[00.00] 

So my name is Deljit Singh, commonly known as Del Singh. I'm 16, going on 63. I live in Peterborough, the place I was born in. What I do for a living: I've been working in the IT industry, in kind of sales and marketing roles for the last 35 years.

 

So what was it like living in Peterborough, which is a stone's throw from Alconbury and American airbases. It was fascinating for a young lad and a British-born Sikh, by the way. So you may not get it from my voice, but I have this really innovative hairstyle that I've stuck with for the last sort of 60 plus years.

 

[00.40]

It was quite amazing because I guess it was almost like somebody dropped a piece of America into the middle of East Anglia. So you had this fantastic little 51st state of America dropped into the UK that was a world of its own. People drove on the wrong side of the road inside Alconbury! Their signs were all spelled incorrectly - American English, let's face it!

 

[01.05]

So what was it like living close to RAF Alconbury and those American bases, you know, in Peterborough, a stone's throw away? And it was fascinating, because it was almost like somebody had dropped, you know, a part of America into the middle of East Anglia, and, you know, it was its own little fiefdom, its own estate. You had people driving in Alconbury on the wrong side of the road inside Alconbury. You had road signs that were all spelled incorrectly because, let's face it, Americans couldn't use the word "crossing," so they put an "X" and "ing" after it. Anything to abbreviate, even back in the’70s!

 

[01.44]

And you know, everything from shopping in a commissary to watching movies in a theatre to drinking in bars, and, you know, all of the stuff that we didn't do. You know, we had pubs, they had bars, and whatever it was, it was fascinating. And for me as a teenager to go on into that world in around 1975 when I was about 13 years old, and experiencing that, it was quite the revelation. It was a real eye opener. It was like, you know, being in the States, but actually, you could pop back home again about, you know, 30 minutes up the road.

 

[02:21] 

My late father had businesses in Peterborough, one of which was a shop in Fitzwilliam’s Street, called the Super Bazaar. And we sold, back in the ‘70s, the fancy goods that kind of like would now count as retro. So things like lava lamps and those big tapestries that would take up an entire wall and, dare I say it, cheesecloth, which was garments of cheesecloth that people thought were great, and patchouli oil that you'd get arrested for wearing now, but all those things were hip and chic and trendy, along with lots of other things.

 

And it happened to me per chance, my dad was actually coming back from London on what was the old A1, which would skirt past Alconbury, and he saw an uncle of mine. We call him an uncle, but he was somebody coming out of Alconbury. "Wonder what he's doing in there?" And I did a bit of Sherlock Holmes digging, and found out that he was going onto the base as a trader and selling pretty much the sort of stuff we had, but in a small fashion. So look, you know, we weren't going to let a business opportunity go by. So we managed to get ourselves onto the base, but with this huge selection, because we had a shop of this stuff that we were selling.

 

 

[03:24] 

And there were the two main, or three main clubs there. There was the Officers' Club, which is very, very posh, and they wouldn't let you in through the front door to sell anything. There was the Non-Commissioned Officers' or NCO Club, which was, again, primarily a Caucasian, white, kind of slightly below the officers' type of place they hung out in and ate and other entertainment. And then just up the road was the Aquarius Club, or the AQ Club, which, to be fair, was a lot of African American service personnel based there. And, so initially, we found ourselves being given a little pitch in the NCO club, and we put all our wares out. And to be fair, we did really well, much to the disgust of this uncle, because he thought he had a monopoly there, and he didn't.

 

And then at one point, when the NCO Club was closed for refurbishment, and this uncle had now moved away because he couldn't stand the competition, they said to us, "well, we can't give you a pitch on the NCO club, but we can give you a pitch at the AQ club." And so, okay, yeah, my brother and I, my dad would often normally go there, but towards the end, it was my brother and I would pitch up there, put our tables out, and that was a different world. Gone was the prim and proper NCO, where everybody was kind of speaking proper, and all of a sudden, you got these dudes coming in, and I'm doing their crazy fist bump, handshakes, jive-ass talking, you know? And then there was the music!

