My first days of disco couldn't have started in a better or more appropriate place, The Gold Mine on Canvey Island. To holiday on the Island may have seemed like a fortnight in West Beirut at the height of the bombing season, but from the hot summer of 76 when the Glenn Miller craze was in full, er, swing through to the turn of the decade, to go clubbing there was the height of good taste.
The music was the freshest on the planet, fashion got invented there - second hand vintage, early punk and futuristic New Romantic - various faces from Depeche Mode, Spandau Ballet, Sade, loads of media including Janet Street Porter and Robert Elms and even Paula Yates with Bob Geldof all came along to see what they were missing out on or could nick for their own.
As a local boy, I couldn t believe my luck. All this on my own door step meant my weekends became an established ritual. It would start in bed on a Saturday morning with, of course, Robbie Vincent. Robbie would then get up to go and present the milestone Radio London Show from which I'd take a note of the new sounds before skipping off to Record Man in Rayleigh, Adrians in Westcliffe, or Golden Disc in Southend, to make sure I owned them by tea-time.
There would also be a visit to the hairdressers to make sure the wedge still looked immaculate and a poke around my personal fashion emporium, Griffins, where perhaps a pair of green pleated trousers with red piping, a two tone cowboy shirt and fourteen foot long coloured belt (for added danglyness) would be purchased to wow the crowds with.
As I said, The GoldMine made being an Essex soul boy the perfect life but I soon discovered its charms spread much further then that. On more than one occasion I can remember waking up to my mum cooking breakfast for two clenched fistfuls of Northerners while a walk on the beach would find plenty of refugees camped out waiting for their first trains home.

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