Barrie K Sharpe, interview
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The late eighties saw the rise of UK dance music under the guise of acid house. London also gave rise to acid jazz, a British take on US funk and Soul with its roots in seventies sound soul and the Philly sound. The era also forged a new type of modern British man, someone who could flick between various disciplines with ease and success. Barrie K Sharpe is one of these, a DJ, designer and businessman.
So Barrie, you were born in London in 1960. Tell me about your early days growing up in the east end?
Brilliant. I got into music very young. Growing up in the East End was actually amazing. At the age of eleven, 1971, I heard ‘Get on the Good Foot’ by James Brown. My whole life just changed. It was like a religious experience.
So where were you when you first heard Good Foot?
Fairlop School, youth club dance. Tthe DJ was Adam Gibson. I was wearing black flared trousers, slacio box lace up shoes, an orange tank top with stripes half way down, and a purple button down collar shirt.
What’s more important to you, music or fashion? Because it’s interesting, I might be able to remember where I was when I heard a certain piece of music, but never what I was wearing, not to that detail anyway.
I can give you detail of what everybody else was wearing, what record was playing, and what day and what time. I have a photographic memory.
So what’s more important? Music or fashion?
They both go hand in hand but music, its’ very elating. I enjoy clothes, I like wearing them and it makes me feel good. But the music is more spiritual. Without music I can’t function.
So, James Brown changed your life?
I stopped in my tracks, I was stunned, it was like a religious experience.
Had you not been exposed to black American music?
Not like that. James Brown invented funk, that was funk, I’d heard it all. The music of my youth was reggae, the style of my youth was skinheads. And don’t forget, skinheads aren’t what most people think they are, skinheads come from Jamaica. The whole side partings, and cropped trousers, and tonic suits, and really smart shoes, comes from Jamaica. There’s no boots, there was not braces, I was a root boy, we were called skinheads, cross between Jamaican style and British working class attitude. And of course reggae. I was brought up in a kid’s home, so I had a lot of black influences, I actually lived in a cottage with three black girls, and they used to take me to these clubs, and turned me on to this music. My whole life at that time was amazing.
So this was early seventies you say?
Very early seventies, yes.
So you were never touched with the glam rock stick?
I had no problem with it, I liked David Bowie, I liked some of it. Some of it was great, most of it was crap. David Bowie being the perfect example, was iconic. Ziggy Stardust was amazing. Just a pity that David Bowie turned out to be a fraud. He let me down. (laughs).
If I try and read about you online, everything starts from 1984, so we’ve got about a good twelve years we need to quickly fill. Can you do that for us?
I spent those twelve years going to nightclubs. First real club, at about fourteen, was the Lively Lady in Leytonstone, which was just pure funk. The music at that time was just amazing, the DJ’s were good because the music was good.
And you were going to clubs when you were how old?
Fourteen. It wasn’t unusual then, though. It was a different world then. I had my own front door key at five.
So when you say dance music, was this was funk, so it wasn’t disco?
Bit early for disco. It was a crossover. It was just music to me, I didn’t have a name for it, it was just dance music, loose funky music. Then we started going up town to Shaggarama, which was a punk club and we went to Global Village, and all those sorts of clubs, all the obvious places. At that time Trevor Shakes was an iconic character in the clubs. He was the best dancer, the best dresser, the best DJ.
So describe what Trevor Shakes would have been wearing?
The iconic time for me with Trevor Shakes was when he was cropped Levi’s, penny loafers, very fifties looking. This was before anybody else. When I first wore 501’s in 1976, I was wearing 501’s, pair of cowboy boots, and a denim jacket, Levi’s. And a white t-shirt. This might sound normal, but 1976 it wasn’t. I’d gone to Ilford Palais, I’m leaning against a pole, chatting up these two girls. And one of them turned round and said ‘oh look, it’s the Levi kid!’ They were taking the piss out of me, they considered it to be very naff. The look was influenced by Trevor Shakes. He created styles, he was the DJ at Monkbridge, very exclusive nightclub, he was the DJ.
Were you travelling far and wide to go to clubs, or was this all in central London?
I didn’t, I went to clubs in the West End. I wasn’t a soul boy, let’s get that straight. I didn’t go to Caister.
When you look at the history of British soul, in the seventies its people going to Caister...
That’s the commercial end of it. I never even touched it. There were so many West End underground clubs, didn’t need to go to that. But most people wouldn’t have got into these clubs, you had to know people.