 

They were then kicking the music and they'd have a DJ, and they'd be playing all the kinda like, those great disco hits from the ‘70s, the sort of Candy Staton and The Emotions and The Miracles and The Temptations, all this really good stuff, and Marvin Gaye. And you’re thinking "whoa, what's this?" And then to make it, to have it even more mesmerized, is they'd start dancing! And they were bloody brilliant! These guys could bust a move, you know? God, you literally felt like, you know, I was only a, like, 13, 14-year-old kid that's like, "I'm not even that loose." And these guys are, like, in their 30s and 40s, and they're flipping around the floor like, "oh my word. What are they on?" I don't really want to know the answer to that, but they were just high on life, and it was a fantastic thing! So what, you know, what wasn't there to like about that part of American culture?

 

[05:36] 

What were we selling on the base? So, primarily, it was fancy goods. It was kind of like object d’art, it was stuff that you'd put on your mantelpiece or on a wall - decorative stuff, very little function to it. But, you know, and to be fair, there was a lot of ceramics and stuff, and what you found is, it was this appealed, primarily, to the kind of wives of the Caucasian personnel they “oh, geez, and that looked great.” You know, it's a little dolls and poodles and dogs and heads and stuff like that. They could put a little… 

 

But then something actually happened, around 1997 you had this TV show called Roots hit the screens around the world, including the UK. And it was Alex Haley's book of basically, you know, slavery, about how slaves were taken from Africa to America and changed their names and forced to comply. And it really was pivotal in people's thinking because all of a sudden we saw a shift in the mindset of these very carefree African American personnel because they literally now were beginning to tap into their own roots, and they began asking questions, and there was that connection to Africa that a lot of people didn't have. 

 

Whether, probably not, by design it just happened to be that we were around and part of what we sold within our ornamental sphere, included stuff that was actually of either African origin or inspired by, you know, Africana, if you want to call it. So there were wood carvings, there were masks and things like that, things that may be seen as being kind of tribal. Now, you know, I'm going to fess up here and say some of this stuff was from Africa, but some of this stuff was mass produced, probably in Taiwan. It was just, just the way things were, you know? But it got people looking at this stuff thinking, “wow, that's quite amazing.”

 

[07:38] 

 

And it was the closest that, you know, an American from, you know, New Orleans, based in Alconbury in East Anglia, was going to connect to Africa through this little bit of wood carving,

and it allowed them to connect. And it was, it was intriguing. Now, you know, look, at no point did we go along and say, “oh, my god, this is something that was authentic”, or whatever it was. These were replicas, they were copies, they whatever they were - there was all sorts of stuff. But people actually started to buy this stuff and really appreciate it. And in a way, they used it to help them connect back. 

 

So that was one of the things... I mean, obviously there was other stuff. The other thing that I know, I absolutely know, the African American guys loved were kaftans. They loved a freaky color kaftan. Oh, my god! These guys, wearing this… they used to, it was what they used to call it a dashiki, yeah, whatever it was. That was the term, “dude, that daishiki is wicked man!” and whatever. And these things were, I mean, obviously it looked like a, kind of,

almost like a explosion of a paint factory, like Jackson Pollock on a bad day had painted your shirt. But they loved this stuff! And they would put it on, and they would be… like, I said, they'd be fist bumping and they look cool in it - they looked cool in it! 

 

I must admit, you know, when I saw regular white folks wearing that, “I was like, “geez, don't go outside, mate. You're going to get sectioned but, you know, you don't... you can't carry off that look.”  But these guys, although maybe was a little intimidating, nobody can go up this six foot five dude and say, “man, that doesn't look good on you”. You know, the guy could be wearing a pot on his head, and you'd think, terrific. This is pretty rich, coming from a guy that's had the same hairstyle for 50 years, by the way, so I can't comment on the people's hairstyles. They tapped into this rich vein of stuff, and we were happened to be there on the scene to help them do that. 

