Charlie Dark tells Stewart Gardiner about life as a DJ, providing hope on the radio and the early days of Mo’ Wax
Charlie Dark is delivering one of his signature Yodaisms, wise words familiar to listeners of his beloved Peace, Positivity and Blessings show on Worldwide FM. “I used to feel really guilty about the fact that I like to play records for a living or I found it quite therapeutic going to record shops to dig for records,” he tells me. “And actually, when I reached 50, I was like, you know what, I’m going to stop apologising for what I do. It’s really important that you step into your light,” he adds.
The thing about Charlie Dark (née Williams) is that he brings other people into his light with him. He’s a genuinely positive force in the world, and not just because of the joy he’s brought as a club and radio DJ or as part of Mo’ Wax trio Attica Blues, alongside Tony Nwachukwu and Roba El-Essawy. Sure, the starting point is the healing power of music, and Charlie makes that central to what he’s about, but he also incorporates other disciplines of enlightenment, namely running, yoga and meditation. He and his partner are yoga teachers and his Run Dem Crew is pitched as “a collective of creative heads with a passion for running and the exchange of ideas” rather than a typical running club (Run Dem Radio is an extension of this). It is wellness for the club culture crowd – more approachable, diverse and egalitarian.
I soon realise during our video call that he’s got an uncanny ability to make you feel important. “When you meet people who’ve known about you from [the] Mo’ Wax days and beyond,” he tells me at one point, “that’s family.” It means a lot to hear this, as my awareness of Charlie Dark stretches back to the Mo’ Wax Headz compilation from 1994, which featured the Attica Blues track “Contemplating Jazz”. Their eponymous 1997 debut remains one of my favourite records on Mo’ Wax, a label that is so very important to me. Charlie DJed with James Lavelle at the Dusted night at the Blue Note in Hoxton (“That was another seminal night that often doesn’t get the credit it deserves.”) and played That’s How It Is on occasion. Later, he ran Blacktronica at the ICA and was a regular spinner at Plastic People. I wasn’t around for any of these nights, so it was with great delight to be reacquainted with Charlie during the pandemic when his Friday morning Peace, Positivity and Blessings show arrived on Worldwide FM. Like many, I found solace in this almost transcendental radio show, something I will be eternally grateful for.
Since our interview, Worldwide FM founder Gilles Peterson announced that the station was going on indefinite hiatus. At the time of writing Charlie’s show is off the air and he has yet to announce a new home for it. But let’s wind things back for now and get into conversation with the one and only Charlie Dark.
Growing up, Charlie was surrounded by music. “We always had great stereos in the house,” he says. “My mum had studied in New York and she lived opposite the Apollo Theater in Harlem. So when she arrived in London, she brought with her an immense record collection of Motown, James Brown, Stevie Wonder. Music from the 60s – the canon of Black music. She was always playing music quite loudly.” This included the radio and I wonder what impact that had on him. “Radio was this sense of research and discovery,” he explains. “Contrary to what people will tell you now, there wasn’t a very large amount of Black music in particular being played on the radio back in the 70s, as far as I remember. So generally, as far as national radio is concerned, everyone from our communities tuned into John Peel, Tony Blackburn, Robbie Vincent. I’ve always loved radio, radio personalities and the power of the voice.”
He started DJing at age 13, although it wasn’t until a couple of years later that he took it “really seriously”. In the meantime, Charlie thought it would be cool to be on the radio, so he made fake pirate radio shows with a friend. “There are tapes of me pretending to be on pirate radio”, he tells me, although doesn’t offer them up for public consumption. The closest he got to real radio back then was living next door to a couple of DJs who were on Gilles Peterson’s K-Jazz station. “I used to watch them leave the house,” he admits, “and then I tried to work out where the studio was, according to the time they left the house before their show.” Rear Window for the mid-80s heads and a lost future for Charlie as a private detective then.
It was at school that he started to make his name as a DJ. “I managed to get an assisted place to go to private school. I was like the anomaly Black kid – there weren’t many Black kids in my school,” he explains. There were however a number of teenagers there with money who would hire venues for 16 to 18 year old birthday bashes. “And I got asked to DJ. Like, ‘Yo, you kind of look like you’re into music. I’m having a party.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, of course, I DJ all the time. I’m there.’ I had a little kind of soundsystem crew at school and we were DJing at loads of people’s parties and stuff.” Then at university he “managed to engineer a situation” to become one of their DJs, “which came with a budget. They would give you money to buy records, which I was quite happy about. The only reason why I went to uni was because at that point you could get a student grant. And I spent most of my student grant on records. So really by the time I was 18, I was seriously, heavily into it.” The first club he played at was The Wag. That was around 1991 and he was 20, 21 years old. “Then when I met James and started doing the Mo’ Wax stuff, that’s when the club stuff really took off.”
