I returned to Warrington where kissograms might as well have been spaceships—they just didn’t happen. ‘A gap in the market if ever I saw one,’ I thought, and immediately placed my own ad in the local paper:
KINKIES KISSOGRAMS—THE SKINNIEST TARZANS IN TOWN
The kissograms that I’d witnessed were all very well but the biggest laugh was achieved when the kissogram first revealed themselves to their subject. After the initial shock it was all downhill. I decided herein lay a further opportunity and what I lacked in muscle I would make up for with humour.
I devised a sequence that got funnier and funnier as it went on as opposed to fading out. My act was based around three balloons, a carving knife, a little teddy, a raw sausage, lots of cream and a blindfold on the girl; I also played the guitar and sang her a personalised song—all for six quid! It was cheap but I had to get the product out there. I had to make sure the cost was not an issue. If I was a hit then I could hike the prices all in good time.
Warrington soon woke up to the hilarity of the kissogram and before I knew it, I was up to seven or eight kissograms a night at the weekends. I soon doubled my prices as I’d planned and even brought in a couple of pals to help out with the engagements. I remember exactly where I was on the night of Live Aid when Madonna came on stage, I was pulling up in my car to Orford Park Recreation Club ready for another semi-naked performance of my own.
The kissograms were a means to an end and it wasn’t long before I had saved up enough money to enter the realms of the mobile disc jockey.
I bought all the gear required for a mobile disco and secured some regular pub dates, I became resident in one pub—seven nights a week! I convinced the publican that every night would be better with music and that if he let me leave my gear there, I would do four nights for free. This meant I didn’t have to haul all the gear round all week; it also meant I could sell my van and buy an MG Roadster instead. In all I was soon doing nine discos a week, seven nights in the pub and then two later on at clubs on a Friday and Saturday.
The discos were good business but another test of my resolve was just around the corner. At Christmas all the mobile DJs could charge a premium for their ‘shows’ and a pretty hefty one at that. You could easily make enough money for a decent holiday abroad during the festive season.
It was two days before my first Christmas booking when, still living with my Mum, I was on the way home late one night after working at a club. I had invested in a Datsun estate car by now, my record collection was getting bigger and although my turntables, speakers and lights didn’t need to move I had to take my records wherever I was appearing.
It was around three o’clock in the morning and I couldn’t have been more than a mile from home when I heard my exhaust blowing—at least that’s what it sounded like, it was really loud. ‘Strange,’ I thought, but it soon became evident what the problem was when I pulled up to park outside our house. Somehow the tailgate on my car had come open, which was why the exhaust seemed so loud. Not only that but to my utter disbelief, somewhere on the way home my entire record collection had fallen out.
I was stunned, I couldn’t believe what had happened. To a DJ his record collection is everything, you have to have all the records for all ages of clientele, from the waltzes for the oldies through the sixties and seventies right up until the latest top twenty, as well as the novelty records for the kids. My diary was booked up all over Christmas and I had just lost every single record I owned.
*At its peak this company was part of an organisation worth over £1,000,000,000 pounds. How mad is that?
Top 10 Dance Floor Fillers for Mobile DJ C. Evans circa 1985 *
10 ‘Let’s go round again’—Detroit Spinners
9 ‘Love really hurts’—Billy Ocean
8 ‘Blame it on the boogie’—Jackson 5
7 ‘Eye to eye contact’—Edwin Starr
6 ‘Never too much’—Luther Vandross
5 ‘Always and forever’—Heatwave
4 ‘It’s a love thing’—The Whispers
3 ‘December, 1963 (Oh, what a night)’—The Four Seasons
2 ‘Young hearts run free’—Candi Staton
1 ‘You to me are everything’—The Real Thing
The next day I woke up and still couldn’t believe what had happened. Of course the night before I had driven straight back over the exact route I had come home but someone had obviously got to my records before me. All that I found was one lonely twelve-inch single of ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
I was so close to throwing in the towel that morning but Mum made me a cup of tea and gave me some kind words of encouragement, enough to cause me to think about the situation a little more rationally. I could give up but what good would that do? Was this situation redeemable? What would Bill, my nice old Scottish boss, have done? One thing is for sure: he wouldn’t have sat there feeling sorry for himself.
One hour later I was in Woolies buying every compilation album they sold—all the hits, Christmas or otherwise. I ended up with around twenty albums and just about enough tunes to get me through the Christmas party season—after which you could almost guarantee some of the other guys were bound to sell up and move out of the mobile DJ world, having cashed in one final time. Sure enough this year was no exception. I earned my extra cash and snapped up some other dude’s record collection sometime early in the new year and before I knew it I was back on top—and with a much better variety of tunes than I had in the first place.
Being a DJ, as I had hoped and suspected, did indeed have many advantages, including that when all the other blokes were drunk and trying to chat up the girls (by the way, why do blokes wait until they are least able to do this, i.e. towards the end of the night when they can barely walk or talk?) I would be stone-cold sober. Not only that but I would have a set of wheels outside ready to go, whilst everyone else had to resort to running the gauntlet of the queue at the cab rank, a notorious hot-spot for punch-ups—second only to the queue for the late-night chippy.
It was this sobriety and availability of transport which led me to meet Alison, the mother of my daughter Jade.
By now I was the DJ at the mighty Carlton Club, the same place where my brother had DJ’d a decade or so before. Alison was a regular there and was absolutely stunning, with masses of cascading blonde hair and a dazzling smile. She also used to wear these long flowing dresses that followed her obediently around wherever she chose to float—and that’s exactly what she did, she floated—magnificently. She was cool, curvy, sexy and funny, what was not to like?
Alison and I got it together one evening when a friend of hers came over and ‘told’ me to ask her out. To be ‘told’ to ask a girl out when you have also been informed that if you do then the answer is going to be yes is one of life’s great joys. I promptly did as I was ‘told’ and Alison and I were very much inseparable thereafter.
Within not very long at all I was staying over at her house most nights—her mum was very liberal, something for which we were both hugely grateful. This ‘understanding’ meant we were free to do all the things young couples liked to do and we did them a lot. We did them so much