Oh What A Time... - #28 Nightlife (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

THIS IS PART TWO, FOR PART ONE.. CHECK THE FEED YESTERDAY! Throw on your gladrags and pop on your dancing shoes because this week we're discussing: nightlife! What was a night out like in a Roman pub? How did DJing become a thing? A once insanely popular Turkish drink which definitely isn't custard. And our bonus part for the full timers; the circus! Thank you for all your wonderful correspondence, do keep it coming in along with any episode ideas you might have at: [e-mail] This is Part Two, but if you want both parts going forward, why not become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER? In exchange for your £4.99 to support the show, you'll get: - the 4th part of every episode and ad-free listening - episodes a week ahead of everyone else - a bonus episode every month - And first dibs on any live show tickets Subscriptions are available via AnotherSlice, Apple and Spotify. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.com You can follow us on:  X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod Aaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice? Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk). We'll see you next week! Chris, Elis and Tom x Get an Exclusive NordVPN deal here: https://nordvpn.com/owat  It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca. Hello, welcome to part two of this week's Oh What A Time. Part one was released yesterday, but if you want them all in one big juicy lump, subscribe to OhWhatATime.com and become an Oh What A Time full-timer. All right, now I want to take you back to the Ottoman Empire. We haven't touched on the Ottoman Empire too much, have we? No. It's been relatively left untouched, but yet here we are in the Ottoman Empire.

We're on the streets of old Istanbul. We're late in the evening. Maybe it's the winter is upon us. There's a bit of a chill in the air. You're on the busy streets. You hear someone chanting, boza, boza. You look out from a window down onto the street and you see a man with buckets slung over his shoulder. Boza, he cries again. One more time, he's saying, Ackman's boza, marvellous boza. And then you go up and say, chuck us one then. You place your order.

He presents you with a drink that is milky yellow liquid, thick but warming, with a topping of cinnamon. Oh, advoca. Yeah, it looks like eggnog. And anyone can drink it and just have enough of a tickle. It fights back against the chill of the evening. I had a look at what boza looks like. It looks like custard and it made me think custard hasn't really caught on in a way that you'd

imagine it possibly would custard is wonderful stuff if there was a guy walking down the street selling cups of custard i would have had far more cups of custard in my life than i have do you hear something absolutely ridiculous, Chris? Tom wrote... I know where this is going. Tom wrote a sitcom that I was one of the actors in it. So Tom obviously as the writer was on set every day

to see how we were doing because obviously it's his grand vision. And he would walk around set and everyone knew that Tom was the writer. People respected him. They were like, this is a great script man this is incredible he was walking around with a polystyrene cup of coffee i'm gonna take him seriously he looks like a writer but it was a polystyrene cup of coffee it was a polystyrene cup of custard it was yep and it wasn't actually a polystyrene cup i love you it was a coffee mug but I used to hold my hand over the top of it

so people couldn't see it was yellow and thick and not brown like coffee is. Such a load. And more to the point, I told everyone I was on a diet and I was looking after myself. And there was a point that one of the other actors came over and said, and I quote, why can I smell custard? Which I don't think you could. I didn't even know it was that strong a smell.

And I had to sort of unpeel my hand off and there was a cup of custard. I will say, though, custard is, I genuinely think custard is my favourite liquid. It is. genuinely think custard is my favourite liquid it is I love custard if I could have a custard tap in my house I would use it

minimum 400 a boiling custard tap a boiling it's amazing great stuff it's delicious it's fantastic

why were you drinking custard again it was just the dessert on set filming long days of filming. Often quite cold. I don't know. You're not bringing your own cup. Also,

crucially, there was custard there. I think that's the crucial thing. There was custard. The answer to the question, why were you drinking custard, is there was custard there. It's that simple when it comes to being custard. There's nothing more complicated. It was there, so I drank it.

Oh, man. Again, you've proved my point. Custard should be bigger than it is. Am I right in thinking that it's quite a British thing? I suppose the Portuguese have it in... Oh, what's it called? Those little, like, custard tarts. Portuguese custard tarts.

Pastel de nata, yeah. Yeah. They have a sort of custardy stuff in there. So is that custard, like, sort of birds? It's a bit thicker, but yes, it is a bit thicker. Okay. But it's very nice. It's a lovely drop.

I should explain that boza, this Turkish drink, almost nothing in common with custard other than it looks a bit custardy. In that case, I'm out. But it's actually a malt drink made by fermenting various different grains like corn and wheat, and it is one of Turkey's oldest beverages. Okay. So it's still big, is it? Well, it was enormous.