Going to a record shop back in the day was a baptism of fire. There was this kind of stushness, about who got sold records and who could be in the shop and who got served first.
Charlie Dark
We’ll get to James Lavelle shortly, but I want to ask Charlie about his Mo’ Wax group, Attica Blues. I’d heard their origin story involved a copy of Archie Shepp’s album of the same name? “Yeah. I was in a shop that shall not be named – but they have moved location from where they were. They were in the Camden area and they sold jazz records.” If you know, you know…. “And I was in there, b-boyed up. The shell toes on fat laces, big hoodie. I’m in there and they had an Attica Blues Archie Shepp record on the wall. I think it was £30. I asked, ‘How much is that record?’ And they were like, ‘You can’t afford it.’ Again, it’s one of those funny stories, cause when I tell it now, people are like, I can’t believe people would be so rude. But actually going to a record shop back in the day was a baptism of fire. There was this kind of stushness, about who got sold records and who could be in the shop and who got served first.” The sort of thing that would make High Fidelity seem tame. “So this record was deemed to be out of my price range – and it was out of my price range. £30 pounds for an album at that point – late 80s, early 90s – that was a large amount of money. But I distinctly remember looking at it and just thinking, ‘You know what, that is a great name. It’s a great album cover. And I’m going to call my band that name, just as a middle finger to those people who have dissed me. And one day, I’m going to be able to afford that record, and I’m going to come back, I’m going to buy that record.’ So I’m actually really grateful for that experience,” he adds philosophically, “because that kind of rejection put some fire into my belly.” And he did eventually buy it of course. As an addendum to the story, Charlie tells me that the sleeve currently lives in one part of his collection and the record in another. “I’d like to reunite them,” he says.
While studying English drama at university, he made some short films and, more importantly, produced music for those films. The university had a studio with a sampler and he was “looping up big chunks of records and layering Martin Luther King speeches over the top and trying to do cut and paste stuff.” After university, he got involved with a group called Pressure Drop. “I was working for a record promotions company and they had a recording studio above the place where I worked, so I’d go up there and hang out and watch how they made records. So I made a couple of demos, then met James. Then met Tony [Nwachukwu] and we started to seriously get on it.”
Here’s someone who is connecting the dots in the same way that I’m connecting the dots.
Charlie Dark
As a Mo’ Wax head from back in the day, I obviously want to hear about Charlie meeting James Lavelle. “We clicked immediately,” he says. “Literally from the first day that we clapped eyes on each other. Because the thing for me, I’d grown up in South London and had this revelation that a lot of the music that I listened to, particularly the hip-hop stuff, was becoming less and less relevant to my life, i.e. I didn’t have the gold chain, I didn’t have the jeep, I didn’t have the aggression that came with the music,” he says. “So I was beginning to fall out of love with hip-hop. And I’m getting more and more into jazz and rare groove and different forms of music from going to warehouse parties. Then I meet this guy. He’s talking about Wu-Tang, but he’s also talking about some obscure Japanese hip-hop record, and then he’s talking about David Axelrod, and then he’s talking about Derrick May. Here’s someone who is connecting the dots in the same way that I’m connecting the dots.”
“Plus, he had these amazing links with people in New York,” Charlie continues. “That meant he was getting hip-hop records before anyone. And it’s something that he’s not really credited for, the amount of records that he actually brought into the country and broke. Also what I loved about him was that he was young and he was fearless. He didn’t care about gatekeepers, power structures and old boy networks. All of that stuff that was really dominant in the music industry at that time, where it was almost this thing of, until you have served your dues you cannot be part of the conversation. I was just like, this kid’s 16 and he’s like fuck that, I’m going to do whatever I’m going to do. And I’ve always been drawn towards rebels. You spend all this time in this very kind of controlled school system, it just immediately makes you rebellious. So yeah, we clicked straight away.”
It was this idea of all of these outcasts from different scenes coming together under one roof, to try and create something new.
Charlie Dark
Charlie enthusiastically talks about the early days of Mo’ Wax. “We didn’t really know what we were doing. All very innocent. Definitely the incubation period where you could go in the studio and just have fun, make records, try out ideas. It was this idea of all of these outcasts from different scenes coming together under one roof, to try and create something new. And it was really exciting, because obviously, we’ve got this connection with New York, we’ve got this connection with LA. We’re starting out at the same time that Supreme is starting out, Bathing Ape is starting out and Obey is starting out. We’re all in this DIY, young entrepreneur culture together, trying to make things happen. Futura’s in and out. This cast of people that had been assembled together, to the rest of the world, these are like demigods. And that’s when it started to change.”
