Soldering and soul-spinning: Telephone receivers and the DIY origins of DJing
My first experience of DJing was being asked to control the iPod on family car journeys, and I don’t know whether it was the thrill of sharing music or my childhood lust for power, but the experience always stuck with me. Cut to the present day, when half of my wage is spent amassing obscure and forgotten northern soul singles to share with dancefloors across West Yorkshire, and performing DJ sets is still pretty thrilling for me. What’s more, that journey to become a DJ has provided me with an extensive education in the vibrant history of DJ culture.
Northern soul is the root of so much of modern DJ and dance music culture. Back in the early 1970s, swathes of young people across the north of England were becoming infatuated with obscure and forgotten soul records from the other side of the Atlantic. These young soul obsessives would pack dancefloors all night, with the aid of talcum powder and amphetamines, dancing to a plethora of unknown soul singles. It was this scene that laid the foundations for dance music and rave culture with its penchant for driving beats, drugs, and all-night dances. It was also this scene that inspired me to become a DJ.
Today, many of the original DJs from the days of Wigan Casino and The Twisted Wheel still perform sets across the country, long-running clubs like Leeds Central Soul Club are still going strong, and young soul fans are establishing their own all-nighters and DJ collectives, too. Growing up in the north of England, it didn’t take long for me to become aware of northern soul, and I was hooked on the music and the culture from the moment I set foot in my first all-nighter.
From then on, a lot of my spare time has been spent searching through boxes of records to find hidden gems and floor-filling favourites, as well as researching the culture that defined the first wave of northern soul all those years ago. At one soul night in Leeds, I saw a DJ cueing up a record, but rather than using headphones, he simply held an old-school telephone to his ear. Intrigued, I asked the DJ what he was doing, and was subsequently given an insight into the history not just of northern soul but of DJ culture in general.
You see, northern soul, like every subculture worth paying attention to, blossomed from working-class communities. The first wave of kids attending all-nighters in the late 1960s and early 1970s did not have money for all the fancy equipment used by professionals, especially since they were likely spending any spare change they had on acquiring more records. What’s more, there were very few companies making products specifically for DJs at that time, so the idea of ‘DJ headphones’ was pretty far-fetched.
Improvisation was key, and some enterprising young DJs had the realisation that every standard telephone comes with a speaker built in. In the days long before mobile phones, the landline was king, and standard rotary telephones came equipped with a receiver with a speaker at the top and a microphone at the bottom. So, with a little cutting and soldering, you could achieve a headphone-like effect with a telephone.
This practice reflected the working-class, DIY origins of the northern soul scene, and it went on to become a hallmark of future movements like disco, early hip-hop, and electronic music, too. Today, telephone receivers are still used, both as a nod to the DIY origins of northern soul and DJ culture, but also because telephone receivers are still cheap and widely available, in addition to being sturdier and less bulky than most DJ headphones. You do not need to break the bank to become a DJ; all you need is passion for the music and the drive to make it happen.
So, how do you make a telephone receiver?
After witnessing the telephone receiver in action, it wasn’t long before I decided to create one myself. Despite my incredible lack of knowledge when it comes to electronics, the process was much easier than I initially anticipated, and my telephone receiver has since saved a lot of faff when it comes to my DJ sets. Gone are the days of bulky headphones and messed-up hairdos; sometimes, the best solutions are the cheap ones.
To make your own receiver, the first thing you will need is an old wired telephone. With the landline on its way out of fashion, you can pick these up at most second-hand, junk, or charity shops. You will also need a 6.35mm plug, which can be bought cheaply at any decent electronics store or online. Once you have your phone, cut the cord which connects the receiver to the phone, and strip away some of the rubber which surrounds the two wires in the cord.
One of these wires will connect to the speaker (at the top of the receiver) and the other to the microphone (at the bottom). Once you have deduced which is which, you can solder the speaker wire to your 6.35mm plug, and voila. You now have your very own telephone receiver, with which you can cue up tracks and continue the DIY legacy of DJ culture.