It was massive, as Isaac will explain. It is still quite big in different regions of Turkey, but it's nothing like it was. So boza was a regional speciality available throughout the southeastern Europe and Anatolia, but particularly loved in Ottoman Turkey. In the 17th century, one traveller to Istanbul noted hundreds of boza shops and thousands of employees. Just imagining hundreds of custard shops. Imagine custard shops.

This seems like my absolute dream city. Thousands of employees. Custard shops. Fantastic. You'd go on holiday and never leave. The Turkish custard crisis of 1700.

So, hundreds of bozza shops, thousands of employees and then there's bozzer sellers who walk the streets at night. This is a big thing about the nightlife. You're getting bozzer sellers walking around at night. Sometimes they're ringing bells, they're shouting

bozzer, as I alluded to at the start. And bozzer was seen as a bit of a night time drink because bozzer can go off. So it's something that's sold mainly... It can go off in the heat of the day, I should add. It's something that's mainly sold in the evening and in the winter.

And it comes in sweet and sour versions. The sweet Bozza is more often the one that's bought in the streets. The sour version is alcoholic. And you get that in kind of Bozzane. So that's alcoholic, is it, that one that you say? Yeah you say yeah yeah yeah bozane is kind of like a pub tom crane would be dead within the hour if he could if he could get pissed on alcoholic custard just to be clear when i was spotted drinking custard at half three on a tv set that wasn't alcoholic custard. I want to make that clear. It wasn't an Irish custard.

I hadn't put whiskey in it. Whatever it is you put in it. Why can I smell whiskey and custard? Exactly. It was a completely

teetotal custard. Anyway. The Bozain is kind of like a pub for Bozza. But now I'm imagining a pub that sells custard instead of pints. Yes.

That'd be, you'd love that. Oh, it'd be nice. Yeah, absolutely. If one of the taps was custard, if pints. Yes. That'd be, you'd love that. Oh, it'd be nice. Yeah, absolutely. If one of the taps was custard, if it was Heineken, Guinness, whatever, Samoguel custard, and at a point in the night,

I'm going to have a custard. It won't be a pint. I'm not mad. I definitely have half a pint of custard within the first three drinks. I'm not mad. You've got to be having a pint of custard. If first three drinks. I'm not mad. You've got to be having a pint of custard

if you're going into a custard pub. And just before I leave to go home, I'd have a final half pint of custard. One for the road. Nightcap custard.

And there'd also be a point in the evening when I walk back to the table and I'm carrying four pints of custard to my friends and my friends are like, what have you done?

What have you done? Anyway, I think it's perfectly normal. So the bozhane is where you could buy some bozza, but also some food. They would sell kebabs at the bozhane. Oh, brilliant. But rather than, you know, the turning kebab kind of lighthouse thing you have now, that chick. The elephant leg.

It would be turned manually on the spit. Someone's manually, an employee is doing that turning it around again a job from history that i think yeah i'd probably yeah i could do that i could handle the turning of the spit but you also get flatbreads uh fruit minced balls of liver offal now there was a version of bozza that was controversial the tat Bozza, so-called because it was laced with opium. Oh, wow. There's a way. Okay, this is how Tom Crane meets his end.

Now, custard is quite a comforting drink. You lace it with opium, you're having the deepest sleep of your life. I didn't think I'd have to make this little note twice in an episode, but just to be clear, when I was caught drinking custard at half-tour on a TV set, it wasn't custard containing opium. I really hope that's the final footnote of this episode. I don't want to have to keep going back to that moment in my history. But there was no opium in that custard.

See, that must have been real. Do you want... I mean, I've never had opium, but the idea of a thick drink before doing something like opium feels like a weird... Doesn't it? Like a thick, heavy, eggy drink and then some opium but the idea of a thick drink before doing something like opium feels like a weird doesn't it like a thick heavy eggy drink and then some opium doesn't i'm no expert it doesn't feel like the natural bedfellow does it i'm fine to say that i when i went to lao when i was traveling in asia i ate an opium pizza and i uh i don't know what happened to me but i felt really sleepy i went back and I slept. And when I woke up, I thought the Virgin Mary was at the foot of my bed.

Right. Offering you a custard. To be fair, I get sleepy after a Domino's. I don't think it's that unusual. Are you sure it wasn't just a quite heavy pizza? Maybe it was the pizza. Maybe it was the pizza. So anyway, right.

