Interview: Mark Moore

Mark Moore became a pop star in 1988 when the gloriously exuberant ‘Theme From S’Express’ topped the UK singles charts. But even before that, he was a shining star of the club scene and one of the first London DJs to become an evangelist for house music.

We talked about his earliest nightlife experiences at legendary clubs like the Blitz, the glitzy delights of hi-NRG, the “temporary utopia” of acid house, and how sampling empowered non-musician DJs to make hit records. Along the way, he also offered some wonderful anecdotes about going raving with classical composer Philip Glass and how he helped turn a bungled vogue tribute track by former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren into a club classic.

I want to start off by asking how you first got into the club world.

Billy’s [‘Bowie Night’ run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan from 1978 in Soho] was the first club I went to.

Was that mainly Bowie music or was there a significant amount of other stuff as well?

They were playing Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and whatever kind of electronic stuff was around at that time, like the first Human League single

I guess it got more electronic when they moved the night from Billy’s to the Blitz in Covent Garden.

Yeah, because Blitz was already ’79.

What was your impression - was it more about music or more about fashion, or more about people just wanting to express themselves?

It felt to me like the crowd were people who had been punks but had got sick of the uniformity of punk, in both the way people were dressing and the way people were making music. So it was almost like a rebellion against that, keeping a certain punk integrity but just going back to the original idea of punk, which was to be individual, rather than being a Sid Vicious clone.

So yeah, it was also a huge celebration of David Bowie who I guess was a blueprint for punk as well and obviously had done the Low album in ’77 with the electronic stuff on that. It was basically a homage to Bowie but also all this post-punk stuff which was using electronics – although to us it was still punk, really.

Rusty Egan [Blitz club promoter and resident spinner], what was he like as a DJ?

Rusty Egan was a fantastic DJ, he doesn’t get enough credit. What he did was very futuristic, playing Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra, test pressings by Visage, the original Ultravox, Telex. He was digging out all this stuff that was just hot off the press, like Gina X. Performance, ‘Nice Mover’, ‘No GDM’. And so UK stuff was coming out now and he was playing The Human League and The Normal.

Was the crowd gay, straight or mixed?

It was mixed, but there were obviously a lot of gay people. But yeah, it was mixed. So he would get lots of girls and lots of straight guys going there - and Spandau Ballet, although I didn’t know who they were at the time. You had the straight brigade and you had the gay brigade but I always thought it was mainly gay.

I was living in North Finchley, it was really hard for me to get to those clubs. I’d mainly go to gigs at that point in time. So I wasn’t there at the start of the Blitz, I only got there about six months later. The first time I went to the Blitz, it was infamous by then on the underground scene. You couldn’t get in easily and you got turned away if you didn’t look right. If a gang of guys went up together, they’d all get turned away. So I went out with a few mates and we thought we won't go in together, we'll go in one by one. And they all got turned away even though they looked fantastic as well. I was with my friend Judy and we went in together. And I didn't look that great, I looked post-punky, kind of a bit James Dean, with a leather jacket with a kind of dyed red quiff kind and a bit of eyeliner on. And Steve [Strange] let us in and took a shine to me and he was always really sweet.

So I started going to the Blitz whenever I could. And by then the scene was in full swing, the new romantic scene. People like Boy George and Marilyn. They weren’t famous, but they were kind of superstars. They hadn't done anything yet. George was still working in the cloak room. And it was very about the look. I wouldn't say fashion, because fashion is the wrong word. But it was about making your outfits and looking fantastic and these creations that you might only see once or twice. So it was about that, but also to me it was about the music, because by then stuff was coming out and there was a scene so people were wanting to be part of that scene. And at the same time, Stevo [Pearce, Some Bizarre label founder] was doing a club and he was doing a Futurist chart for Sounds magazine. So you’re getting new music and then Stevo’s Some Bizzare Album, which had Depeche Mode on it and Soft Cell.

So there was stuff coming out and you'd hear about this new band Depeche Mode and people went out to Basildon to see them, so this scene was going on. Now people call it post-punk but that name wasn’t around in those days, to us it still felt like punk, but with synthesizers. It was still the spirit of punk but what was great about it was punk had been destroyed so the essence of punk could carry on, experimenting with all kinds of music rather than just a set type of music and experimenting with all kinds of different looks instead of just one set look. So to a lot of us, punk hadn’t died - we thought The Normal was punk, you know?

