for the night and organized a big fancy-dress bash. It was late when Sean and I got there; me dressed as the ‘Cisco Kid’ in full cowboy outfit, complete with sombrero and six-guns. (I can’t remember what Sean went as, but it was probably a sack-based costume.)
The party was in full swing and the place was bouncing. I was dancing in the packed lounge when I saw Ron, the boyfriend of one of the girls from work, enter the room dressed as a white hunter. I went for my guns in jest and he raised his rifle. I drew quickly and he fired – and I mean proper fired! I felt the .22 bullet whizz past my head and we both stood staring at one another in shock. He’d obviously had no idea that the rifle was loaded.
The noise of the gun had been masked by Stevie Wonder on the stereo and everyone was still dancing, unconcerned. I turned slowly to look behind me and saw a bullet hole in the French windows. Ron gulped and exited slowly and I carried on dancing. Shame it wasn’t Lee Dorsey’s ‘Ride Your Pony’ playing at the time.
The bullet hole wasn’t discovered until the next morning. Kay, naturally, got in deep shit with her parents. When she came into work on the Monday, she interrogated everyone who’d been at the bash to find out if anyone knew anything. I don’t know why she suspected me – maybe I looked guilty, I don’t know – but within minutes of talking to me, she was absolutely convinced that I was the culprit. I pleaded my innocence, but by now everyone had judged and condemned me. Kay wanted money to pay for the damage and I wouldn’t pay up because it wasn’t me! I was in the bad books for months and months, it might even have run into years: branded a coward because I wouldn’t admit I’d done it or tell her who had. (Didn’t they know that I could have died that night?! Rhetorical question, obviously.)
It became apparent that I had to do something. I’d confided in Sean about what had really happened and we decided to gather evidence to clear my name. As these things always are, it was going to be difficult because Ron had by now stopped going out with the girl from work. However, he still played football with us occasionally (more on that later), and so Sean and I devised a plan. I would phone Ron under the pretext of asking about his availability for a game, and somehow steer the conversation around to the night of the shooting, while Sean would listen in on the extension and record the chat on a cassette recorder, MI5-style.
Once in position, our mission began …
Me: Hiya Ron, it’s Dave.
Ron: Hi mate, long time no speak.
Me: Yeah, well look, we’ve got a hospital football match coming up and I wondered if you fancied a game?
Ron: Love to, mate. Where do you want me to play?
Me: Up front, I thought. Well, you’ve always had a good shot on you, haven’t you? Oh, and talking about good ‘shots’ …
With that seamless link, I said that I’d been chatting to Sean about the party, particularly the moment Ron had nearly killed me – and he laughed and recounted the whole incident from his point of view. Result! We presented the evidence to Kay in dramatic style and she thankfully forgave me.
Later, Sean and I started doing a monthly disco in the doctors’ mess at Bolton General. We put on quite a show, with new and improved sound equipment, a bigger and better light show – even, would you believe it, the occasional bubble machine and pyrotechnics! We had a great idea to obtain a super-8 cine projector and show old black-andwhite films on the back wall over the heads of the dancers, and this was a winner as the crowd danced and enjoyed the adventures of ‘The incredible shrinking man’. The added bonus – which we’d hoped for, but which worked much better than we’d expected – was that the projected film created a strobe-like effect, which added to the disco experience!
The doctors’ parties were the stuff of legend and tickets were highly sought after. The drink flowed, the hospital staff let their hair down, the music played and it was totally magic. They sometimes had themes – like the cocktail party that got out of control because they made the four cocktails up in bulk beforehand. People initially asked for a pina colada or a mojito, but then, soon affected by the excessive strength of the drinks, started shouting for ‘A blue one!’ Or ‘A red one!’ Or ‘A blue-andred one!’
One party was fancy dress. I went as a flasher with a rubber chicken strapped around my privates – ‘Wanna see my cock?’ – and Sean went as Eccles the Goon. A good friend, Dr John P (who went on to become Professor of Surgery), turned up as a fairy, complete with wings, tutu, magic wand etc. About an hour into the party, his fast-bleep went to signal cardiac arrest and he sprinted off to Medical Emergency. He was successful in reviving the poor chap, who slowly opened his eyes to see Dr P stood there, resplendent in fairy attire, and said, without hesitation, ‘I’m dead, aren’t I?’