At the age of, I was about 12 or so, I kind of discovered Central Line, so this is about 1980…
Jazz funk, not my favourite thing. Some of it was great.
Define the different genres of Funk, or Jazz Funk, or whatever it’s called, Brit funk…
There was a certain period, ’77, ’78 we had this British sound, very piano orientated, I didn’t like it. Some of it was great, Central Line had a couple of great tracks. But you ended up with a band called Shakatak, which epitomised the whole thing, and made it really crap. Course you had great bands like Incognito.
So late seventies, we’ve still got to get to 1984, so what are you doing for work at this time?
I went to ballet school, I’m a trained dancer, I studied down at London School of Comtemporary Dance and The Ballet Rombre. That was better than going to work. I did that all day, went to clubs all night. Never had a job, didn’t work till 1984 in fact.
You were one of Maggie’s millions were you?
I guess so. Bit political for me. Wasn’t aware of politics then, I was aware of the clothes, music, clubs, and girls of course. So, 1984. I met a girl named Diana Brown. She worked at Vidal Sassoon, the guy she was assistant to was Renee Gelston, who was the top stylist at the time. And he owned a club at the WAG called Black Market.
In about 1980, 1979, at a Club Seven, where Trevor Shakes was DJing, he’d play all the latest music and he started dropping old tunes, like Wicky Wacky, and old James Brown stuff. I thought hang on, this stuff’s better than the new stuff. Club Seven was a club that opened till about three in the morning, only guys in there and lots of mirrors, and full of great dancers.
I thought the music and the clothes were synonymous with girls?
No, not at Club Seven. There were girls there but it wasn’t about that. This is a whole different thing, this is about dancing and music. And he’d put the record on, and he’d go and dance. And if he liked it, he’d put it back in again. If it was a part two, he’d turn the record over. Which impressed me, his self indulgence impressed me. Then I started going up to clubs, like the Beetroot and the WAG, and a few warehouse parties, [Jag Strongman, Steve Lewis, Hector of the WAG], and they’d play an half hour of funk, they’d play “Rock Creek Park”, all the obvious ones. But that was the best part of the night for me. I thought, I can do this, but I can do it better than this, cause I’ve got all the music, and I can do it all night.
So, Diana took my cassettes to work, Renee said who makes these tapes? She said it’s me. He said "Is he a DJ?" "Yeah, he is." So I got the job at the WAG, the most exclusive club in town. I’ve turned up, with all my old records, I was DJing with Dave Durrell, who didn’t quite play what I was playing, and I expressed my opinion to Renee. I said my neighbour, Lascelles, who was in the Brand New Heavies, has got the same sort of music as me, with a different take on it. So me and Lascelles started playing our music at WAG, which is all seventies, which is great for a year. And I didn’t like the door policy at the WAG, lot of my friends didn’t get in.
Tell us about the door policy, tell us about the style of the time…
It was a racist door policy, to a certain extent. And I played a certain type of music that attracted a certain style of people.
So was it a quota, that basically said right, I’ve got twenty…
There was no rule, but kind of, yeah, they discouraged certain people from coming in, and I’d argue every week about it. I actually DJ’ed there but I was banned. I wasn’t allowed in the club the rest of the week. So I kicked up a lot of fuss.
Tell us about the style as well in 1984, what were you wearing, what were people wearing?
I was wearing cropped Levi’s, loafers with no socks, very fifties. Eight piece caps, backwards, made by Duffer. I’d worn my hat backwards in ’84, I’d seen it done elsewhere, but I was at a certain place, I was the DJ at the WAG, I was on the rostrum wearing my hat backwards. And I made these hats, it became a whole fashion. Everything I did became big, not because I did it first, I was at the right place at the right time. So if I did it, it happened. And I owned Duffer, we had a shop in Portobello Road, everybody would come down and buy these things that I wore.
This is exactly at the same time, so you’re down on Portobello road, doing Duffer.