 

[09:33] 

But you know, there was always the connection, along with the African thing, there was also the connection to the music, because around that time, you were also getting TV shows like, you know, Starsky and Hutch. And you had, for the first time in a long time, you actually had Black characters, African American characters, who were centre stage. So Starsky and Hutch’s boss, you know, Captain Dobey, or whoever he was, the rough growl African American boss, pitbull boss. And then, of course, the coolest character in there, Huggy Bear, the dude they'd all go to get info, you know. So no longer was it just the heroes were the white guys. You actually had some people of colour that were actually now contributing and that was really impressive, too. 

 

[10:14]

That name was so cool. So this guide obviously appropriated that name. And, you know, I remember asking this, this really fly guy, you know, his name goes, "man, I'm there. I'm the bear. I'm a Huggy Bear." I'm like, "okay, that'll do. I'm not going to question you on it," you know. But he was a cool dude. This guy sort of obviously set the decks up, so around sort of six o'clock in the evening, you know, just we're trying to pack up, these guys would start setting up ready for the evening's entertainment. And, you know, on more than one occasion, it was a great incentive for us to stick around for a few hours to, you know, even though I was too young to drink and stuff, just to watch this guy get behind the decks and play great music. And it was, it was, it was soulful music. It was, it was disco music. This was before what I would call the Saturday Night Fever disco revolution. So it was kind of the precursor and it was, you know, people like, you know, I remember, I mean, I fell in love with Candy Staton "Young Hearts Run Free." I could not… I went to go and buy that record because that was it. You know, The Miracles, The Emotions, "Best of My Love," and there's all of this other rich stuff. Of course, they were the real heroes, those sort of Motown artists, people like Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross who are now into, you know, in the 1970s, you know, they'd lost some, some of that old Motown stuff, but they were still, you know.. Marvin “Got to Give It Up” and stuff like that. And you're thinking, "Whoa, this is terrific stuff."

 

[11:33]

Like I said, not only do they play the music, but this guy was a great raconteur. He was actually talking to the crowd. He was getting them up. He had control, you know? The guys wanted to be like him, and the girls wanted to be with him. What was there not to like? I wanted to be that guy! I really want to be that guy. You're going to be kind of like, you weren't going to go short in the kind of like, you know, love stakes, and at the same time you're going to get maximum respect from all the other guys, because, you know, he had a very commanding voice in the microphone, and that was important, because, you know, you literally had the entire room there hanging on your next word. It's like, you know, "okay, and now we'll play this and this," and boom, you put it on. And that's the and that that was truly inspirational, that's said in a way that ignited a spark that said, "oh, you'd… I’d love to be that guy."

 

 

[12:23] 

So outside of the base, the influence from there… It was there - the spark was lit, but it was smoldering. And then along came an opportunity, which was Saturday Night Fever. It was disco gone mainstream. It was disco with a very pretty face of John Travolta with some moves in a white suit that would now be taken out of the clubs, into the cinemas, and onto the dance floors. And with that happening, of course, you know, the world opened up. People wanted to dance. People you know, wanted to then more music came about. It was..  it was no longer confined to these niche clubs. It was now finding its way into the mainstream. 

 

And for me, I was a school kid. I was at Jack Hunt School in Peterborough in the sixth form around ‘79 when this thing was breaking - ‘78, ‘79. And it was just a happy accident where somebody suggested, you know, we always raised an annual thing to raise money for charity, and somebody said, “why not do a 24 hour disco?” Whoa, 24 hours away from mom and dad… and girls and music. What's there not to like? The only downside was that there was no DJ under god's earth that was going to play for 24 hours and not charge you like several 1000 pounds. And if we're trying to raise money for charity, it wasn't going to work.

 

[13:43] 

So long story short is my older brother David and I actually ended up, kind of almost being delegated to hire this kit. We hired these turntables and speakers. We were allowed to use the drama facilities with its light shows and stuff in the school. And then we, you know, begged, borrowed and stole records. Less of the stealing, more the beg borrowing people's records, recording tape, taping the chart show on the Sunday till your fingers were raw. And then we actually went there on the this Saturday night into Sunday night and basically ran this thing for 24 hours, my brother and I. 