So if you're drinking opium-laced bozza, obviously you're on the risk of getting thrown out of the pizza. So anyway, right, so if you're drinking opium-laced bozza, obviously you run the risk of getting thrown out of the establishment. Here's the thing they did in these bozzane, which is that they would have to be a kind of referee. Think of it like a pub. It's kind of like they'd have a referee there. He's kind of like a quasi-bouncer. The individual is usually an older, elderly customer

who acts as a referee of the establishment. And what he says goes. Oh. So it's kind of like a bouncer without the physically kind of intimidating aspect. Like a respected elder, basically you're saying, yeah. A respected elder, exactly that. And people would say stuff like,

bloody hell, he could drink a lot of custard back at home. I've seen him done pint after pint of custard. He's a comedy writer, actually. He does a history podcast. Can anyone smell opium? Would that work today, the idea of some old guy? I'm not sure it would. But I like the idea.

I do like the idea. I think it maybe would. Absolutely. Because the idea. I do like the idea. I think it might, it maybe would. Absolutely. Because you'd kind of respect that, you know, it's not, the idea of the bouncers

is quite confrontational, the responsibilities of a bouncer. But if it's an older person. And I suppose they're also, you're right, respect is the thing. There would have been a galvanising kind of group.

Like, if anyone had a problem with him, then everyone else in the pub is going to back around this guy because he's respected you know they'll become one and hopefully deal with the issue if that makes sense yeah rather than just seeing what the bouncer does yeah okay no i'm with you on that i'm sold i like that so again on this aspect of nightlife the bozer sellers would march long into the night they were night travelers very much part of parcel of istanbul's evening

culture and economy easily romanticized now but they've all gone now. That whole kind of culture of the boza seller has disappeared. The boza seller still exists, but mainly at shops, delicatessens, ice cream parlours, travelling street vendors. The boza went out of fashion, largely due to kind of Ottoman and Turkish elites who had preferred the modern refinery of European beverages like

coffee, red wine, German beer in the 20th century. These new drinks kind of phased out the boza. And so, yeah, they've been put back into these shops and they're seen as a kind of, it's a bit of a gimmick now it's seen as in Istanbul, a bit of a romanticised gimmick, similar to kind of old man pubs with like antique bar billiard boards and skittle alleys. And so they're there really. The Bozza drink kind of harkens back to an older time. Absolutely fascinating. Well, I'm going to have to give one a go. Next, if I'm in Turkey, I'm going to have to have a Bozza.

And I will be thinking about Tom Crane. But how disappointing when you'd have a big sip and it doesn't taste like custard. Exactly. But then, Chris, isn't that true of every drink? It's a new day. How can you make the most of it with your membership rewards points? Earn points on everyday purchases. Use them for that long-awaited vacation. You can earn points almost anywhere,

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I'm a sort of DJ first, sort of lover second, podcaster third. The kind of DJing I do is DJing at its most basic. Okay. So name two songs that you play and then tell us how you go between them. What is the level of mixing? Zero mixing. I press play on one deck

and then when the song ends I press play on the second deck and I'll bring the fader down on the first and that really is it what a bit of air horn to mask the join no I might take the mic

and go there you go lovely superb when I was 18 I briefly did a bit of DJing in a little juicy bar in

Bath where I grew up I can't remember the name of the place was anyway my first ever gig I was so bad at mixing I just I literally

couldn't basically couldn't beat match I couldn't ever get the two records to play at the same rhythm and quite early on I managed to do somehow a seamless mix between two records and people sort of looked around and people were quite impressed and I was so amazed by this that I then took the wrong record off and the music immediately stopped. So rather than removing the one that I just mixed out of, I still remember this painful memory of just the embarrassment of loads of people going, oh, you're an idiot. What are you doing?

Did you have a DJ name? I did not, no. So you were DJ Tom Crane. Yeah, I was. And there is a big DJ called Tom Crane now. There is, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I remember once I was talking to you about exercise and being in the gym.

And we got onto the subject of what we think about when we're working out. And I said, I don't really think about anything. I'm just listening to music. And you said you think about DJing in Ibiza with your top off. It's like the vision you have in your head. That is right. Yeah, that's true. Because I listen to darts music when I run and I imagine I'm behind the ones and twos,

which is what us DJs call them, and I'm imagining the crowd going wild. After Wales got to the semi-finals of Euro 2016, I came back and I'd watched every game and it had been the most transformative just profoundly blissful experience of my life and I was at the gym

and I was running on a treadmill and I'd forgotten my headphones which is really annoying because obviously it's very hard to, just to keep your mind occupied if you don't have headphones on a treadmill but I thought, do you know what, I'll just think about Euro 2016. So I thought about every game and then it got to sort of

