ME as D.J.

​I don’t suppose it’s any real pronouncement to say that in addition to all my other great talents I am also, of course, a DJ. I mean, who isn’t a DJ these days? But I’ve got deep roots, both as a radio DJ and club DJ, and on and off over the years I’ve always played on the wheels of steel – and just lately I’ve been delighted to get back into it a bit more again.

Of course, the whole stereotype of the DJ is innately connected to dance music but until just recently, I’ve tended to play everything but dance music. I started out in the late 70s, on radio, on the then-fledgling 3RRR in Melbourne, on the sound of punk and its roots in 50s’ rock’n’roll and R&B, 60s’ garage bands and Stax soul, and 70s’ glam rock; by the late 80s, I’d moved on to specialise in should I say pre-alt.country acoustic/roots music, and I did that until well into the 90s (when a couple of kids cruelled my night-time activities).

Now, with my new venture the A.O.Disco, I am reveling in deep disco and vintage soul, Latin, funk, fusion, Afrobeat, new wave and, well, a little bit of cheese too.

​I can even sometimes see a lot of my history/writing projects as akin to DJing in print. Like things like Inner City Sound, Buried Country and even daresay the tragically pulped Deadly Woman Blues – that the first two at least grew into CD-collections as well was completely natural, like a DJ set I might play to soundtrack the stories…

​I started out as a 21-year old in 1978 when I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne and one of the first things I did was get together with my blood-brother Bruce Milne to co-present a show on the future-3RRR called Know Your Product. The then-3RMT had just moved from its first studio on the then-RMIT campus to one in Cardigan St, Carlton, and Know Your Product was the station’s first real dedicated punk/post-punk program, which went out on Saturday mornings. When Bruce then moved on to Adelaide to work on the foundation of Roadrunner magazine, I went solo on the mid-dawn graveyard shift. Then when I moved on, to Sydney, I didn’t keep it up because I had my work cut out for me as it was fulfilling the demand for my journalism.

3RRR, 1978

Darlinghurst, 1983

​When I started getting back into it in the latter 80s, I did some gigs on Oxford St, at the Klub Kakadu, Kinselas and the Cowtown Lounge at the Freezer, and then in 1991 with my friends Toby Creswell and Francine McDougall we moved into the Site at the Picadilly Hotel in Kings Cross (where only a couple of years earlier I’d appeared in my band the Killer Sheep) and launched TCBs. TCBs (for ‘Takin’ Care of Business’, after Elvis’s motto/logo) was a sort of unplugged/roots affair is probably the easiest if most odious way to describe it; we got in some of the cream of Australia’s rock talent to perform, acoustically, every week, and I spun the disks that ranged from Doc Watson, say, to Tony Joe White or John Lee Hooker. As such, the place became something of an industry watering hole and the talk of the town and we packed it out every week for maybe 16-20 weeks through the middle of the year – and then we stopped. Exactly why we stopped so abruptly, and why it was never resumed, I can’t remember, but as quickly as it arrived, it was gone.

​After that, I did sporadic gigs around the inner west where I was by then living – at the Globe in Newtown (before it closed down), the Newtown RSL (before it closed down), the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle in Rozelle (before it closed down) – but after that I again hung up my headphones to concentrate on writing (and raising children).

Until now. When it seems like Sydney’s beleaguered nightlife needs a shot in the arm, or rather feet and hips, and I feel inclined to be bunny enough to give it a shot. So I have launched the A.O.Disco. My playlists have always, naturally, reflected my personal listening habits, and so since just lately, or at least for the last decade or so, I’ve enjoyed more than anything music whose only commonality might be described as its basis in the groove, that’s what I’m spinning: deep disco and vintage soul, Latin, funk, fusion, Afrobeat, new wave and some cheese. I can’t stand the beat-matched monotony of today’s standard EDM DJ, let alone having to be up till 3am before anything happens. The A.O.Disco, even when it exists only in my own head or shed, is place where nothing is under 40, nothing over 130 (BPMs) and which guarantees you home in bed by midnight! Designed to shift and lift: to shift your feet/hips, and lift the spirit. And couldn’t we all do with a bit of that?