March 20, 2006

An Introduction

Interview with Paul Marinelli - Part 1

When I was growing up in the 80s there was hardly any dance music on radio, the only radio station in Melbourne that played any kind of dance music was 3RRR, a community radio station in the heart of Fitzroy. I remembered tuning in late at night to the "Pulsation Club Show", then "Beats per Minutes" and finally "Dance till Dawn" - These shows, in my opinion, pioneered and championed the underground dance sound back when there there wasn't a dance scene. The DJs of these shows were Alen Rados and Paul Marinelli who in the 80s were at the height of their popularity as DJs in Melbourne playing a quasi mix of disco and then house. Their music was what changed me at 16. I was taping their shows every week, listened to them continously and then when I had enough money would dart down to Central Station and hassle Guy or Krystal about a track they played on RRR with the lyrics that went "Jack, Jack, Jack" .... When all the other kids at school were trying to get into pubs to drink beer every saturday night, I was busy trying to get into clubs to listen to the music, it was anywhere that played this House music stuff, and by the time I finished high school the whole ACID house thing exploded - there was no going back ... I can safely say that these guys were instrumental in what made me want to become a DJ and to like / play this kind of music.

I finally tracked down Paul Marinelli (or more to the fact Paul tracked down me) and I was fortunate enough to speak to him about the 80s and the Melbourne club scene back in the day. Paul Marinelli and Alen Rados have remained close friends for 20 years following their pioneering dance music radio show days - a very enduring and valued friendship that started in a radio studio in Fitzroy as 17 year olds.

The Interview

PM - Alen Rados was on air with a program called The Pulsation Club Show from around 1986, at least one year before I started presenting Dance till Dawn on 3RRR in 1987. Dance till Dawn, which together with Alen’s show, became the two only serious ‘import’ dance music radio programs in Melbourne and pretty much in Australia at the time. While it is nice to take credit as being pioneers for this kind of music, and for sure the both of us were way ahead of our time in terms of the music radio shows, credit has to be paid to the real dance/disco music radio pioneers, people like Paul Jackson, Aaron Sony and I forget her name but the presenter of a show called Danceteria – all of these RRR programs started in the early 80’s. They were playing imported dance music when all you could ever hear on any commercial radio station was 60s and 70’s classic rock – young people were prevented from having the ability to hear, let alone like new music – whether it was dance or rock or otherwise. It was an absolute joke – and this continued well into the time Alen and I were doing our programs, so of course, where did the young guys and girls tune in to on Fridays for their fix of new / current dance music – 3RRR – there simply was no other choice.

PM – Man oh man, I DJ’d at heaps of venues during my time at RRR, before it and well after. I was lucky to have got the best part of 15 years out of DJ’ing, before moving into my other full time passion which is what I do today– motor racing based public relations and marketing. So taking it from the top I spun at Hotel Oz, The Boulevard, Hot Gossip, Night Flight, St Elmo’s Bar, The Wool Exchange, The Hippodrome (the first 18 months), Inflation (when it was a pretty exclusive place), The Paladin (for years!), Lazar, (and it isn’t and never was called ‘Lazars’!), did guest spots at the Tunnel in Sydney and Surfers Paradise and guested at stacks of smaller places around town that I struggle to remember the names of! My favourite club of all time was a place called Shieks which was around in the mid 80’s, I think it was in Collins or Flinders Streets –used to love that place – made me want to be a DJ. The other place I really liked was Fortunes (Gold Coast) sadly both aint around.The best nightclub that I have ever seen was just last year – ‘Pure’ at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas – absolutely amazing!! Wish we had clubs like that here – I’d still be going to them!

PM - Only in the garage when I feel like having a go! The last DJ’ing gig I had was about 10 years ago playing 80’s music upstairs at Lazar. That was a lot of fun, I loved the regulars and it was before the place turned to shit by changing the entry standards – as so many clubs did. I was asked to do an 80’s party in town last year which was heaps of fun and I loved it. It was amazing that after all of this time, a lot of it still comes naturally, beat mixing / key mixing etc. I still have my DJ equipment, have updated most of it - but the Technics 1200’s are still the first I ever owned. Now and then I crank it up and blow the dust off the monitors and cause concern for the neighbours, but not nearly as often as I would like to. I have been offered several retro-type DJ gigs over recent years but as my business involves a lot of national and international travel, I am away sometimes up to 35 weekends in a year – its pretty hard to hold down a DJ role with this. Also, you have to know when enough is enough. I was sure of one thing when I got into the DJ’ing caper from the very start. That it would never be my “forever” career – as much as I liked it, I knew what I wanted to achieve was being in business for myself in the sports / corporate media field. Also the finicky nature of clubs, their owners and back stabbing DJ’s made it hard to hold gigs for long – there was very little job security for the long term. Each to their own of course and I have to take my hat off to Andy Van and John Course as the two stand-outs from the time I was DJ’ing and the amazing careers that they have established in DJ’ing and music writing / production, but aside from them, anyone else who is still spinning these days from back then should have their head checked!

PM – Yes and its massive and its always getting bigger. I am very proud of it, you can imagine what is in there, if you listened to my RRR shows then everything you ever heard is in it plus much, much more, as (shock horror) I have always liked hard rock and punk rock as well. In fact I like pretty much any kind of music except Jazz. But my favourite is dance by far. I am always updating it, when I get to a record shop that has vinyl, I can spend hours sifting through what I need and it drives my wife insane. I want to catalogue it all and have been saying that I will do that for 11 years now. One day it will get done. The hardest thing is trying to find something that I suddenly get the urge to listen to, like an old Sylvester or Patrick Cowley track or something.

PM – Alen and I pretty much based our music on things like the Billboard US Dance Chart, at the time the only true dance chart in the world, and the UK, German Italian, French / all of Europe’s dance charts. We would get these from record stores and we also subscribed to Billboard magazine. We would try and grab everything that we knew was kicking butt around the world.. At the time record stores like Central Station were very helpful with procuring a lot of this new music, and after a couple of years I was importing dance music myself from record companies throughout Europe. I went over to Europe in 1988 on a holiday, but I also spent time making record industry contacts and hence we had the best music, music that no-one could find (which must have been frustrating for fans!) and that placed shows like Dance till Dawn so way far ahead of its time. The House sound was huge in the 80’s and it wasn’t as if we planned to play heaps of house, it was in at the time and charting all over the world, except in Oz of course because the fat cat 55 year old music directors / programmers of stations like MMM / FOX etc, at the time didn’t want people to hear, let alone like new music. They expected 16 year olds to listen to Reo Speedwagon – for fuck’s sake!

Goto Part 2 here