Upton Manor Tavern

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Background

Rocky Boss, born 1983 in Newham, A DJ, host, promoter and creative, and a member of Flames Radio/ Media. Also an official host for The Fanatix.

Transcripts

One

I would say, Upton Manor was, was like one of my favourites, because I think it was like the beginning and with Upton Manor, it was so strange. So you had, it was such- so the owner, the people that was running at the time, it was a, it was an Irish family, and the you the Irish family was dating a Jamaican man. So it was that kind of like fusion, where it was like an Irish kind of Jamaican pub. And that I just remember that being I remember just thinking that, ‘Oh, wow, this is just like’, not clash, ‘a unity of two different worlds’. And, yeah, I just remember at the beginning, it used to be the pub, so therefore you’d have people in there playing pool and doing all of that, and then it’ll get to about nine o’clock, and it all just changes. They move, like some of the tables out and the chairs. And then we used to just, it was our own platform for us to just play music, dance, experiment, and used to get all different types of people in there. It was just such. It was just so, like before diversity was a keyword, and like everyone trying to it was, it was literally that it was just so diverse in there. But at the time, we just didn’t even appreciate the diversity time. It was just like, ‘Oh, it’s Upton Manor pub’. And yeah, it just used to be so I just remember it just used to be so fun, and everyone just used to be happy, and the girls used to come there to check out guys, and vice versa. And it was just, it was like a safe space as well. It felt like a safe space for everybody. And then you had, like, older people in there, but they were kind of like, they kind of like, stayed at the back. I think that they might have, in hindsight now, I think that they might have been, like, close with the owners, so they used to be there in hindsight, I think that they was there as kind of little protection make sure that nothing went wrong inside the pub. But yeah, it was just really just, it felt like it was our own little playground where we could just be ourselves and played in play music and and play new music and bring in people who we thought were great, not knowing that they would be like, superstars of the future.

Two

You had- in Upton Park, you had Upton Manor pub. Upton Manor pub. That was another big one. I remember we had, we booked Dizzee Rascal. So Dizzee Rascal, in his early days, from the Upton Manor pub. We paid him 30 pounds, and he smashed the place open like, literally, it was, ah, it was such a, just such a happy memory at that time, not knowing what we was witnessing, like was witnessing someone that’s going to literally dominate the scene in the future. So that was Upton Manor pub, and we used to have, like, in there, a little kind of, like, every Friday in there. And that was when I met up with a guy called DJ face. So DJ Face was a Jamaican DJ who came over to England, and there was me and me like, who were trying to get into the Jamaican scene to play the dancehall and be like, and we want to play it authentically, whereas Face, DJ Face wanted to get into the English scene, he was like, oh, I want to get into the UK scene. So we kind of just gelled, and that’s how we then formed- He then joined cold as ice and was a was a crew there playing, playing Jamaican music, but yeah, so he used to have a residency at Upton Manor pub. So that’s kind of where we started there. Then there was another part pub bar called Princess Alice on Forest on road. And Princess Alice was another one where a lot of events used to keep there for like, the kind of dance or reggae, kind of crowd.