Yeah. I left the WAG with Lascelles, we opened the Cat in the Hat Club. And that’s when they started calling it rare groove. We never called it Rare Groove, we just played funky music. And you had guys like Norman Jay coming down, who would say "what’s this?" ‘I Believe in Miracles’ was a good example. Now, everybody can tell me they heard it in the seventies, I don’t believe them. Because I didn’t, Lascelles didn’t. We went into a record shop, any funk records there were 10p. We used to buy it all up, and Lascelles would pick a pile of records up and say I want that, that and that. If we’d never heard it before, but he thought it had a good name like The Jackson Sisters, he bought. It was ‘I believe in Miracles’ and we bought up loads of them. We had like thirty copies. Norman Jay bought his copy from me, he had never heard it before. He asked me what these records were. They can all write history the way they want to write it, me and Lascelles, wholly on our own created Rare Groove, everybody else was later on.
I remember 1985, maybe it was 1986, I came down to Notting Hill Carnival from Birmingham, and all I heard was Roadblock, 24/7.
Yeah, we had a system outside our shop, it was Roadblock.
That was the Roadblock Carnival. How did you feel about Roadblock?
Didn’t bother me, it was great tune. It obviously got a bit too commercial and over-played.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman didn’t have their reputation then, did they?
No. Guys calling it Rare Groove stopped me DJing.
Why did they stop you DJing?
Because they were playing the same music, or a version of it. It was no longer exclusive, there was nothing in it for me, it didn’t excite me. So in ’86, I started a band called Diana Brown and the Brothers, which later became the Brand New Heavies, Young Disciples, and me and Diana Brown. And that was acid jazz. We didn’t call it acid jazz, it became acid jazz.
When Diana left, then I went on tour with a fifteen piece band called Brothers International, we toured with the JB’s, and then I got back with Diana and Jazzy B was involved with this. We recorded a couple of things. We could get a gig any time we wanted, not because we were good, it was just the way things were, right place, right time. And I owned Duffer, I had the Cat in the Hat. I could do crap and people would think it was great.
Tell me about the Cat in the Hat.
The Cat in the Hat was a pure seventies club. Style, and everything. Low ceiling, we had dancers in cages, everybody dressed up for the part.
And where was the Cat in the Hat?
In Leicester Square, where the Comedy Store is. I re-created a club called the Likely Lady, same music, same style. And people came just to dance all night.
So when I first became aware of you, it would have been ’89, ’90. It was Masterplan. For lots of people of a certain age, that song is absolutely definitive. Explain how you guys came up with Masterplan.
We played it live for year, with the band, in a very broken up version. Before it came out, I’m saying to the record company, I’m going out acid house parties, and they’re playing Masterplan, and it hasn’t even been out yet. It sold out the first day, and they didn’t get it back in the shops for three weeks. So it went right up the charts, then right down again. If you listen to it properly, it’s Payback, James Brown, it’s all based on Payback, with a 'I Believe in Miracles' sound at the beginning, which actually is a stylophone. But it’s all based on other things, it was easy for me to do.
Obviously at this period now, UK dance music is massively to the fore. How did you feel about that, how did that affect the club scene?
When I first heard acid house music, which was black American music, I loved it, it was funk. When it became white English music, I didn’t like it so much.
I was always struck, very early British house music, there’s like Forge Masters and warp records, that to me reminded me of seventies dub. And that, for me, was absolutely amazing, but you just kind of switched off instantly did you?
As soon as it became for the floor, only for the floor, nothing else, yeah.
So there’s this whole great big scene of UK, and really London acts, in acid house, are you guys all hanging out together? Describe Incognito, Brand New Heavies, the Chimes…
No, no-one hung out together, we’re English, everybody was working against each other, no-one was in it together. Everyone sort of keeping themselves to themselves.
You were going to the same clubs and stuff though?
Yeah.
And you knew that such and such has been signed by so and so?
Yeah, I guess so.
So, where is Duffer at this point, how big is that business, and what are you guys producing?
We were cleaning up. We were doing suede trimmed cardigans, made by Gabbici, which we re-designed a lot of them.
So you say we…
Four Duffers.
But you were the designer though?
Yeah.
So what were the other three Duffers?
Well one of them, Marco, done the graphics, and designed some stuff. Eddie did the business, and this guy named Cliff did a bit of this and a bit of that.
In the early nineties, you’re having it, in our own words, you’re producing an album, how long did it take the album to get produced?
Four months. It was quite easy, because those were the songs what I’d had in my head my whole life. The first album is always the easiest.
And did you find it easy working with your girlfriend?
She wasn’t my girlfriend back then, and no, I didn’t (laughs). It was a nightmare. She hadn’t been my girlfriend since the Cat in the Hat. It was on and off for us for years, we hang out together, we went out together and we didn’t, but we finished in sort of ‘85ish.