Lavelle signed a deal with A&M in 1996, giving his label the backing of a major. That same year, Mo’ Wax released DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing LP. “The A&M phase was horrible,” Charlie tells me. “I think when Shadow arrived on the label things started to change, because the focus definitely was more, this guy is basically the future of the label. James’s attention became very much Shadow focused. And then when A&M got involved, it was just horrible. I think we naively went into that thinking it’s going to be like how it was in the old days, but suddenly you got people in who really are about making money. It’s not a spliff and a handshake anymore. It’s all very serious, and the stakes are much higher. I mean, it all just got bigger, new people came into the fold. You know, it’s more exciting to talk to the Beastie Boys than it is to talk to Charlie Dark.” Time for another Yodaism: “James was young. It’s the music industry and the music business. We didn’t realise that it’s called the music industry, the music business for a reason.”
There was the tediously inevitable backlash from the music press, including a notorious review in NME knocking down UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction album after building it up. “Yeah. I think it’s really unfortunate, because there were a lot of people who actually were really resentful of the success of Mo’ Wax. It’s normal now for someone in their early 20s to have smashed it. It wasn’t back then. So I feel there was this kind of resentfulness from the old guard, like, how dare these youngsters come into the game and start ripping up the rules and not playing by our rules,” he explains. Ultimately though, he wouldn’t exchange his Mo’ Wax days for anything. “I had a wonderful, wonderful time.”
Attica left Mo’ Wax behind and signed to Sony at the end of the decade, with their second album Test. Don’t Test dropping in the year 2000. I ask what it was like on a major. “At first, amazing. We signed to Sony because Mick Clark was an A&R man there and he had signed Soul II Soul and Loose Ends. So we were just like, ‘Okay, this guy’s got a tradition of signing Black acts that are doing something slightly different.’ We were label partners with Grooverider, Leftfield, various other people,” he says. Commercial pressure quickly got in the way of creativity though. “The Fugees blew up and that just mashed everything up for us. You know, you’re a trio. The Fugees are making records like this. You need to be making records like The Fugees. And Mick Clark got sacked.” Their A&R champion gone, a less attentive replacement entered the picture and Sade delivered her album late. “When you’re on a major label, those big acts provide the breathing space for the smaller acts. So her album comes in late, suddenly it’s like, right, all of these sub-labels need to go.” It went from, “we will do absolutely anything for you, to we can’t get a hold of that A&R man. It was one of the darkest periods of my life.” That album ended up being the final statement from the band, unless you count the rather excellent Drum Major Instinct comp from 2001 that Charlie and Tony curated.
These are young Black kids from South London, but they’re into The Cure and they’re into weird rock records and they’re into Chicago house and hip-hop and reggae. People just didn’t know where to place us.
Charlie Dark
As Charlie muses on the legacy of Attica Blues, it is apparent that when considering the past, he finds lessons to apply to the present. “I would love to be doing Attica now, but in my 20 year old body,” he says. “Because I feel like it’s cool to be eclectic now. It wasn’t cool to be eclectic then. I think we just confused people, because people were like, these are young Black kids from South London, but they’re into The Cure and they’re into weird rock records and they’re into Chicago house and hip-hop and reggae. People just didn’t know where to place us.” Today’s musical landscape would be a different story indeed and Charlie even hinted at an Attica Blues return on his final Worldwide FM show.
Around 2000, Charlie gravitated towards the broken beat scene. “With Attica we’d always had this love of odd time signatures, weird beat programming, the stuff that Kenny Dope was doing on the b-side of Masters at Work records, breaking up the beat. And what was really exciting about the broken beat scene is that it was welcoming of all kinds of people who had been rejected by major label life.” This was certainly true for Charlie and the Attica crew. “The broken beat thing for Attica was after being chewed up by the major label world and just thinking there isn’t really a place for us in music anymore. Being part of that family was really, really cool.” Legendary broken beat club night Co-Op at Plastic People “was really an inspiring club to go to because you’d hear these amazing records that would inspire you to go home and make records. And that’s what I love. You can always tell a club that’s great when you see producers from other scenes in there. Don’t make that music, but they come down and hang out. That’s How It Is had that, Dusted had that too. Co-Op definitely had that.”
I was DJing after Flying Lotus at The Big Chill and literally had a meltdown on stage, mid-set.