I don't know I'd been running for about 20 minutes or something and then I I remember the semi-final game we'd lost to Portugal of course and I imagine myself

playing in that game and I imagine myself scoring a goal late on in front of our fans and putting us in the final and I imagine myself being embraced by Gareth Bale

and Aaron Ramsey and Ashley Williams and all the players in that team. And I realised I'd done my 25 minutes or whatever, stopped the treadmill, had a look in the mirror, realised that I was in tears. I was so moved by my own sort of daydream that I'd burst into tears at the gym. I was crying and tears were dripping down my face,

like onto the treadmill. What do you think other people in that gym would have thought? Either you really hate running or you're going through a difficult breakup. Yeah, a difficult breakup. Yeah, one of the two. I thought, poor sod. His wife's left him.

So, for this explanation about the birth of nightclubbing and DJing, we're going to have to start by getting into our time machine and we're going to go back to Paris, 1953.

Okay? To a nightclub called Le Whiskey a Go-Go. So you might want to put on a nice outfit. Any ideas what you want to put on for this trip to 1953? What are you thinking? It's got to be yellow so that the custard stains don't show up.

Perfect, there you are. And Chris, West Hampshire, what are we thinking? Yeah, yeah, nice 1950s big badge. Exactly. Cotton heavy. Proud, proud. So I'll tell you about this place. Le Whisky a Go-Go was a nightclub or a bar that was

designed to appeal to american customers mainly military personnel who were still stationed in europe after the second world war and it served whiskey rather than wine which is where you what you get in most night clubs around paris at that time but crucially it was a place where you'd find a woman called regine Zilberberg. Now, Regine was an incredible person. She was of Polish-Jewish descent. She decided the Holocaust by hiding in a French convent. And then she got work in the cloakroom at La Whiskeyagogo and then worked her way all the way up to managing the club. Now, she's an incredible person, and she had an idea that would change the world. So at that time, nightclubs only featured live bands,

or in the case of La Whiskey A Go-Go, a jukebox where people chose their own songs, which actually, incidentally, is something I miss from pubs. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I do miss that. I love that. When I first went out, that experience of putting a bit of money and going, these three songs I've paid for represent me, and I want to hear it. definitely. I do miss that. I love that when I first went out, that experience of putting a bit of money and going, these three songs I've paid for represent me and I want to hear it.

I do kind of miss that. Her idea was, instead of a jukebox, was to replace it with a disc jockey who would make use of turntables to ensure that there was never a gap between the music. Now, there's quite a weird reason as to why she didn't want a gap between the music. Do you want to try and guess

why she was so desperate for consistent music? It would have been weird, no? Isn't it weird if you just play one record and stop? But that's what it would have been previously. A band would have played a song, they'd have stopped, or maybe someone would have put a record on, there'd have been a break, and the next record would have been placed on. But using multiple turntables changed that.

Why do you think she was so keen for this sort of consistent sound? I don't know. So the reason was she explained that when the music stopped, you could hear snogging in the corners and it really killed the atmosphere. I don't know who's kissing that loudly. I know the French are sort of quite amorous people. But also, yeah, if there's a hundred people snogging at the same time, it's like the purring of a cat is quite quiet, but a thousand cats purring simultaneously. You know, you'd hear that half a mile away. So it disturbed her enough

to want to sort of change the way that this nightclub approached music. And then she accompanied this constant sound by adding light above the dance floor. This had never been done before, which pulsated according to the tempo. And behind the decks, Regine and her assistant wore white lab coats and adopted the guise of an operator. That's what they referred to themselves as, just operators. They operated the equipment. Love the lab coats. Yeah, it's a great look, isn't it? It's so cool.

That's fantastic. The name Disc Jockey didn't appear at that point. But there they are, stood in lab coats. This is back in 1953, operating this equipment so people could listen to music consistently throughout the evening and people absolutely loved it immediately people just thought this is such a great way to enjoy your night out in fact her innovation was so successful that in 1958 it migrated across the Atlantic to Chicago then Los Angeles and it was copied in France elsewhere and it made its way

to London Regine soon had her own place called Chez Regine in the Parisian Latin Quarter. So this person who's come from such a difficult background suddenly has her own nightclub in Paris. She named herself the Queen of the Night. I'm not sure what the rules are on giving yourself a nickname, if that's all right. Yeah, always dodgy in my opinion. And they're always self-aggrandizing.

