Mark Wood

0:13Hello and welcome to this special episode of the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco and for today's show I speak with the curator of a new compilation telling us the definitive history of gay nightlife from 1980 to 1989. Box of Sin is a release by the Disco Discharge label. It was a pleasure meeting Mark Wood in the studio.

1:04Mark Wood, welcome to Monaco Radio to talk about Box of Sin, a project that you've been heavily involved. But first of all, Mark, we need to talk that you're part of Reader's Wives, the band, And I have to say, I'm a fan. And as soon as I met you, I remember one of your tracks, Scum Pop, which I absolutely love. So tell us a little bit before about the band. How long have you been doing Reader's Wives, by the way? The band is sort of on hiatus at the moment. The band came from the DJing, really, which we've been DJing as the Reader's Wives since 93, so 30 years. God's sake, 30 years, yeah, this year.

1:44And then, you know, we met some friends who were musical and we put together some singles and we had a lot of fun making electronic pop records. It's really good to hear you say you like scum pop. It's just gone up on streaming fairly recently for the first time. So we're constantly saying we should do it, do it again and make some more music. But it's just time with the DJing and my day job and everything else. But thank you, Fernando. I really appreciate it. And extra projects, like Box of Sin. Extra projects, yeah. Extra projects. I mean, I have this beauty in front of me. I have the vinyl.

2:21I know there are two versions being released, the vinyls and the CD, but it looks amazing. Box of Sin, full-length gay clubbing from 1980 to 1989. Is that something that you always felt quite close, and that's why perhaps you got involved with this project by Disco Discharge? There are a few reasons why I pitched the idea to Demon, who are the label who released it. One was, you know, very much enjoyed It's a Sin, the Russell T. Davis TV show, which was, you know, incredibly powerful bit of TV during lockdown. One thing about that show that kind of didn't quite ring true was the soundtrack, because I was watching, you know, it looked very much like it felt in the 80s in London, going to gay clubs.

3:08But some of the music, I just sort of thought, wouldn't it be you know really interesting to tell the story of of what you really heard in the gay clubs in London so sort of beginning as you come out of disco at the beginning of the decade by the end of the decade you're into well into acid house and house music and everything that happened in between was like my that was my clubbing education that was my musical education I was sort of 18 when I went to my first gay club, which was the Black Cap in Camden, now no longer with us. They used to have a thing on a Sunday. You know, Sunday lunchtime is a big thing, was a big thing in 80s gay life.

3:52And I'd been in London collecting for the miners' strike. You know, we were quite politicised kids. You know, we had stood with a bucket outside Camden tube station and a couple of our friends who were stallholders at Camden Market went, oh, come down to the Black Cap. So we all kind of went in just kids, you know, went into the Black Cap. And I could not believe what I was seeing on a Sunday lunchtime. It just I couldn't even believe it was legal. You know, loud music, drag queens, you know, men all over the place, drinking. You know, fantastic. And Jump For My Love by the Pointer Sisters, one of the tracks I remember most from that day, which will always remind me of, you know, my first sort of experience of gay clubs.

5:01From time to time, coming to, going to various pubs and clubs, and then by the end, you know, I'm firmly living in London, spent some time in Manchester in the 80s, firmly back in London, Heaven, and all of the sort of subsequent house clubs, you know, Acid House, The Trip at the Astoria. I was sort of right back there. You get to the end of this box set and we're in Daisy Chain, which was a really famous night in Brixton, which was a brilliant club, so influential. And I just sort of, you know, thinking about it and thinking about the way that the music had evolved. The 80s was, it was tough being gay in the 80s.

5:41You know, it was tough being young and gay in the 80s. You had AIDS, which was, there was no treatment for it. There was no cure for it, just at the point when we were sort of reaching our kind of most sort of sexual maturity or whatever you want to call it. And there was a heavy negative press against gay people, queer people. And the whole atmosphere was very repressive. But, you know, people were dying. And, you know, but in the middle of that horrific kind of atmosphere, you had this really vibrant, homemade nightlife. And, you know, it's not just about London. You know, I saw it in Manchester.

6:20It was global. You know, the thing about this music on this box set is that you'll find when you look at it that, like, this music was properly international. You know, a good club track could and still can come from anywhere, you know, whether that's Italy or San Francisco or the north of England or Liverpool or whatever. You know, and I sort of thought that that was quite interesting as well. You know, it was very, very bleak politically and socially, but culturally, there was just this huge sort of like creativity. And what these people were doing who were making these records, they were sort of inventing club music as we understand it today.

7:04You know, electronic club music started at the end of the 70s with Donna Summer and I Feel Love, which is sort of its influence looms over this whole box set.

7:37And then whether you're going down the alternative route or the house route or whatever, you can kind of hear I Feel Love just about everywhere on this. I mean, just look at the charts today, and that's why it's fascinating. Looking, for example, I love the flirts with passion. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, the beat, I have a feeling that a lot of artists today, young artists, they've been influenced by that. That's why this is kind of an essential listen to whoever likes electronic music.

8:19The design for this box there, which I kind of really have to kind of call out because it is so beautiful. It is beautiful. There's a young kid called John Conlon who works for an agency called Oink in East London. And he was assigned to me with a project. You know, I'm ancient. I'm in my 50s. But he's just a young man who wasn't even born at this time. And all I did was I sent him four or five pictures from Wikipedia, Google actually, of some gay clubs in the age, black and white pictures. And I said, it needs to feel like this. I said, you know, we didn't have rainbow flags then. You know, it was kind of, there was a lot of leather around.