Charlie Dark
DJing started to take a back seat in 2005, around the time his daughter was born. Feeling isolated, with many of his contemporaries without kids, Charlie now recognises that his mental health was poor. “I didn’t really know how to deal with it, I didn’t really know how to recognise it, I didn’t know where to go and get help. That combination started resulting in anxiety whenever I DJed. I had a couple of big incidents where it all just fell apart really badly, quite publicly. I was DJing after Flying Lotus at The Big Chill and literally had a meltdown on stage, mid-set. Then I was playing at Cargo, at a friends and family event and had the same thing happen.” He had been enjoying his Blacktronica night at the ICA, but having to deal with various institutions to make it a success finally soured it for him. In 2015 he got into collecting dancehall records and started doing the Hip-hop vs Dancehall parties, but the vibes in clubs had changed for the worse. This was compounded by the advances in DJ technology. Charlie was a Serato beta tester, but it ultimately wasn’t for him. “I think what happened is once people saw laptops in the DJ booth, and they suddenly realised that a DJ could have 3000 songs at their disposal, the attitude of the crowd started to change. I found that people became really aggressive, and pretty disrespectful.” It was the end of the road for him. In 2018 he hung up his headphones.
This is the long dark night of the soul part of the story and it took a global pandemic to allow Charlie to step back into his light. We might have needed him to guide us, but he had to find himself first and he credits his partner with making that happen. A garage girl 12 years younger than Charlie, “she was like, ‘I’ve moved in with this guy, he’s got at least 10,000 records in the house, they’re everywhere. Massive trainer collection, he collects toys, he’s really weird. And he’s got turntables underneath the sofa, which he’s not using.’” Returning from a trip to New Orleans during the tentative early days of the pandemic, the situation was looking serious with potentially long-term implications. They were both yoga teachers, so it made sense to transform their front room into a yoga studio. However this would mean Charlie’s turntables going back into his studio. “I was freaking out,” he admits. “She forced me to move my turntables into my studio. And one day I found a big load of soul and funk records that I listened to in my teens and I was just like, these are really cool records. These are quite uplifting records.” And then Gilles Peterson stepped in. “I got asked to do a Worldwide show and it spiralled from there.”
I love all the Yodaisms and little bits of advice. That’s why I do the show, because I realised that people needed help during the pandemic.
Charlie Dark
I tell Charlie that his Peace, Positivity and Blessings show was a real guiding light for me during the pandemic and it’s brought immense joy since. Obviously I’m not the first person to say so. “If anything, that’s more important than the music. What really makes me smile is when people are like, ‘I love your show, it’s really helpful with my mental health.’” The uplifting nature of the music reflects Charlie’s words and vice versa. “I love all the Yodaisms and little bits of advice. That’s why I do the show, because I realised that people needed help during the pandemic. We went through a lot of big social issues, lots of change. And what I realised is there weren’t many places for people to go and get help or guidance or support.”
Fridays just aren’t the same without Peace, Positivity and Blessings on the radio, so let’s hope it returns soon because the world remains an unforgiving place and Charlie Dark is needed still.
The quotable DJ
Not quite Yodaisms, but here are some more words from Charlie Dark.
On record shops:
“I really love Alan’s [Records in East Finchley] because what I love when you go over to Alan’s it’s like, not only is he a great character, but it has these old characters that come in. I never see them buying any records, but they always seem to be in there. They’re in there with this incredible knowledge of music. I like it because it’s curated but not heavily curated. That’s one of my favourite shops. I like that it’s a bit of an adventure for me to get to as well.”
“I like Atlantis Records in Hackney. Again, another goldmine of a store. You’ve got to spend time in there. It’s a bit kind of wild, but I love a shop like that.”
“I love buying records. I love meeting the characters. I love the people I see. I love the whole culture of it. It’s part of my blood. It’s something that I’ve done since I was 13 years old. I’m not going to stop.”
On Discogs:
“It got very dangerous during the pandemic. I started to fall in love with the sound of the postman. And I now have a couple of rules that I have where I don’t pay for anything in the nighttime. Because records sound amazing at one o’clock in the morning when you’re digging through.”
On rare records:
“A lot of these super rare records are super rare because they weren’t that great in the first place. They weren’t great records in the first place, but they’ve become coveted. Because they’re rare, not because they’re good.”
On digging:
“I can’t stress to the younger DJs how important it is to go out and spend time in the record store and get lost. Because you’re going to find that anomaly record that maybe makes those two other records in your collection make sense.”
Charlie Dark: Peace, Positivity and Blessings
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