Then the next big club was [legendary promoter] Philip Sallon opened his first club. He started Planets in Piccadilly, and one of the DJs were Boy George who had just about started Culture Club, talking about this band he just formed you know. Planets was fantastic. And they were such great DJs you know, George was a great DJ, he played a lot of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Bow Wow Wow, Heaven 17, Flying Lizards, as well as Siouxsie and the Banshees, ‘Spellbound’ – a mixture of post-punk and electronic.

Then the Camden Palace opened up, which again was Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, and Colin Faver was DJing there. So that was fantastic, great electronic stuff. Cha Cha opened up at the back of Heaven, which was run by Scarlett [Cannon] and Tasty Tim was DJing there, again with Colin Faver. So that was the first place I heard things like Klein and MBO’s ‘Dirty Talk’. So you know, all this stuff was coming out that was inspired by the New Romantic thing and Depeche Mode, and also obviously inspired by disco. So you have this great futuristic Italo-disco stuff and then all that hi-NRG stuff as well like ‘Hit and Run Lover’ by Carol Jiani and of course the electro stuff was going on as well, the first time I heard ‘Planet Rock’ I think was probably at Camden Palace. Yeah and of course Heaven was playing all the Bobby O and Divine stuff, electronic hi-NRG and then I remember hearing New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ at Camden palace and thinking, “Oh, someone’s ripped off Bobby O, oh my goodness!”

I wanted to ask you about hi-NRG because it was very, very important but overlooked historically in some ways. What do you think is the reason?

I think because it’s often quite cheesy, and a lot of it was kind of blandly produced as well. And it might have done its job then but a lot of it didn’t stand the test of time. I think the things you can pull out now and they sound great are things like Evelyn Thomas, ‘High Energy’ - that is a real campfest, but it does sound great.

The Lime records are still great too…

Yes, totally, all that Lime stuff, the dub versions of the Lime stuff, ‘On the Grid’. Also ‘Male Stripper’, stuff like that. But a lot of it just didn’t stand the test of time. I guess the good stuff has been renamed Italo-disco.

But it was very important at that time. There were clubs all around the country playing nothing but hi-NRG. You played some of those records at Pyramid [at Heaven] too.

Yeah, we tried not to make it stuff that would be played on the normal Heaven nights, the normal hi-NRG – we played things like Company B, ‘Fascinated’, which were still quite gay-sounding records. But we were mixing hi-NRG with this Soul Sonic Force, Africa Bambaataa-type of electro, mixed in with some new wave kind of electronic music. It didn’t matter just as long as it had that electronic sound.

You became one of the first DJs in London to be strongly identified with house music. How did you become such an evangelist for house?

Because there was so much good stuff coming out in ’85, ’86, ’87. And me and Colin Faver, and Ian B as well, who was playing at Pyramid with us, the more we found this stuff, the more we just became obsessed. And we were mixing other things in like Alexander Robotnick and Liaisons Dangereuses and stuff, but then we were getting more obsessive just playing the new house stuff from all the import shops. But at the same time, you know, at Pyramid you’d have to slip in stuff that people loved - Pet Shop Boys, New Order…

You and Colin were the kind of people who liked the new thing that was coming around the corner before it arrived.

I just remember being a bit baffled how the straight crowds took longer to come around to liking those [house] records. They took a bit of extra work than it did at Pyramid at Heaven. Sometimes you’d play warehouse parties and they’d be confused by hearing things like ‘Strings of Life’ [by Rhythim is Rhythim] for the first time, they wouldn’t quite know what to do because they’d never heard it before. I remember saying it’s because the drug of choice was wrong. For London, it was more about rare groove and head-nodding and the hip-hop stuff that had come after the electro stuff, because the electro stuff is quite fast. But then of course, the drug of choice did change, very rapidly.

Tell me how S’Express happened. Did you decide one day, “I’m playing this music so I can make it too”?

It was basically because I've been doing A&R for Rhythm King [record label]. I told them to sign things like Taffy, ‘I Love My Radio’, great hi-NRG cheesy Italo-disco, goes down a storm. You know, that went top ten then there was the Beatmasters and the Cookie Crew. And Rhythm King said, “What can we do for you?” “I’ve got these ideas running around in my head. Can you put me in the studio?” And they said, “Yeah, sounds great. Let's do that. We could put you with Pascal Gabriel.”

