# ‘Everyone knew who he was’: James Hamilton, the ‘eccentric aristo’ who catalysed British club culture

Norman Cook can remember the first time he met James Hamilton very clearly. “He was _enormous_,” he laughs. “Enormous and very well-spoken, called everyone ‘dear boy’, quite camp. He looked so … _unlikely_. Not a party animal, not into anything apart from dance music and the vibe and the culture of it all. Not interested in being cool, he was like, ‘it’s OK to be nerdy as long as you really know your music’, but I think he really enjoyed the fact that every club he went to, everyone would know who he was and they were all going to tell him some gossip or give him a record.”

Moreover, Cook remembers their meeting because James Hamilton had caused him a whole world of trouble. It was the 80s, a decade before Cook became Fatboy Slim, superstar DJ and multi-platinum producer of countless dancefloor hits: he was still the bass player in indie band the Housemartins, who had quietly put out his first solo single – “a kind of cut-up rap record called ” – under a pseudonym, DJ Megamix, further masking his identity by trying to make the 12in look like an American import.



“And James Hamilton found out who I was, and when he wrote about it in Record Mirror, he put ‘Norman from the Housemartins’. And all hell broke loose: the rest of the band were going ‘What are you doing? You have to stop this! We’ll lose fans if they think that you’re into hip-hop!’” He was that era of ‘hang the DJ’ – you couldn’t be in an indie band and like dance music. So the first thing I said to him was ‘oh, thanks for outing me – how did you know?’”

It’s a very James Hamilton story: it makes reference to his imposing physical stature, his fabled public school poshness (he was 6ft 8in, and variously described as resembling “a country squire”, “an eccentric aristocrat”, “a headmaster that had turned up in the middle of a nightclub” and compared to James Robertson Justice, the fearsome star of the  films). It notes the sheer improbability that someone like that would be a pivotal figure in the world of dance music, however encyclopedic his knowledge.



“… James Hamilton found out who I was, and when he wrote about it in Record Mirror, he put ‘Norman from the Housemartins’. And all hell broke loose: the rest of the band were going ‘What are you doing? You have to stop this! We’ll lose fans if they think that you’re into hip-hop!’” He was that era of ‘hang the DJ’ – you couldn’t be in an indie band and like dance music. So the first thing I said to him was ‘oh, thanks for outing me – how did you know?’

He was a fascinating figure. Quite aside from his writing career and the various innovations it spawned, he’d spent the 60s alternately working with the Beatles in America, and DJing at legendary London mod nightclub the Scene under the name Doctor Soul; he then built Britain’s first custom-made mobile DJ console, and took to playing at aristocratic country house balls, where requests tended more to the Blue Danube and Scottish jigs and reels than the latest US imports.



It’s hard to imagine in a world where mixing records is what club DJs do as a matter of course, but Hamilton’s idea met with a combination of indifference and outright hostility. Pete Tong believes it was “down to resistance of the unknown, like ‘I don’t really understand how to do this’,” but DJ and producer Greg Wilson – an early adopter of mixing, who ended up , and who is publishing the new collection – thinks it had more to do with the possibility that it might frustrate their aspirations to become broadcasters. “DJs didn’t travel all over the country, they weren’t stars in the same way they are now, so their ambition was usually to get on the radio. So the idea of putting the microphone down in order to mix records … they were absolutely dead set against that.”

But Hamilton persisted, taking British DJs with him when he returned to the Paradise Garage. Most of them seem to have been distinctly nonplussed, but one,  had what Wilson calls “a Damascene conversion” and apparently imported the UK’s first set of Technics decks on his return. He started peppering his writing with suggestions about other tracks you could mix into the one he was reviewing, and started counting records’ speeds – their beats per minute – with the aid of a stopwatch and adding that information to reviews too: whenever you see a BPM measurement attached to a dance track, that’s basically down to James Hamilton.

Hamilton was a fascinating figure. Quite aside from his writing career and the various innovations it spawned, he’d spent the 60s alternately working with the Beatles in America, and DJing at legendary London mod nightclub the Scene under the name Doctor Soul; he then built Britain’s first custom-made mobile DJ console, and took to playing at aristocratic country house balls, where requests tended more to the Blue Danube and Scottish jigs and reels than the latest US imports.



He was also impressed by the burgeoning new romantic movement, talking up the Blitz club’s DJ  and coining a weirdly familiar term for the music he played: electronic dance music or EDM. This, however, proved a step too far for the purists. “There was a record shop and label that really took umbrage at him covering this white, electronic music, and threatened to withdraw their advertising from Record Mirror, so he had to stop,” says Wilson. “The irony is that in the US, Gary Numan and the Human League were being played at Black block parties in the Bronx, and that’s how you ended up with records like Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.”

He was also impressed by the burgeoning new romantic movement, talking up the Blitz club’s DJ  and coining a weirdly familiar term for the music he played: electronic dance music or EDM. This, however, proved a step too far for the purists. “There was a record shop and label that really took umbrage at him covering this white, electronic music, and threatened to withdraw their advertising from Record Mirror, so he had to stop,” says Wilson. “The irony is that in the US, Gary Numan and the Human League were being played at Black block parties in the Bronx, and that’s how you ended up with records like Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.”

He was also impressed by the burgeoning new romantic movement, talking up the Blitz club’s DJ  and coining a weirdly familiar term for the music he played: electronic dance music or EDM. This, however, proved a step too far for the purists. “There was a record shop and label that really took umbrage at him covering this white, electronic music, and threatened to withdraw their advertising from Record Mirror, so he had to stop,” says Wilson. “The irony is that in the US, Gary Numan and the Human League were being played at Black block parties in the Bronx, and that’s how you ended up with records like Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.”

His influence finally began to wane with the arrival of acid house in the UK. Hamilton liked the music, but was wary of the accompanying drug culture (invited by Paul Oakenfold to his acid house night , Hamilton famously surveyed the club, then turned to Oakenfold and said “I’ve heard the crunch of amphetamines on the dancefloor before, you know”). And, as Peterson points out, acid house was “sort of creating a new movement that didn’t want to be associated with the past”. “It was our punk rock moment, it was year zero,” agrees Tong. “It was almost like everything that came before was forbidden. Things like the Boy’s Own fanzine were really influential and they were a bit ‘fuck off, soul boys’. It’s how the phrase ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’ came about – I was accepted, but in print, they took the piss out of me because I was connected to the past.”



James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-1982, edited by Mike Atkinson, is out now, published by Super Weird Substance, £30

This article was amended on 11 March 2025. The pictured disco in Ilford was called Room at the Top, not Top as stated in an earlier caption.
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