Sean and I made good friends with many of the house officers through these parties, and were often invited as guests to formal dinners in the mess. The price of us getting in was that we had to get up after the meal and tell a few jokes, which we regularly did, trying to get the biggest laughs. These were in effect – although I didn’t know it at the time – my very first stand-up gigs.
Much later, we did a gig in a church hall and, because we wanted a drink, we decided to leave the gear there overnight. We stacked it neatly in a corner, but it must have been in the way because when the cleaners came in the morning after, they had to move it. Someone put our box of music on a storage heater, which came on an hour later and melted all the records.
We were naturally devastated: this was likely the end of the road for the ‘Atlantic’ lads because we couldn’t think of any way we could (a) afford to replace the, by now, hundreds of singles or (b) find replacements for many of the classic 45s we had collected.
Then I had an idea! If we pitched this tale of woe to the local paper, it would make a good hard-luck story for them and generate a good deal of free publicity for us (and there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there? Yes, there is). I thought if we could get the Bolton Evening News to tell of our sad tale, it would be a free advert for our disco and potential clients would be secured! Clever thinking, eh?
Well, no! Who in their right mind would book a disco which has no f***ing records, eh?
The Discovery of DNA
MY MOBILE-DISCO career aside, I was simultaneously getting on with the other job in my life. Having winged my way to studying my HNC, I was now faced with a big decision: much like on Mastermind, I had to select a specialist subject. This choice would affect the rest of my working life as I would be committed to working in and studying that subject exclusively.
It didn’t take me long to choose Haematology and Blood Transfusion. The inarguable positives were:
1. It was a fun place to work, with the radio always on (low) and great staff, who were always up for a laugh and who were, without doubt, far more attractive than those in any other department = Sex, Blood and Rock and Roll.
2. There were a great variety of tests to keep you busy and interested.
3. At the time, Haematology was one of the fastest expanding branches of medical science, providing the chance to be involved in the exciting developments of the department.
4. They brewed their own beer and wine and went to the pub almost every dinnertime.
An added bonus was that, if and when you qualified, you could apply to go on the out-of-hours on-call emergency work rota – dashing into the lab at any hour to cross-match blood for transfusion, test a patient’s clotting factors, perform white blood cell counts and then differentiate the different types of cells present, and much, much more – making a difference, contributing in some small way to helping patients and occasionally saving lives. In my eyes, Haematology and Blood Transfusion staff were the SAS of Pathology.
&nbs
p; I started my HNC in Haematology and Blood Group Serology in the John Dalton Building of Manchester Polytechnic in September 1970. We still studied Physics, Chemistry and Biology, but there were more sessions on Haematology and Transfusion, usually scheduled in the evenings, with guest lecturers from the big labs in and around Manchester. This was good, but it was also bad because during the break for tea prior to the lectures, we would go to the pub across the road, The Salisbury, and down a liquid tea.
I was soon joined by Glenn, who had been fast-tracked onto the HNC course after a year on ONC due to his good A Level grades. To be fair, we had a great time on the whole. We had a bit of a close call in one of the practical projects that counted towards our final grade – because we decided we couldn’t be bothered doing it.
We had to extract DNA from, I think, rat liver (the process of which is too complicated and boring to detail here). Although we got all the equipment out and mixed the reagents and set up burettes for titrations, we actually gave up twenty minutes into a project that was to take four weeks. We decided that we’d just follow everyone else around and do what they did and carry what they carried. So if they went to the biohazard store and got some acetone for part of the extraction process, we went too; if they set up a bunsen burner, tripod and gauze and boiled blue stuff in a beaker, we did too; and once when they all put their samples in the big centrifuge on high spin for fifteen minutes, we pretended that we had too.
This was where our plan almost crashed and burned – because the scary and imposing Dr Maddox appeared at the centrifuge just as it was slowing down to enquire of our progress. We said it was going really great, all according to plan, etc. Then the centrifuge stopped, someone opened the lid and everyone dived in for their samples. There was an awful pause as Glenn, Dr Maddox and I peered into a now empty centrifuge and slowly exchanged a look. Glenn’s face was a cross between panic and terror, but I decided to go on the attack: ‘Somebody’s taken our bloody sample!’