 

And the other thing is, it was important because the Huggy Bear spark had been lit. I just didn't want to be like the DJs… sadly there are too many DJs today who literally just, you know, they've got their headphone on and they fade one track into another, into another, and there is no communication with the audience. There's no pushing the boundaries. There's no getting crowd involvement. So, you know, I still have the wherewithal to actually encourage people to get them on the dance floor and strut their stuff and do stuff, and, you know, engage with them and talk to them about the music. Because for me, the music was brilliant, and I became a bit of an encyclopedia. I actually didn't just like the music. I love the music, the artists, I learned their background and the fact that, you know, this hit was their previous hit, and it got to number 15 the charts, and this one's now number 12. Yeah! Boom! 

 

It was a very successful, you know, event. It raised about 3000 pounds for charity. But the real kicker was that a few weeks after that, people kept coming up to my brother and I and saying, “guys, we've got a birthday coming up. I don't suppose you want to do the disco for me, would you?” And that was, that was the vote of confidence. We thought we were good, but people thought we were great, and they actually now wanted to pay us to do their events. And so that's how I became a DJ, because of, you know, that spark was lit, turned to a flame. 

 

[15:36] 

And then, you know, my brother and I set up a disco road show. In fact, we set up two disco road shows, one for him, one for me, and those ran for, you know, almost eight, nine years, and it put both of us through university. So we had the Spectera sound system, which actually kind of became more of a… was our main disco… disco thing that we, you know. So we do birthday parties and stuff like that, and we do that. And then we, you know, we had the Singh Brothers Road Show, and we had the Singh brothers Rock Road Show. And we'd, you know, we would do that as well. So we could, obviously, we could, you know, we had two separate brands. The fact of the matter is, you know, one got “well, you're the rock guys”, and the other one was… ah we had two separate… the system was the same, but it is the big box at the front of the name… name panel on it was different. We could substitute one out of the other. It's innovation. Well, it's entrepreneurial. 

 

I mean, he, I mean, he didn't know the music and stuff, but he knew about entrepreneurial stuff. And so did we. We knew, look, you know, we, and I've always carried that with me, which is, look, you know, the effects and that all the equipment can be the same, but as long as the vinyl that you're playing resonates with the crowd. So if it just happens to be that you've got a crowd in front of you that want, you know, want dance music and stuff - play that for them. And if you've got people that want a head bang to heavy metal, you've got to make sure you've got the right music for them. So that's all it is. And also, if you are passionate about the music, and you're fake about it, and you know, I've always had a very eclectic taste of music, and I even to this day, you know, the music shapes me. I can go from anything from, like, you know, rock concerts, through to, you know, watching people on a seafront doing, kind of, you know, with a washboard and stuff. 

 

[17:20] 

Yeah, it well, the music was there. I think everything was there. And I think, you know, it's like, one of those things. It's that, you know, if you're, if you're building a fire, as Tom Hanks did in the film Castaway, you've got all the kindling, you've got all the stuff, and now you're trying to desperately light the spark, and then you get a blow on and make sure. And that's what these things were. They're little events that came along that kept that little ember going and then finally ignited and it got going and… But, you know, and the other big payoff for all this was by running a disco and being paid to play music and entertain people. That was a thing of its own, obviously, as a rather hormonal teenager, you know, the biggest thing that you wanted in life was to possibly get laid. I suppose. No, you wanted to get the girl. You wanted to kind of like, you know, get jiggy with it somewhere along the line, as Will Smith would say. And this was a great way of doing it. It became very popular because you got invited to all the best parties, because you had the records and stuff. I’ve got the music. I’ve got the music man…

 

[18:19] 

You know, I was never going to be kind of Huggy Bear there, but I kind of like, was, you know, you know, it's still afforded opportunity to go and mix with the great, the good and the beautiful people, so you could be in with them. You could entertain them. And you know what? The other thing it did was it didn't just indulge my passion in music and allowed me to continue with that, because I could also go and buy records that I really liked. So I could buy the stuff while sometimes I was playing, but I could also buy stuff that I wanted to listen to myself, which obviously wouldn't be mainstream. So, you know, I was doing all of that stuff, which often people couldn't do, because, you remember, even though, back then, you know, buying a record was a 45 or single was like 50p or 60p or 30p, if it's in the bargain basement, you know, LPs or long players, you know, were a couple of quid or fiver. That was a lot of money back then. 

