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Credit to the Edit!

The release this year of a selection of ‘edits’ by Greg Wilson brings one of the most pioneering DJs in history back into the spotlight.

Tiesto? I’d rather stay at home, thanks. Timo Maas? About as entertaining as having your fingernails removed. People inevitably end up asking me, “So which DJs do you like, then”. I tend to answer, “Greg Wilson”. He’s a DJ whose career spans some 30 years, a man whose influence has been so great that he’s still talked about despite the fact that he officially retired from DJing back in 1983 at the tender age of 23.

Greg Wilson made his name in the North of England playing what was then known as Electro-Funk, a genre of music later shortened to plain ‘Electro’. Before Hip-Hop, before House, before Techno, this was the black dance music that was being listened to on the underground. Taking in rap, disco, soul and funk, Electro was joining the dots between the musical styles existing at the time, displaying a kind of eclecticism that we think of as being unique to culture today. Unusual for music at that time, it was inspired in equal measure by black and white artists, with German Krautrock acts like Kraftwerk being as important in shaping the genre, as blacker, funkier artists like Sly Stone. Hard too imagine, but at the time, during the early 1980s, Electro was controversial music. Its use of electronic instruments and drum machines made it akin to blasphemy to the jazz and funk purists who at the time dominated the black music scene. One particular music journalist refused to mention the genre by name, instead writing only EL*C*RO. It’s against this backdrop of musical purism that Greg Wilson made his name.

It’s for his ‘edits’ that Greg Wilson will always be best known. An edit is almost like an early and much more primitive form of the ‘remix’, involving looping up and repeating the parts of the track that the audience wants to dance to, and eliminating the parts that don’t work out on the dancefloor. The ‘edit’ developed out of necessity – many of the hits from the day were too short for the tastes of dancers, and the idea of releasing special 12” extended versions of tracks was in its infancy, most of these records being hard to find American imports. His edits were originally done using a reel-to-reel tape machine, with razorblades and not computers being the most important tool of the trade. As well as cutting and pasting tracks together at home, he was able to create live edits of the music while he was DJing, using two turntables, two copies of the same record, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette player. It involved what looks like, today, extremely basic equipment: cassette tapes would be ‘paused’ at the right moment to allow a short sample to be played at a particular point.

He was the first British DJ to mix two records together; the first to use three turntables; the first to pioneer the weird and wonderful sounds that were coming out of New York at the beginning of the 80s. He was creating ‘mash-ups’ or ‘bootlegs’, involving taking the lyrics from one track and mixing it with the music from another, a generation before MTV caught onto the idea. However, despite having residencies at Manchester ’s Hacienda and Wigan Pier (back then the most exuberant club in the whole of Britain ), Greg Wilson turned his back on DJing in 1983 to concentrate on working as a producer. He quickly started experiencing serious financial problems, something you can’t imagine happening to the hugely overpaid superstar DJs of today, and ended up having his car, his home and worst of all, his music equipment repossessed. However, twenty years later, he’s still being talked about, and made a spectacular return to DJing in 2003.

There’s a very good reason for the fairly recent rediscovery of Greg Wilson. An eclectic hybrid of genres and styles, the music he pioneered is perfectly in tune with today’s obsession with early 80s dance music (just listen to the latest Madonna single if you don’t believe me). Confirming his importance in the field, this year saw the release of an album of Greg Wilson’s versions of other peoples tracks, entitled “Credit to the Edit”. Though some of the tracks were put together in the last few years, many of them are around a quarter of a century old, yet still manage to sound fresh and exciting.

The equipment he uses today to DJ with speaks volumes about his approach to music. Having always been at the cutting edge of technological innovations, he’s encorporated a laptop into his DJ sets. However, he still also brings along his old Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder, using magnetic tapes cut and stuck together with scotch tape. It’s a piece of equipment you certainly wouldn’t catch Tiesto using…