Yeah, absolutely. But despite the fact that Luis Guiagogo played non-stop records, the world was still waiting for its first actual DJ, someone whose job it was, who referred to himself as a DJ, who that was what their role was. But they wouldn't have to wait long, because in 1959, Austrian businessman called Franz Schwerdinger opened a new restaurant in Germany

in the city of Aachen near Cologne and it was inspired by something called Radio Luxembourg I don't know if you know Radio Luxembourg but yes yeah yeah the cult radio station that basically played pop music at this time yeah completely unheard in quite a conservative time to have pop music played before Radio 1 exactly yeah and it gained this cult status very, very quickly. And so this guy who owned this restaurant, he employed someone simply to put on records. However, it was going down so badly, basically, the people in the restaurant just weren't enjoying the music, not really getting involved. It was going so badly that a journalist who was there one night in 1959 called Klaus Quirini

drunkenly made his arrogance clear resulted in the manager coming across to him and saying okay if you think you can do better go on and he did which I admire that thoughts on that confidence if someone comes up to you in a bar goes okay you're better than that do you think you're better than that DJ get up there yourself it's a kind of ultimatum that you always think will win it's like the nightmare scenario for the stand-up comic. Yeah. Is that you're being heckled and you say, well, if you think you're funnier than me,

then come up on stage and do a bit. And then they do get on stage, actually they're the next Billy Condé. I mean, that is the nightmare scenario. And they do an hour and a half of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four gag a minute stories. So Klaus, this journalist journalist took to the decks and

loudly announced ladies and gentlemen now it's worth giving some context here there was a very popular song called a ship will come in at that point i said ladies and gentlemen we're going to roll up our trousers legs and flood this place because a ship will come with lael anderson and this huge song at the time was referenced in his jokey introduction and they absolutely loved it they found this hilarious this stupid little joke they loved his shtick and throughout the evening he told more jokes about the records he was going to play he personalized the whole thing and people just went wild and he kept riffing throughout and it went so brilliantly that by the end of the evening the manager offered him 800 deutschmarks a month

to stay on as a permanent DJ there. Looking to capitalise, he quickly gave himself a stage name, which is DJ Heinrich. And so the first DJ was born. He was the first person to call himself a DJ for it to be their primary source of employment. And this is something which is accepted widely by music historians. This chap was the first ever DJ. And within a decade, DJs were everywhere and discos were commonplace throughout Europe. So by 1975,

now bear in mind that this idea of DJs and dancing records just wasn't a thing merely 15 years ago. Earlier, by 1975, West Germany had more than three and a half thousand venues with the average DJing earning around 800800 a month, according to Billboard magazine. And the DJs took their jobs very seriously as they do today. Of course, it was quite different back then because obviously you had to take records. Billboard magazine estimated that British DJs of the period carried 500 singles and 100 albums to any gigs.

Some even more with a view to meeting any requests that they might receive. Exactly, yeah, completely. Whereas now, obviously, it's all through laptops and iTunes and all this sort of stuff. Some even more with a view to meeting any requests that they might receive. Exactly, yeah, completely. Whereas now, obviously, it's all through laptops and iTunes, all this sort of stuff. People were dragging around 600 records with them to gigs. In terms of popular culture, there can't be many bigger innovators ever.

Yeah. Because DJs, do you know what? This is genuinely true. This sounds absolutely ridiculous. Izzy and I fancied a takeaway, and I said, don't we have an ad for ages, fish and chips? There's a really nice chippy near us. Yeah.

It is small, okay? So it's like you can probably get six people in this chippy at most, and there's a vending machine that sells cans of Tango and Fanta and stuff. In the probably, I don't know, 18-inch gap between the vending machine and the counter where all the fish and sausages were, he had squeezed in a DJ. That's not where I expect an anecdote to go. At 8 p.mpm on a Friday night and there were people queuing in the street

just trying to buy a Samoyed and chips. And he's playing like Balearic anthems. It was like April. Oh, that's so great. But they are everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. If you remove DJs from the modern night out, it would be utterly different.

Completely. And this is all down to Regine Zibelberg, who, as I say, if she hadn't had such a hatred for snogging and a want to sort of block it out with consistent noise, we probably wouldn't have minutiae sound and pasture and all these sort of things we have today. So God bless her.

There you go. That's nightclubbing and djs so this is part two part one came out yesterday but if you want both parts together as they should be in one lovely piece then do sign up at owhattatime.com and become an Oh What A Time full timer we will forever be in your debt

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Stick five stars down. It all helps spread the word. Not if you're one of our enemies. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Thank you so much, guys, for your time. And, yeah, we really appreciate it. Goodbye. We'll see you next week. Thank you.