 

[19:08]  

And if I could afford to buy one of those, because I was getting paid 100 pounds to do this, I could spend a bit of money on myself. And the other thing it allowed me to do is it built confidence. Nothing builds confidence more than a 15-year or 16-year-old sitting in front of like, literally, 300, 400 people with a microphone, and, you know, to quote the old gladiator thing, "are you not entertained?" You've got to entertain these people. And all you've got is a microphone, your brain and your voice and some music. And like I said, you can just put the music on and that's it. But, you know, we would try really hard to read the room, play the music people wanted, and also give them the banter and stuff, and get them up and about and so on, and get them involved. And yeah, this day, people always say, I mean, you know, thankfully I still know a lot of people used to come to their discos.

 

[19:57]

And even recently, somebody actually found an audio clip of me DJing back in like 1982 and played it back to me, like, "oh my god." And he said, "this is amazing." You know, you talk about someone's misfortune. Some guy broke his hand, whose party it was, and I made some rather lewd quip about the fact that his weekend was ruined now, he had no right arm, and say, you know, whatever it was, and he stopped. That was funny as hell then, it's still funny now. But it was... It gave us this outlook. And you know what? That's something I carried through into this life. Now, I mean, I, you know, one of my pleasures in life is public speaking. People hate it. I love it. I tell you what somebody said to me, you know, just drop a hat. We need something to go and stand up and talk to a crowd, whether it's 100 people, 1,000 people, whatever. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll just go up there and, you know, it allowed me to do things like I’ve done stand-up comedy, The Comedy Store in London, it built a massive amount of confidence that nothing else in the world would do that… having to do that at 15, 16, years old. 

 

Yeah, I mean, Huggy Bear has got a lot to answer for. There's a lot of people out there don't like me, and it's all his fault. It's remarkable. I mean, and I never got to know the guy's real name, which is a shame. I mean, obviously I know the character in the TV show was Antonio Fargas, but this wasn't Antonio Fargas. This was just some regular dude who loved his music. The girls loved him, and he knew how to entertain. So thank you, wherever you are, Mr. Bear.

 

[21:20] 

Yeah. So, you know, the disco thing, the mobile roadshow through my teens was pretty good. It got us through university. It was really good. And then, obviously, reality bites. You get a job, a nine to five, and for many years I was doing that, and it happened to be on my, one of my trips, I was… I work in the IT industry. I found myself in Chicago, in… it was like, I think, very late, late '98, early '99, and ended up at a place. Now, for the life of me, can't remember the name of it, but it was a bit of a drinker back then. But I ended up in a place that was quite the most unique venue I'd been to. It was actually on two stories, two floors. There was like a regular floor where they had a band playing, and then you went downstairs and there was this disco going on, and it was kind of like a more housey thing. And they were almost two different crowds, which is quite remarkable to have these downstairs, these people in their house music. 

 

The upstairs, you have people kind of rocking out to like, you know, slightly more, you know, rock-oriented music. I thought, "this is clever. This is clever. Why has nobody thought about doing this, a multi-purpose music venue?" And when I came back to the UK, I was talking to my then younger brother, who was running, we had a wine shop in Fitzwilliam Street in Peterborough. And to be fair, with the way supermarkets were now selling cheap booze, that business was now beginning to wane. And he was like, you know, "I don't think this is sustainable. Got to find something else to do." And I said, “ you know what? I think this city needs, it needs another kind of venue." 

 

Now, remember, we had nightclubs. They're very, very kind of cliquey. They generally around those that late ‘90s, early 2000s played dance, trance, house. That's it, and that's what it was. And you, you know, you say you had Shanghai Sam's or Faith, or whatever it was, they had Liquid, they're all syndicated clubs, and they played formulaic stuff, and there was nothing original. Then they had pubs playing their sort of music, which was bands. I said, "What if we combined the two and did this?” This is what I saw in the States.