8:59he just came up with this beautiful design that really feels fresh but very much reflects you know the look and feel of it and so we had a lot of fun just putting it together and you know i made a playlist for for him to listen to when he was working on the design of the songs that we were hoping to include on the box set and you know he he was like all over it you know he was like this is this is just the music of now you know it really did invent the future there's a lot of stuff from the 80s that sounds very old-fashioned but but not these babies definitely not and i love that it's a bit tongue-in-cheek as well i have divine i know there is the cd as well but for them lp3 relax alternative joys and boys with toys yeah i like that well just having a bit of fun because the way the way the album is sequenced is you know we put you know because there was a lot more diversity in you know even within gay nightlife queer nightlife whatever you you want to call it we probably would have called it gay light nightlife in the 80s you've got there what you've got you've got a sort of disc of divas you know because they are sort of perennials they're still still with us today you know your aretha franklin's and donna summers and people like that and then there's a disc of just called passion which is your high energy sound your passion by the flirts the bobby oh sound which is very electronic and very very ahead of its time then there's relax like you say which was the sort of edgy chart pop which was which was interesting route to go down just because you know you had all this kind of oppression of gay people and yet the biggest sort of artists in the mid 80s just when the climate was so bad for...

10:35I mean Relax in the UK was number one for... Relax was the biggest song of that year and Two Tries was sort of well apart from Band-Aid I think and you know but they were definitely the biggest artists of that year Relax, don't do it When you wanna go to it Relax, don't do it When you wanna come Relax, don't do it, when you wanna come

11:10Relax, don't do it, when you wanna come Relax, don't do it When you want to suck, do it Relax, don't do it You know, so while all this kind of shit was going on, you've got the biggest, you've got Pete Burns, Delora Life used to bring me around like a record, there's Bronski Beat and Jimmy Somerville, there's Mark Armand and Dave Bull, Soft Cell, so you know, some of the biggest pop stars were kind of coming straight out of the gay clubs, and they were on your screens, And then there's a sort of disc of Europop, which we called You Came after the Kim Wilde Europop, and just chart pop. I mean, by the end of the 80s, chart pop just sounded like the music you heard in gay clubs.

12:01And then the last disc is about Touch Me, which is the early house stuff. And the first house music I heard was all in gay clubs before you heard it in straight clubs. It was very soulful. It was very deep. It was very vocal-led. And then that turned into Acid House. And then it turned into Italo House. And, you know, we've only got five discs, four for the LP. You can't really reflect all of that variety. But we were attempting to theme it so that you could see that there was a lot of diversity in that decade, in that culture. Do you still play this type of music? All of it. I mean yeah really easy research for you right because you play it and you're like you know what I know which ones to choose a lot of um it's really weird isn't it you know I don't go out that much but I'm seeing a return to a lot of younger people dressing in this sort of leather and with the leather caps and stuff you know just like the guy on the on the sleeve there it's it's really funny I mean everything is drag isn't it at the end of the day any kind of dressing up is is drag and you know it seems to be kind of back again that that sort of clone look if you want to call it that you know moustaches are obviously everywhere everyone's got a moustache that was the look at the time czech shirts white t-shirts and inside the package we we work with the bishopsgate institute i don't know if you're aware of their work but they they're the uk's lgbtq plus archive and they've got fantastic resource in liverpool street and they couldn't have been more helpful they threw open the their doors to us and i went in with that young john who who did the design and we sat there for a day looking at gay times from 1980s right the way through and we based the box set sleeve notes on the small ads at gay times so when you know if you get a copy of the box set you can see what that looks like it's very much um based on what those look like but but within the box as well we had we saw some stuff that i mean it's just amazing photography by gordon rainsford which the bishopsgate institute uh hold they hold those pictures and you know we've got them and it's just fantastic stuff people out and about in clubs some famous names lily savage is in them pictures and lee bowery you know very kind of famous clubby figures from right the way through the 80s jimmy sunville andy bell from erasure but also just just kind of normal people having fun out there having fun djing snogging wrestling you know all the stuff that went on in these clubs and uh you know we're very very grateful to to them because they they let they just gave us all this stuff that really brings it to life mark i'm curious about the Disco Discharge brand because they had earlier compilations, beautiful ones as well.

15:01I have a couple of them. Who are they? Who is Disco Discharge? Is it a series of people? Yeah, I mean, Disco Discharge were the sort of mid-2000s, I think they started and Disco Discharge was a brand at Demon who are releasing Box of Sin. There was a team of them at Demon. I think David Ackerman was the compiler. Alan Jones wrote Sleeve Notes. Alan Jones, a famous sort of cultural writer who couldn't contribute to this because he was working in Italy during the time we'd need him on board. But he did give it his blessing and proofread my Sleeve Notes. I'm sure he did a great job. Yeah, it was a group of them.

15:46And, you know, they came up and they had the genius brainwave in the days of CDs of just making available some fantastic full-length extended rare disco stuff before streaming and just at the point when clubs like Horse Meat Disco were starting to get big news. Disco Discharge came along and they did a fantastic series. I collected them all as a fan. And I believe there are plans to bring them back, to redo them, but redo them in vinyl. vinyl was nowhere 15 years ago. Nobody really wanted it. But now, I mean, just look at this beauty. Sorry, I'm holding. I know it's radio. Vinyl just does look better.

16:31It's just beautiful, right? I mean, I know this is kind of a difficult question, but if we're going to play out this interview, can you choose one track for us? Yeah, I know what I'm going to choose. I'm going to choose the same one that you might choose. I think we should go for Passion. I like that. By the Flirts. Amazing. Bobby O had a massive influence on just about everybody, including your new orders and people like that. So there you go. It gives me goosebumps, this track, actually. Thank you. There you go. Mark, thank you so much. Thank you. That's lovely.

17:08That was Mark. Thank you very much. And Box of Sin is out now. The show was edited by Steph Tjungo and I am Fernando Augusto Pacheco. Thank you for listening.

17:22Thank you.

17:50Thank you.