Pascal was working with Tim Simenon [Bomb the Bass] by that point.

Yeah, he just worked with Tim Simenon. So I worked with Pascal, we got on like a house on fire. We love the same things like Yello and Cabaret Voltaire and punky stuff. So we got on really well. I had all the ideas beforehand, they wanted me to put all the ideas on the cassette. So I just put all the samples down. But it wasn’t even properly mixed or anything, just the samples. So I went in with Pascal and we started to jam and write bits, and treated it like we were writing a song rather than just a string of samples, coming up with baselines, and it was great. And so we carried on jamming on more songs, which ended up on b-sides and the follow-up single ‘Superfly Guy’.

You literally just went into the studio with a bag of records and came out with a number one hit single?

It felt quite effortless. Yeah, it felt really like everything just flowed.

At that point [in the late eighties], hip-hop records were using old funk and soul samples. Did you decide, “Well, I'm going to do it differently. I’m going to do it at a higher tempo with disco samples”? 

Exactly. Basically, I was still playing hip-hop at that time at the Mud Club and a lot of other places. And I was well into hip-hop still. To me, I was making a hip-hop record, just with a disco influence. I wanted it to have a house music feel but I didn’t want to copy other house music records, I wanted it to sound like a futuristic disco record. For some reason I had it in my head that it was wrong to copy - you know how suddenly everyone started making house music and it had a kind of generic sound, I just thought you couldn’t do that when you’re making a record. I thought if you were a punk band, you would try and be original if you were a proper punk band.

‘Theme from S’Express’ was real glitterball of a record, wasn’t it? It was so shiny, it was a record that made you happy, basically…

But it also sounded really strange to some people at the time because they weren’t used to the disco revival yet and didn’t quite know what to make of it. “Is it OK to like this?” It sounded like a futuristic disco thing because of the Rose Royce sample, but it also sounded odd compared to everything else that was going on at the time.

It's interesting because those samples you used on the record are like historical citations about the clubs at the time.

Everything was a kind of a statement or a kind of nod to something that was important. You know, the only reason I put the laugh on from Yazoo [‘Situation’] was because to me, that was an important electronic record. And the Peech Boys at the end going “ha ha ha” [from ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’], because that was an important record. It was almost like a homage.

It coincided with the first rush of acid house in London, didn’t it?

Yeah. That’s when Shoom was going and then Paul [Oakenfold] opened Spectrum, I think just more or less when we released ‘Theme from S’Express’. You know, those are two of the major clubs that kick started the whole acid house scene in London in particular - yes, they were playing it up north, but it wasn’t the same.

Do you think we over-romanticise that period now?

Yes, for sure. We’ve mythologised the history quite a lot.

But for a DJ, it must have been an incredible time.

It was fantastic. Yeah. But it's almost like become this yarn. You know, there were so many different strands going on all over the country but it's almost been kind of just mashed up into 'OK, this is what happened' - Shoom and Spectrum in London, Hacienda in Manchester. 

It is over-romanticised. But on the other hand, it deserves to be.

Exactly. It was fucking great. And it was I do remember at the time feeling that it was such a really special time. It was a cultural revolution. To us it was like, “Oh my God, this is what the hippies must have felt like when they discovered acid.” And it was very different from the previous revolutions, like punk and New Romantic, very different.

It was a different way of doing things because the choice of drugs had changed. And that was what was so important, along with the music. Some people really didn’t understand house at first, but when they started taking ecstasy, then they got it. I’m not saying you needed to take ecstasy to appreciate the music because you certainly didn’t need to – but it was heard in a very different way when you were under the influence.

There was kind of openness about the early acid house scene, and at that point, it was more racially and sexually mixed than it became later.

And that was so special. Acid house, with that empathy, that unity, that mix of people – for me, it was like a temporary utopia.

You got to work with some very interesting people as a result of your records with S’Express. What was it like working with Malcolm McLaren?

Loved it. Fantastic. I think he remembered me from being a teenager hanging out at McLaren and Vivenne Westwood’s clothes shop] Seditionaries, where Jordan took me under her wing, and you know, I'd help her shut up the  shop and she’d take me to dinner afterwards with Vivienne Westwood. I was 15 at the time, you know, and she just really looked after me. And she’d see me at Adam and the Ants gigs, when they were still underground, and take me under her wing and buy me a drink.