 

[23:22]

And so what happened was we found a building on Park Road in Peterborough, which we kind of acquired, and it was perfect, because the thing is, downstairs was a very open area, which I thought would lend itself wonderfully well to that nightclub vibe. And yet you went up the stairs and upstairs with this kind of almost cathedral-like pitch roof, long section, which I thought the stage at one end, and this was great for live music. You could do both. And that's what, actually what we did. And we so in literally, 10th of December, 1999 we opened The Park, which was certainly Peterborough’s and the region's first kind of multi-purpose venue, in that it had two levels that did different music styles. And originally we only allowed an early license, and we, you know, so we had to close at 10 or 11, which wasn't great. 

 

We applied for a late license, and we immediately got a couple of the local nightclubs objecting. We went to court, but guess what? They were going to outsmart us, and we actually got our late license, and I got to make them pay our costs. Ha! So, you know, it was terrific, and we now were a fully-fledged night venue, and that gave us free reign to now experiment.

 

[24:39] 

And the one thing I did do was I kind of tacked back to, what is it that people want, and what is it that's going to actually keep us alive and keep… because if we try to do what the other clubs are doing, and they weren't going to have it because they're already being catered for by those clubs. I was like, "okay, what is missing in Peterborough or this area that nobody's tapped into?" And it happened to be urban music. It happened to be Black music, dance hall, garage, all these different genres that were rising or refining - soul, R and B, whatever. So I was like, now I'm going to put hand on heart and say I'm a bit more of a rock guy, and I wasn't really very much into that scene, but from a business point of view, it made sense to cater for people that had nowhere to go to. So all of a sudden, The Park now started putting on those… that sort of music for people that needed it. 

 

We tapped into the DJs nationally and internationally that were playing that music. So yes, we bought people like David Rodigan to Peterborough in the dance hall style, Chris Goldfinger came here, and Trevor Nelson, people like that. And then obviously, on the garage side, you had people like the kind of Dream Team, Spoony and those guys. So we were now getting these sort of… and all of a sudden, and guess what? The craziness is that all those years later, I opened a venue like this, we started getting Americans from Alconbury, from Lakenheath, Mildenhall, traveling to come along. So we started putting on nights like we put on an MLK night. And, you know, acts, we got acts in so, you know, we… Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" played The Park!

 

 I spent an evening chatting with Coolio. And who knew that he thought Sex Pistols were brilliant and it influenced him. Hey, but I did. I talked to him, yeah, exactly. And I don't know if you remember, it's probably not the best song in the world, but the video was remarkable… was Cisco, "The Thong Song," I don’t know if you remember that? But that was, it was a shocking video, but it was, it was funny, but the guy's like, that three foot five or something. He should have been in Lord of the Rings, but, yeah, this guy played there. 

 

[26:53]

Then we had legends. And I call them legends and I mean that. People like Gregory Isaacs, you know, Freddie McGregor, Chaka Demus and Pliers, yeah? These people came to Peterborough, so I bought… So in a way, we kind of came full circle because we were dealing with that. And also at the same time, I was indulging my passion for live music, because upstairs there was live bands playing. And so some of these bands, you know, we paid 50 quid to, 60 quid, a hundred to, then went on and made… become megastars, yeah? Kasabian, Keane, Biffy Clyro, they're headlining big festivals and stuff. 

 

Bands that I grew up with, who I watched. So, you know, I was the only.. I think to this day, I'm the only Sikh punk rocker. I used to go... I watched bands like The Clash and The Damned. There's all these people had spiky haircutw looking different. I just rocked up with this turban on my head. And I was like, "I'm different, because none of you look like me." And to be fair, I never got any hassle and stuff. It was a great vibe. So getting bands like The Damned and The Stranglers and stuff like that to come and play at my venue all those years later was brilliant. So, so, yeah, so you know that music thing never died, and it kind of almost was reincarnated back in the 90s through to 2009 at which point I'm probably too old, too tired, and just wanted to sell up and get out.

