Paul Robertson talks about how he became a DJ

"And then at the end of the night the manager said “do that tomorrow night”, “ok” and that’s how I started, being a DJ."

Stevenage Museum

Transcript:

But that all changed in Christmas of ‘71. I was still there, I was doing about 4 nights a week, 5 nights a week. I can never remember the man’s name but he was General Manager of the Mecca at the time, big, big man, he was always in dark glasses. Frightened the life out of me, and he used to always call me boy, well I was a boy and I was passing the patio suite it was called then, and he said “boy do you know how to work that record machine in there?”, so I says “yes I do sir”, so he said “go in there and play some records”. Yeah, right, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. So I went in there. This old thing was an old Vox, it was an old valve system. It used to take about half an hour to warm up like, really old-fashioned thing and it was modern then but thinking of it now… and I got it going and I went to the Library. In them days the Mecca had a library, a record library and I went there and I grabbed what I could and I went back in there. I got myself a microphone and I thought right – do this, so I played the records and behind me was the wall towards, behind that was the main ballroom and the DJ in there, Danny De Lino was his name, and I used to put my ear to the wall and whatever he said I come back and said the same at the microphone. So I copied him. I don’t know if it ever worked out, I was never playing the same records but I said what he said and it seemed to work out and that’s that. And then at the end of the night the manager said “do that tomorrow night”, I said okay “ok” and that’s how I started, being a DJ. I did a couple of nights a week there, and the rest of the time I was changing lightbulbs.

Robertson 2016

 

This page was added on 16/03/2016.

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