And so I was always in Seditionaries for a while hanging out. But Malcolm wasn’t in there very often at that time. He must have been doing The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle and stuff. But a couple of times I saw him and he was quite, I don’t know, fatherly I guess, when I’d run away from school to come down for some gig or something - I was at boarding school at the time. And he would say, “You don't need school. It’s fine if you drop out of school.” Really good advice like that.

So yeah, I presume he remembered me from that but then again he might not have, I don’t know, but he asked to have his tracks remixed by me. So I was working with William Orbit at that point. And I asked William to get involved and Malcolm came to London, he flew into London and came to William's studio. And the first day we literally just sat down and he told us stories about being in LA and how surreal it was. And Lauren Hutton was madly in love with him. And he was going out with her and he couldn’t believe that someone as unsuitable as him was going out with Lauren Hutton, and then we were talking about the Sex Pistols, and we got no work done. We just heard these amazing stories.

So then he said he’d got all these rushes from this movie that was being made called Paris is Burning [directed by Jennie Livingston, 1990], which is about the [New York] voguing scene, which I didn’t know anything about then. And he lent them to me and William and I took them back and watched them on my own. And I was like, “God, this is fucking amazing! This stuff needs to be sampled and go into the record!” So we started sampling the fuck out of it, me and William.

And you know, what he had was awful, his version of ‘Deep in Vogue’  sounded like a live band on a cruise ship doing a cover version of [MFSB’s ballroom anthem] ‘Love is the Message’ in a cocktail-jazzy kind of way. By then we had to throw Malcolm out of the studio because he just kept talking. So we got down the backing track, me and William, and we threw in all the samples and stuff like that. And then we called Malcolm back in and he was like, “Oh, this is great, fantastic!” But we had a problem. We needed to make it sound like a Malcolm McLaren record and he was going, “I don’t know what a Malcolm McLaren record sounds like, I’ve no idea.” So we said, “Well, we think a Malcolm McLaren record has you kind of ranting or shouting or saying something.” So we got him to recite a few things [a tribute to the legendary ballroom houses of New York]. And then it went to number one in the Billboard dance chart [in the US] and we thought, “Oh my God, how did that happen?”’

But you were also involved in one of the unlikeliest collaborations in classical music, when [systems music composer] Philip Glass remixed ‘Hey Music Lover’ [by S’Express]. How the hell did that happen?

Well, I’d always loved Philip Glass. I’d loved his music from [1985 film] Mishima and a journalist friend of mine had interviewed him and became friends with him, Louise Gray. So I was like, “Oh, I wonder if he’d like to do a remix, can you get a message to him?”, and she did.

He came to London to do one of his operas and we just started hanging out. And then we took him to a rave. Of course, everyone was doing drugs and we thought we’d better tell him. But he was just quite amused: “Oh, you think you’re the only people who’ve ever taken drugs.” So we gave him some and took him to the rave and he loved it. He wasn’t so much dancing though, more head-nodding. He was so cool.

The remix that they [Glass and his musical collaborator Kurt Munkacsi] did [of S’Express song ‘Hey Music Lover’], it sounds like they’re having so much fun.

Yeah. He said that when he got the remix parts, he literally just looked at the computer screen and the keyboard and just sat there thinking, “What the hell do I do?” He just didn’t know what to do with it.

People were going, “This isn’t a dance mix! What were you thinking?” But we wanted him to do what he does. For me, the whole thing I liked about remixing was going up avenues that you hadn’t explored, rather than just being a tool to sell more records.

S’Express were kind of a pop band. But on the other hand, you kind of weren’t.

Exactly. I would say we were playing the part of a pop band.

There was incredible kind of run of British house hits in 1988, you had Bomb the Bass, then you, and then you had The Beatmasters, then Coldcut. Did you feel at some point that the future really was arriving?

Yeah! In 1988, you constantly felt the future was arriving. Each time you’d go out to a club, you would hear something new and go, “Oh my God, what’s this? This is amazing! This changes everything!” You were in a constant state of surprise at what you were hearing.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ July 25, 2022.

Photo: Mark Moore on the cover of ‘Smash Hits’ magazine’, September 1989. Image from markmoore.com