2. The Step-stepfather (1994-96)

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The Au Pairs
The Step-stepfather
The Simulated Wank
The Toy Store
The First Single
The Queeny Put-Down
The First Hissy Fit
The First Gay Club
The Rent Boy
The Heterosexual Phase
The Lifestyle Switch
The Empty Floor
The First Poem
The Amsterdam Weekend
The First Time
The Perfect Moment
The Year In Berlin
The Trade Years
The First Memory
The Anniversary Party
The Incompetencies
The Pricking Of The Bubble
The Club Residencies
The "Tales of the City" House
The Musical Epiphany
The Worst Thing I Ever Did To Anyone
The Royal Procession
The Parental Disclosure
The Concept Albums
The Romantic Obsession
The Failure
The Apotheosis of Queer
The Shove From Above
The Interrogation
The Professional Rut
The Rebirthday
The First Boyfriend
The "Catharsis Of Joy"
The Funeral Address
The Falling In Love

troubled diva

One day in the summer of 1982, I followed three recommendations in the James Hamilton column. “Walking On Sunshine” by Rockers Revenge, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash, and “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force. These three radical new tunes – stark, stripped down, electronic yet still soulful – were for me a kind of musical epiphany, matched only by the impact of punk at the back end of 1976.

From then on, James Hamilton’s column was required weekly reading. It was the first section I would turn to in Record Mirror, more often than not during the walk back from the newsagents. I would meticulously scrutinise every last word - re-reading the same columns over the next few weeks as the pre-releases gradually became available - keeping months of back issues to hand for cross reference purposes – circling the tracks I owned on the RM club chart - marking them with a T if I only had them on cassette off the radio – marking them with a hyphen if they were tracks on my “want list” – and so on, and so on, fairly obsessively.

The great thing about James Hamilton’s column was that he always attempted to describe the music as accurately as he could, rather than letting too many of his own opinions get in the way. To this end, he more or less invented his own descriptive language, which made more sense the longer you read the column. If James said a record was “a 0-116-0 initially chix cooed gently lurching and jiggling then stridently wailing and cantering electrophonic boom-boom-boinker”, you kind of knew what the track was going to sound like.

From late 1986 to late 1989, while I was DJ-ing my own club nights, James’s column became my bible. From late 1989 to the sad week in 1991 when Record Mirror folded, I continued to maintain the habit. Even after that, I would often catch his column in the “rm” pullout section within Music Week, or in “Jocks” magazine (which eventually mutated into today’s “DJ” magazine).

And then, in late Spring 1994, around six months after my father died, my stepmother Sally started dating him. By the end of 1994, they were married. Which kind of made James Hamilton, by the most extraordinary coincidence imaginable, my step-stepfather.

In the Summer of 1994, Sally brought James to Nottingham, to meet me and K over dinner. Understandably, she was very nervous about this. How would I feel, meeting her new partner so soon after my father’s death? Would I view it as an insult to his memory? Well, of course I was absolutely fine about the whole thing. How could I not be – she was going out with my musical guru!

For a DJ, James cut the most unlikely figure. He was tall, always smartly dressed in jacket and tie, and with a decidedly patrician, slightly aloof, almost authoritarian manner. Try and imagine a cross between Colonel Sanders and James Robertson Justice, and you’ll be halfway there. But I took to him instantly. The two of us spent almost the entire evening talking about music to a highly detailed degree, no doubt boring K and Sally to death in the process. I soon discovered with delight that he was every bit the obsessively passionate enthusiast I’d imagined him to be, with encyclopaedic knowledge of every last fact, and seemingly perfect memory recall. Hey, quite like me really!

He was also a great name dropper. Hey, quite like me really! Except that James actually had some names worth dropping.

In the 1960s, he’d been the resident DJ at London’s hippest mod club, The Scene. He’d worked in another club owned by the Kray twins – the Beatles would regularly pop in. He accompanied the Beatles on their first trip to the States in 1964. He helped organise James Brown’s first UK tour. He hung out with Miles Davis. He dated Philly singer Dee Dee Sharpe (of “Easy Money” fame), who later married Kenny Gamble (I love the thought of my parents being on the same Bonk Chart as Gamble and Huff).

In the late 1970s, James visited New York’s Paradise Garage club, where the now legendary Larry Levan was the resident DJ. This was his first exposure to beat-synched mixing, and it blew his mind. He returned to the UK, then dragged other members of the “London Soul Mafia” DJ-ing fraternity back out to NYC to hear it for themselves. Everyone’s jaws hit the floor. From that point onwards, James included “beats per minute” counts with all his singles reviews, measured with scientific precision by a stopwatch and his trademark “clickers”. Basically, he was responsible for introducing the concept of BPMs to the UK.

James had always lived alone, and had never married. Now in his mid-fifties, he finally moved away from London, and in with Sally, into the house in North Nottinghamshire which I had known since the age of 3. Straight away, he had the letterbox widened so that it could take the deliveries of 12” singles and albums which poured through almost daily, stacking up in the old breakfast room. He continued writing his Music Week and “DJ” columns from the living room table, always working right through the night on copy deadline day. I found it utterly bizarre that my old family home, where I had always been criticised as a teenager for spending too much time playing pop music, was now home to all the hottest, most upfront white label pre-releases.

Just a few days after marrying Sally in late 1994, James discovered that he had cancer. (*) The last time I saw him alive was on June 16, 1996, sitting up in bed, his skin an eerie shade of yellow, but still perfectly lucid. His last words to me, as I left the room, were “Stay cool”. The next day, he was dead.

James had left a set-list for his funeral, which was played as a medley in church by his old friend Pete Wingfield on electric piano. It started with Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”, which had been played at his wedding to Sally. It ended with James Brown’s “Night Train”, with Pete Wingfield reluctantly obeying strict instructions to commence the track by shouting “All aboard, the Night Train!” The original vocal sample had just been back in the charts as part of Kadoc’s dance hit “The Nighttrain” – a big Tall Paul Newman Trade anthem at the start of that year, which I had gone mental to on many a sweaty Sunday morning (it was the height of my Tradebabe phase). Maybe it was to some extent James’s parting nod to the contemporary – I like to think so, at any rate.

Now widowed for the third time in 20 years, my stepmother was never really quite the same again. Always a heavy drinker, she had stopped almost entirely in order to nurse James through his illness. Now, she started again. Less than three years later, she was dead from liver failure. Her 17 year marriage to my father had been conducted in an almost constant state of war, but her short marriage to James had been like an Indian summer of happiness for her. I’m glad she had at least a taste of that in her life.

To this day, every now and then, I catch myself thinking “F**king Hell! Sally married James Hamilton!” I’ll never quite get over it.

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(*) My thanks to L.A. for the following amendment:

"The only correction I would make to your account is that both James and Sally knew about James' cancer before they got married, but I don't know if they told everyone. This makes Sally a remarkable woman indeed and in case you were not aware of this fact, I thought it might give you another wonderful thought to have about her, and how special her relationship with James was. They adored each other as you say. She took him on knowing he was dying...quite a remarkable lady."