 

[28:11] 

Plans to revisit that stuff is… it's stories. So first and foremost, I love telling stories. People tell me that I do it quite well, which is always good to know, because nobody was an audience falling asleep while you're talking to them. 

 

But you know, I, as well as doing my day job. I like, I mean, I'm passionate about Peterborough, my city. And so when people run it down and say that nothing ever good happened in Peterborough, it's a dreadful place, I disagree, just because your life is boring just don’t tar it all with the same brush and think that nothing ever happened here that was good or different or unique. And my story is unique. And so in 2021 I kind of worked… I got invited to make a short film with Peterborough Presents. 

 

[28:58]

And, you know, I created a short film on growing up in Peterborough in the ‘60s... you know, being born Peterborough in the ‘60s, growing up in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, et cetera, and touching on some of these themes about setting up the disco, doing that, run-ins with the National Front, stuff like that, racism, whatever, and how we overcame it. And how people… how people were very inclusive and welcoming to people from different cultures, which is very pertinent this time when people are being demonized, and it's like, you know, "show your ID." 

 

And, you know, if you don't like our [inaudible] , "go over there," you know, that kind of thing. And so I didn't think too many people would watch this thing. I just thought, you know, my late mother would probably watch it and repeat, probably because it was her pride and joy sort of talking. But, you know, 20,000 people watch this thing, and all of a sudden people stopping me in the streets and so on, in a good way, as opposed to in a bad way, and saying, you know, "watched your video. Brilliant, great. Do another one!" Some guy stopped me, you know, in the supermarket, and said, "hey, you're the history homeboy.” History homeboy - what a good moniker. I love that. Yeah. 

 

[30:02]

And so, you know, ended up long too short, made four of these films their on the Peterborough Presents website - “Del's Magical History Tours of Peterborough”. But there’s story in there that I recounted about running a disco and how we, you know, one night had the National Front came to attack us because they couldn't stand the idea of people that weren't white playing music and somehow helping other people enjoy themselves. And that story just grabbed the attention of a lot of people, and people that are maybe outside of Peterborough, because it was like, "sorry, are you telling me three Sikh lads set-up a heavy metal roadshow in Peterborough in the 1970s? Is that real?" Yeah, hell, it's real!

 

[30:45] 

And… and so Eastern Angles, a theatre company based out of Ipswich, they got it. They came back and said, "this sounds very original and unique. We'd love to explore doing something with you." And so we applied for Arts Council funding. Got it. I put together initial draft of a script to a director, some actors, and what's called “Bat Out of Peterborough” as a little homage to “Bat Out of Hell”. But “Bat Out of Peterborough” because it focused on the heavy metal aspect of it. But there are some beautiful, touching moments, because I wanted to cover those in there about lighting that flame, where the spark was lit, and that spark was lit at the AQ club, the Aquarius Club, by Huggy Bear the DJ, watching those people dancing, having a great time, me wanting to be a DJ. 

 

So we're hoping that that's something that may come to fruition and be on a stage somewhere around East Anglia, or maybe even further afield in, you know, 2026 possibly even 2027 because these things move quite slowly. But it's… it's remarkable that people love the story, and it will give me a great chance to pay homage to what is a rather wonderful part of the world that we live in, and I was born in, Peterborough… and the areas around me, including the community of American GIs and servicemen, you know, Blacks, Black air personnel and white personnel that were from American… America, that bought a little piece of the US here and they shaped lives. They didn't know about it at the time, but they did. 

 

[32:13] 

They shaped a life and the probably the most unexpected life they would ever think, you know, who would have thought, you know, that Sikh kid is gonna grow up thinking… And I've been to America lots of times and stuff. I mean, apart from the fact they still can't spell correctly and… and they and their people do sort of, when I open my mouth, they look at me strangely because I wear a turban, and say, “gee, you sound like you're from Downton Abbey”. But, you know it's, it's a bit… a bit perplex… perplexing to them. But otherwise it's wonderful.

 

[32:42] Finish