In early 1982 I had a band called (modestly) The Rogettes.
We played covers of all kinds of songs from swing, jazz, soul, rock'n'roll, easy listening, and current chart hits. We also recorded some good stuff of our own (see The Rogettes page).
We mostly played in Working Men's clubs in South East London/Kent - I have never played so much bingo as I did in those days. We also did weddings, parties, Social Clubs plus a few bookings down in Leysdown on the beautiful Isle of Sheppey.
After a few years of trudging around, rehearsing, arguing, sharing the money I'd almost had enough. In the meantime I had a pretty large record and tape collection and was doing mixes onto cassette tape for people's house parties and began to realise this was the way to go - only me to be paid, same sound every night....easy.
So I got this technogeek, Hughie to build be a deck. It took months. It had mismatched scrounged record players and a tape deck. The socket labelled 'headphone' was for the microphone and vice versa. The headphone output was so quiet I could almost not hear anything when trying to queue the next track. The whole thing was almost six feet long and made (it seemed) of solid oak - an absolute bastard to carry up/down stairs or through doorways. But it worked - usually.
My friend (and singer from the Rogettes), Ken joined me and we called the disco R.K.Music (R - Rog, K - Ken) in the hope people would confuse us with the local radio station Radio Kent and which often used the initials RK.
We did loads of gigs together until 1985 from trendy Central London parties to crabby little social halls in Belvedere. Ken decided to leave in '85 - mainly cos he'd seen and done it all and who wants to spend a precious Saturday night in Thamesmead? It also was the only time things nearly got nasty when a drunk kept moaning about the music and leaning on the equipment and making the records jump. Amazingly this was the only bad moment I recall in the WHOLE time I was doing discos, so I guess we were doing something pretty right.
Sometime around then I upgraded from Disco ME to Disco Vista, i.e. a commercial unit.
I think my favourite gig was at Banbury.
A college mostly accommodating American students. I was at Banbury college for a week or a two weeks course organised by BT. God, it was deadly dull, but for the final Thursday night I'd agreed I'd
bring the disco with me and we'd have a party: us, the gorgeous American students and the staff.
It was very loud (kicking off with James Brown's 'Living In America'), very drunken and went on all night - and I got very lucky :-) (one of the very few times). Hmmm-mmmm
I can remember I didn't think I would survive the journey home from Banbury to Dartford as my eyes just could not stay open.
I carried on until 1989 when BT (who I was working for) decided to relocate our entire department from the Barbican in London to Swindon in Wiltshire. I was working pretty much every Friday and Saturday night (more at Christmas with office parties most nights of the week). I even put the van (a dodgy Comma Van, >groan< - although better than the Reliant Robin - true! - I started with) to use during the week, doing 'Man and Van' work.
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