Beggar & Co. – (Somebody) Help Me Out/Rising Sun 12”
Light Of The World – Swingin’/The World Is Out 12”
Light Of The World – The Boys In Blue / This Is This 12”

Vale Chris Hill.

He was a generation ahead of me, so when I was a kid, he had already attained legendary status.

A genuine eccentric, he had been the DJ at the Lacy Lady in Gants Hill, where he played imported soul music at a time when almost every other disco was playing chart music. The venue drew a super-fashionable crowd of working class kids who really dressed up for the occasion. It’s seldom acknowledged that this was where‘77 punk borrowed its sartorial style from.

He later worked for Ensign Records and was instrumental in getting Brit-Funk bands signed, so I thought I’d have a morning of playing just Brit-Funk.

I saw him DJ a few times in the early eighties, and that highly performative DJ style had been nicked and done to death by others, who had sometimes made more money from it (Steve Walsh, for instance) . I can still remember him squeaking a pet toy or something along with Brass Construction’s Movin’ though.

As is often the way, the originators of the Brit-Funk sound only achieved a modicum of commercial success whilst those pop acts who co-opted their sound (looking at you Spandau Ballet, ABC, Haircut 100) got the glory. It’s a tale as old as time. Makes you wonder what it was about those acts that made them more palatable to the British pop market.

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