Was it difficult because you had a history?
No, because I was moving in a different direction to Diana. We recorded Masterplan, The record company kept wanting Masterplan again, I thought I’ve done that, I’m that kind of person, I’m always moving on. Then I wanted to do something else, they wanted me to keep doing the same thing, which for me didn’t work.
1994, you left Duffer, why did you make that decision?
I left Duffer to bring up my son.
So tell me about your son, and you becoming a family man?
Well, my wife left me with my son. I had to stop whatever I was doing, which was music, clothes, clubbing, the whole lot, and sort my son out.
But it wasn’t long before you actually set up Sharpeye, was it?
Set up Sharpeye in ’95, but that was backed by the Japanese, so all I had to do was design stuff, there was no real work involved, I just got paid for designing. And that was just an extension of Duffer as far as I was concerned. But after about eighteen months, I walked out on that, started up on my own, opened my own shop in Soho and started doing my own thing, where I started really doing what I wanted to do.
Again, just to set the mood for us, what is the look of Sharpeye in the mid 90’s?
Blimey... I was in bondage pants. Baggy hip-hoppy loose fitting kind of stuff, but legs strapped up, a lot of really Italian style knitwear. Lots of military style jackets, but with a twist to them in modern fabrics. It was all military orientated I guess, all quite classic, but there was a twist to everything.
And by that period, would you say that the oomph had gone out of the Acid Jazz scene?
Yes, definitely.
And why do you think that happened?
It just acid jazz wasn’t that strong in the first place, there wasn’t that many great bands. Acid jazz didn’t pay anybody, so their bands always left them.
And would you say before the impetus went out of it, there wasn’t the real business to sustain it, musically how do you think it compared to what was coming out of America?
Well America was just R’n’B, it was just crap. It was a good time for Hip-Hop, but the average Soul music was crap. The reason I started DJing was because the music coming out of America, I hated it, that solid soul sound, with the synths, and the synth drums, loud snare, synth bass, hated it. And that’s why I played seventies music, just for me to hear.
No SOS band for you then?
No.
How do you feel about Duffer now?
It’s… something I did. I don’t feel anything.
And tell us about the growth of Sharpeye after you ditched the Japanese?
Really blew up for a while, when I was in Soho. I done really well, I had the trendiest shop in London. But, it was hard work, we were always moving on too quick, never cashed in. So I’d do something, everybody else copied it, which is what I’m about. I’m not a true business man, I’m just a designer.
I moved from Soho to Covent Garden, then into Portobello Road, which was brilliant, because all the customers are really tourists. Italians, couldn’t believe it, never seen anything like it, it was all new to them. Then I had enough. Actually had enough of the whole thing. And the markets died anyway. I sold my lease for a lot of money, so I was out of there, I was quite happy.
Now I’m still doing it, but I’ve actually got no interest in it. I’ve always designed clothes just for myself, I’d go out and people would say "where did you get them jeans from?" I’d give them my card, they’d never contact me. They used to, at one time they used to all come and buy them, they don’t any more. They just don’t have the money.
Obviously for you, it appears with your story anyway, that going out, clubbing and music was integral and obviously you said girls as well. What do you reckon to music in 2011?
It’s like everything, there’s always good music, but in general there’s no creativity, there’s no progression, nothing’s moving on. Anything creative in this country, nothing is moving on.
And are you still going out?
Only to my own club, Big Stuff.
Tell us about Big Stuff.
We play funky music all night, with a bit of reggae thrown in, all for the over 35’s. The vibes amazing, the people are really, really friendly, everyone knows each other. A lot of this is through Facebook by the way. We only promote through Facebook. These people meeting for the first time, they become like a family. We move it about quite a lot, but it’s East village at the moment which is kind of working. We really enjoy it, it’s a good night out.
And just before we started the interview you said that you were working in the studio today, so what are you working on?
I recorded a reggae tune, very seventies orientated, with a great singer named Heather MacDonald. Dub versions, modern, almost housey mixes, just a phat reggae tune. Going to put it out on vinyl myself.
So there’s still a future in vinyl?
For me. I don’t know if it will sell or not, I’m doing it anyway. But this is a novelty thing, I want to put the tune out. So if it’s on vinyl I’ll play it myself. I don’t play CD’s, so it’s got to be on vinyl for me.
Barrie K Sharpe, thank you.
Cool.
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