“Success has no taste, or smell, and when you get used to it, it’s as if it didn’t exist” says Huma Rojo in Almodóvar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Tragically insatiable as human beings may / may not be, Norman Jay MBE seems momentarily appeased: “The Queen could have given me a chocolate biscuit, I’d still be happy”, he says, departing for once from his slick media-type tones into a 1970s Nottin’ ‘ill bubble.

Norman Jay, veteran DJ of house with a black flavour, is also co-founder of Kiss FM, the only black DJ to be awarded an MBE, and has run everything from the wharehouse to the rare groove [he coined the genre], owning arguably the biggest sound system at the Notting Hill Carnival, Good Times, leading Phonogram imprint Talkin’ Loud with Gilles Peterson – and yet despite these diadems Jay sees himself as a mere DJ – “I’m just a travelling minstrel going from castle to castle”.

Jay left the BBC in a huff last year when his show was taken off FM and put on digital. He gives me the exclusive that he has agreed a new deal with the corporation, renewing a relationship with radio that began back on an autumnal night on the third floor of a block of flats in Charlton, south east London in 1985. “That was my first ever pirate broadcast on Kiss FM” he remembers. “It was a Tuesday night between 7.30 and 8.30 – we had an hour. I was really nervous and didn’t speak a lot. I still remember the tunes I played that night. The guy who played the very next show the following week was Jonathan More from Coldcut.”

These days Jay can seem like a grumpy old man, referring tetchily to new artists who “just want do it all themselves” and avoid being groomed by their labels. This seems at odds with Gilles Peterson’s interpretation that he was too much of a free spirit to work label like Talkin’ Loud, and seems to back up Jay’s occasional confessed lack of artistic independence: “I’m a DJ – I’ll play whatever you want me to play. The only time I’ll really play what I want will be at my own Good Times system at carnival.”

Jay seems to be involved in every black music scene going since the late 70s – he even DJed at a block party in Brooklyn in 1979: “It was the summer, and for these kinds of blocks the streets would be shut off, the residents would put up tables, prepare food. It was a fantastic feeling – the sun was beating down, we had the system set up on the pavement, my aunt had all the food ready on the stoop, and we rocked the afternoon away with a mixture of funk, soul and calypso. In those days he had one of the largest Caribbean systems in Brooklyn, called Dr Wax.”

Although Jay has been playing a few Motown sets recently on Brick Lane, his first love was a type of soul music that came just after that era: the Sound of Philadelphia. This was a sound that had become more sophisticated than the simple house bands of Motown, with bigger budgets to include complex orchestral string sections [violin, viola] and better recording techniques for a lusher feel.

He brought this taste to his Notting Hill carnival sound system, and was immediately the ostracized by the roots reggae regulars. “A big Rasta man would come up and try and intimidate you. This was serious rivalry because I played music that was really against the grain, gay New York disco and raunchy James Brown. When you play to a black crowd it really is a baptism of fire. In those days you cut your teeth playing in front of a pretty hostile crowd, and it was your your job to win them over. The bedroom DJs of today had it easy…” he trails off in irritation, all Victor Meldrew.

When Jay was in New York in the lates 1970s he cottoned on to the scene revolving around Paradise Garage nightclub, which was mixing disco and dance music [the term “garage” emerged from there]. He started his own pre-acid house wharehouse parties playing what he’d heard out there: “I was playing the earliest Chicago house and Detroit techno records alongside James Brown and Luther Vandross and the Clash – completely mixing up the music. It was the first time rasta men would be dancing next to sloanes.” He doesn’t, however take credit for bringing house music to the UK, adding that people like Jazzie M, Colin Faver, Colin Dale, Steve Jackson and Danny Rampling were more influential.

His partner at the wharehouse parties, that used to go down in places like King’s Cross and Southwark, was Judge Jules – who got his nickname from Norman Jay: “It was because he was a law student at the LSE. I said to him ‘Here I am hanging with someone who in ten years time will be sending my mates to jail for drugs!’”

In the words of Gilles Peterson, Jay is someone who “creates a vibe around him wherever he goes”. Forever bedecked in a box-fresh hat, he is an instantly recognizable character on the scene. On the phone, his enthusiasm and energy are apparent at once, as is his uncomplicated humility when describing his gong: “I’ve got more of a chance of winning the lottery. It’s the fact that I was acknowledged by the highest authority in the land.” ‘Highest authority in the land’? sounds a bit like my granddad…but then there’s a bit of that in old Norm too.

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