About

The Delta Disco was originally started way back in the summer of 1996 by Peter Hawkes at the tender age of 25. The original idea stemmed from a friend name Stan who, although a few year younger, had been DJing for a while having had the buzz passed down from his father, who is still DJing to this day! Stan use to mention his agent who passed on a number of gigs to him and sat at home on a big leather sofa handing out gigs, instead of having a day job. This sounded a like a pretty easy life rather than going out to work at 8am every mornning.

So the idea was born, to put an advert into the Yellow Pages and do the same. Pull in a few gigs and then hand them out to established DJs for a small fee. As long as the small fees added up to more than the advert, where was the danger in giving it a go?

As soon as the advert came out the phone started to ring, not much but a few times a week to start with. Things went to plan for the first couple of bookings but it wasn't long before gigs had been taken and no one could be found to cover them! There was only one solution to get out of this sticky mess and that was to buy the nessecary equipment and cover them himself!

With the help of a few frineds to DJ and provide the odd piece of kit and records, the Alpha Force Roadshow was born and on the road!

As Pete and friends were avid clubbers at the time, the original style had a heave slant towards banging club tunes, and was entirly run from Technics 1210s and vynal with one of the first purchases being a huge, and very weighy, suitcase full of old 7" records bought second hand from a retiring DJ. Although this got the show through it's first gigs it soon became apparent that the seller of these 7" records had taken out all the classics and kept them for himself, not an Abba Dancing Queen or Kool and the Gang Celebration in site!

At the time CDs were just coming in and the music required to do family ocassion just couldn't be found on vynal so the first of many CD players was perchased for around £50, and the huge collection of CDs still used today was started.

Not long after the next stage began with the offer of two gigs on the same day, always Saturdays. Not wanting to turn down good money when offered, The Alpha Roadshow would be out and the odd extra gig would be passed on to the original DJ friends. This is where a couple of problems arouse! A couple of bookings were taken in the home area of Southampton on succesive evenings (a Friday and Saturday) and given to a DJ friend who lived in London. The two bookings together were worth coming down south for and having a parent who lived near Southampton would make an easy stop over saving travel back between gigs. Unfortunately the night of the first booking the DJ's vehicle broke down on the M3 from London to Southampton, leaving a rather distraught customer on the end of a phone to Pete, who was luckily only off from gigging to go to Franch for the weekend to organise a party the following night. The only solution to this being to put off the trip to France until the next day and do the customers disco in person! The party in France still went on as planned but timings were pushed to the maximum!

Here a lesson was learnt, use local DJs, not ones who need to travel long distances to get to the function! The following Monday an advert was placed in the local Job Centre for DJs and few now good friends were found in the local area, a couple of which are still doing the discos for Pete now!

The next stage was now complete. With a couple of name changes to simplify things, the disco now became the Delta Disco and the company Alpha Entertainment was born to deal with the bookings covered by other acts.

With a background firmly set in the clubbing, technics playing, days of rave music, Pete is of course still a big lover of live beat mixing music, and this is still a big partof his DJing style. It still comes as quite a surprise though to find so many DJs out there who can't string a beat together! There is a lot to be said however of a DJs skill at chopping two tracks together well, judging the right moment and method of doing it, that lots of non beat mixing DJs are very good at. Or to use the correct term 'to segue' two records (segue ' SEGway' a musical term meaning to continue on to the next piece without pause). Although with this said, there are still far two many DJs out there who simply rely on, sometimes good, but more often not, tacky mega mix party CDs. These can be left running as long as you don't want to change the order the tracks play in but always have that rather nasty 'Jive Bunny' sound to them. Most audiences on the outlook don't even seem to notice and a lot even love these DJs and come up at the end of a night complimenting the DJ on how fabulous he/she was, when really a monkey trained to push a green button labled 'start' would have performed just as well! Some of these DJs get by without even needing to use headphones! How wrong is that (like a Golfer without a club)! A bit of a bitter comment you could say but if the customer is genuinely happy at the end of the night you can't argue with that we guess, the job was definitely done well.

As a pet hate of these mega mix CDs though, all mixing and segue'ing (if ther is such a word) of tracks is always done 100% live, although you will hear Pete using them if needing to leave the consol unattended to entertain children out the front. As a result, the mixture of music is always able to take the neseccary turns when required to keep things moving and get peoples request played quickly, as long as they don't contrast horribly with the present style being played!

...and so, ten years on, a whole load of experience has been gained in entertaining at private functions, corporte parties and thousands of Wedding reception including some services, a very large selection of music obtained covering everything from 40's to present day, including all the usual requested tracks, and a compliment of good quality tried and tested equpiment purchased to ensure all customers of the Delta Disco are kept dancing and happy right through to the last song!

And now the Delta Disco moves into the new era with the next purchase on the horizon being computer technology to play music in MP3 format.

Although the desire to be out gigging every night of the week and not getting to bed until 3am starts to fade, the buzz of rocking a crowd never does, we're sure the Delta Disco will still be banging out the tunes, or Pete will be pushing the buttons on an MP3 playing laptop, for a few years to come yet before hanging up those trusty old head phones!