Greg Wilson (born 1960) is an English DJ and producer, associated with both the early 1980s electro scene in Manchester and the current disco/re-edit movement. He is also a writer/commentator on dance music and popular culture.
Career
1975–1980
Growing up in New Brighton on Merseyside, Wilson lived above his family's pub during the years 1966–1973. The premises included two function rooms where he'd witness mobile discos featuring on a weekly basis at wedding receptions and parties. His main musical influences came from the record collections of his elder brother and sister, especially the soul music labels Tamla Motown, Stax and Atlantic. Wilson began his career as a DJ in 1975 at the age of 15, having bought a mobile set-up from his schoolfriend Derek Kelsey (later known as DJ Derek Kaye). He held a residency at local nightspot The Chelsea Reach between 1975 and 1977. Further local residencies followed at The Penny Farthing (1976–1977) and The Golden Guinea (1977-1980), where he first built his reputation as a black music specialist, playing soul, funk, disco and jazz-funk.
1980–1984
Wilson left the Golden Guinea in 1980 and worked in Denmark and Germany (he’d previously DJ’d in Denmark and Norway for a few months in 1978) before returning to the UK to take a 4 night a week residency at Wigan Pier. In 1982, he became a full-time black music specialist, continuing Wigan Pier's Tuesday night jazz-funk session, which was voted the North's Best Club by Blues & Soul readers, with Wilson collecting the North's Best DJ award. He controversially championed early electro records at Wigan Pier and, most notably, Manchester club Legend, where he took over their Wednesday jazz-funk night in 1981. As with Wigan Pier, people travelled to his nights at Legend from places including Birmingham, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Nottingham, Liverpool and London. Legend attracted a predominantly black crowd to listen to the new electro-funk records, which were mainly coming out of New York City. Wilson also began to take a serious approach to mixing around this point, and is regarded as one of the UK pioneers. In 1982, he began to present regular mixes of the music he was playing in the clubs on Manchester's Piccadilly Radio, and these featured on Mike Shaft's specialist black music show T.C.O.B (Taking Care of Business). These radio mixes are still talked about as being influential to this day, with the end of year Best of 82 and Best of 83 mixes regarded as classics.
In February 1983, Wilson was invited to demonstrate live mixing on the Channel 4 TV show The Tube. Interviewed by presenter, Jools Holland, with Mike Shaft commentating, Wilson mixed between 2 copies of David Joseph's "You Can't Hide (Your Love from Me)", then a new release, but subsequently a UK top 20 hit. This was the first time a British DJ had mixed live on TV.
Wilson was a fixture on the All-Dayer circuit in the North and Midlands during this period, regularly appearing alongside other black music specialists including Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft, John Grant, Hewan Clarke, Richard Searling, Kev Edwards, Pete Haigh, Jonathan, Trevor M and Cleveland Anderson. In 1983, Wilson began a Friday night residency at The Haçienda club in Manchester, which had opened the previous year. This was the club's first weekly dance music night and would lay the groundwork for its influential Nude night, also held every Friday, which came to prominence in the mid-'80s with DJs Mike Pickering and Martin Prendergast.
Wilson also put together the first UK 're-edit', Paul Haig's "Heaven Sent", in 1983, and taught Norman Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim), then a young aspiring DJ called Quentin, how to cut and scratch in December 1983 during a short Haçienda tour of the South.
1984–1987
At the end of 1983, aged 23, Wilson retired from DJing to focus on record production, as well as managing Manchester breakdance crew Broken Glass. They gained national exposure via TV appearances including a famous edition of The Tube, filmed at The Haçienda in January 1984, on which Madonna made her UK live TV debut. Later in 1984, along with musicians Martin Jackson and Andy Connell, he co-wrote and produced all but one of the tracks on the Street Sounds UK Electro album, now seen as a seminal British dance album, the first to feature sampling. One of the tracks, "Style of the Street", a recording by Broken Glass, was sampled by The Prodigy on their 2004 hit “Girls”. However, the project was short-lived, Jackson and Connell going on to form the band Swing Out Sister, while Wilson, struggling for opportunities, would eventually re-locate to London in 1987.