Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson obituary

Every night throughout the mid-1980s, rooftops across London’s highest points came alive with nefarious activity. With as many as 100 black music pirate stations on air, losing a transmitter to night-time sabotage by rivals or government raids was considered an irritating but unavoidable cost of business.

But the then pirate station Kiss FM had a secret weapon to deploy: Paul “Trouble” Anderson, who has died from cancer aged 59, one of the station’s most talented DJs and the possessor of a baseball bat. “Most of the time there wasn’t any violence – it was like a deterrent,” Paul told me when I spoke to him last year for a BBC documentary. “[But] when it was the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry] you had to be very humble and just ... not show the bat.”

Street tough, physically indomitable, a man with martial arts skills and a fiercely proud spirit who brooked no nonsense from anyone, being a part-time enforcer for Kiss was an easy way for Paul to contribute to the communal labour of love that all pirate stations depended upon. However, it was for his effortless technical mastery of the turntables, an encyclopedic musical knowledge, his unrivalled record collection and his skill as a selector incapable of playing a dud tune that Anderson will be remembered.

In the 80s and 90s Paul was one of the first wave of big name DJs, popular across Britain with promoters who knew his presence on a flyer would be a draw for paying punters and sufficiently revered to be able to take his music across Europe. He was a champion of soul, funk, hip-hop and the shuffling good times-inflected music known as boogie, but it was the sounds of house and garage with which he will be most closely associated.

He was an ambassador for house music in the UK and a trailblazer at warehouse clubs and raves, positioning himself at the forefront of many of the key shifts in UK club culture and influencing a generation of new DJs as well as many others in the music business, including future household names such as Soul II Soul co-founder Jazzie B, Trevor Nelson and Norman Jay.

Paul’s early years were hard. He was born in Hackney, east London, the second youngest of six children of Jamaican-born parents, Valentine Anderson, a building site foreman, and Mavis (nee Walker), a seamstress. When Paul was two, following his parents’ divorce, he and his siblings, Valerita, Conseta, Mitzi, Leopold and Hayley, were dispersed into care. He spent the next 14 years in a series of often bleak and violent children’s homes, including one where food rations were so thin that apple scrumping and pantry-raiding became part of his survival strategy.

He attended Enfield grammar school, where his athletic prowess earned him stints in the youth football teams of Arsenal, Tottenham and Charlton before various injuries ended what could have been another career entirely.

It was in the 70s, at the Soho nightclub Crackers, that he first came to prominence as a DJ. Run by George Power, a charismatic Greek Cypriot DJ from north London, Crackers was based in a pub in Wardour Street and opened its doors on a Friday lunchtime, guaranteeing that the club would be packed with truanting schoolchildren. The entrance fee of 50p also included sausage and chips, and the club became a mecca for the (sometimes literally) hungry young soul crowd who came to dance.

Power soon started leaving Paul in charge of the decks while he attended to business elsewhere, and Paul taught himself to mix, perfecting the skills that would become his trade. Dancing was as important as the music in those days, and Paul’s balletic moves, based on close study of the films of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, enabled him to take on the older boys – famous clubland dancers such as Trevor Shakes and Horace - for the title of King of Crackers.

With his reputation building, he was soon DJing across London’s growing network of black music clubs, including Kisses in Peckham, where he met Gordon Mac, a young DJ and promoter. It was Gordon who would become the driving force of Kiss FM, a pirate station founded by Power with the radio engineer Pyers Easton and another DJ, Tosca Jackson, in 1985.

By now Paul was known as Paul “Trouble” Anderson, a name he later adopted by deed poll, and inspired by his love of go-go, the richly layered funk from Washington DC and its pre-eminent band Trouble Funk. A founding DJ at Kiss, he became an increasingly important asset for the station in its battle for credibility and worked there for 13 years, initially in its prime Saturday night spot, from 9 to 11pm.

After Kiss became legal in 1990, Paul’s relationship with its owners began to decline as corporate shareholders and commercial concerns came to dominate, shunting him from his ad-free Saturday mix show into ever later slots.

He left in 1998, and for a generation of music lovers who continued to view Paul as a visionaryit was an unforgivable transgression from which Kiss would never recover. However, his relationship with Gordon survived, and Gordon later brought Paul to his new station, Mi-Soul, a digital, legal recreation of the original pirate Kiss FM.

For the past five years Paul had a monthly residency at the Bussey building in Peckham, where he built a new young fanbase, and his popularity ensured that he was in constant demand with bookings all over Britain and Europe.

His lung cancer was first diagnosed in 2011, and although he entered a period of remission after major surgery he was diagnosed with new tumours this summer. He broadcast his final Mi-Soul radio show in November.

Paul is survived by his children, Heidi (with Kerry Ashton), Paul (with Monica Reid), Rio (with Lisa Mason), and a grandson, Jamie-Lee.

• Paul O’Connor Trouble Anderson, DJ, born 28 September 1959; died 2 December 2018