I wanna do a Mamyrock too. I want to grow old disgracefully.
A crowd of drinkers parts amid whoops and applause as the star enters the café. Her make-up artist follows a respectable distance behind. A poster from one her gigs hangs on the wall. I am not here to meet Lady Gaga or Paloma Faith, but MamyRock, the 69-year-old British DJ earning cult status with her leopard-skin tops, gold chains and dark glasses in nightclubs from Paris to Istanbul.
“People love me,” she says as she sits down and orders a cup of tea. “Why they love me, I don’t know. But they do. It’s crazy, incredible, ridiculous.’” Back in her native Bristol, MamyRock is known as Ruth Flowers, the parish councillor who turns up to meetings in jeans when she is not delivering talks to the local historical society on such topics as Charles Dickens and the six wives of Henry VIII.
A few days before meeting me in a fashionable Parisian cafe, she had been discussing planning applications in her village near Bristol. Yet that night — at an hour when most people of her age are fretting over insomnia — she was due on stage in front of 2,000 to 3,000 fans in a discotheque in Lisbon. Search for her on the Net and you can see her in action at the Queen Club in Paris earlier this year. As the lights flash and a mix of house, electro-rock and Queen booms across the dance floor, Ruth leans over the edge of the stage to do high fives with la jeunesse below. A couple of weeks later, she was in Luxembourg, where she spent an hour signing autographs and posing for photographs after her show had finished at 4am. This month, she will release her first single, Mamyrock, that includes the lyrics: “She’s the new DJ, nothing’s going to stop her, no, she never surrenders.” You can bet your bottom euro that it will be a hit in Europe and perhaps beyond, given that clubs from Singapore to Canada have heard about MamyRock and want to book her.
It is all a far cry from the time when she was moving around Britain to follow Ron, her late husband, who was an engineer with the Ministry of Defence. While he worked on projects of strategic importance for the national interest, she had her own general store outside Bristol and a fabric store in Buckinghamshire. Both were “a great success. But you can’t put down all I did,” she says in a grandmotherly tone as she sees me scribbling frantically. “It’s been a very packed life, I’m afraid.”
The daughter of a Methodist preacher, Ruth grew up to the sound of hymns and developed an interest in a wide range of music, from Bizet to Queen. She trained as a mezzo-soprano and has always sung, although never professionally. In the Algarve, where she lived with her late husband for 10 years after his retirement she was part of an amateur group, called Lana and Friends, which performed hits by the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber. She is also an enthusiastic participant in an amateur dramatics, a qualified masseuse and a trained public speaker who gives talks on sewing well as history. At the age of 57, she ran the London marathon.
“All my life people have said to me you should be on stage, but fame is not something I’ve really craved,” she says. “I can’t understand people who just want to be famous.”
“MamyRock” first emerged after her husband’s death, when she discovered at her grandson’s birthday party that “they don’t have games such as pass the parcel nowadays. They have disco. It was very loud and very flashy, flashy, flashy lights. I was struck by all the joy they were getting from this music and all the energy and I said to my grandson, ‘Nana could do this.’ He said, ‘That would be so cool’.” Ruth’s original scheme was to run weekly dances for local teenagers, whom, she says, were singularly short of Saturday night activities.
Meanwhile, in Paris, the record producer Aurélien Simon, was wondering whether there might not be a market for a DJ who broke the Gallic stereotype of a tanned young man with tight trousers and designer stubble. He heard about Ruth through a mutual acquaintance, and got in touch. “He said, I’ve been thinking along the lines of developing someone into an elderly DJ,” says Ruth. “I thought that’s about the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. But I thought and I thought and in the end I thought, well, crazy sometimes works.”
The first thing was to get a name: MamyRock suited, since mamy means granny in French. Then there was the look: wild, grey hair, make-up by LadyBlue and an imposing quantity of bling. When we meet, Ruth has enough metal on her to make Puff Daddy envious and the biggest dark glasses you have ever seen. “Can I take them off now,” she says on arrival. “I can’t see anything with them on.” Finally came the lessons on how to be a DJ. Ruth already had some idea since she had watched her brother running dances in the 1940s and 1950s . But he handled vinyl. Ruth was expected to use digital mixers, CD players, consoles and host of other equipment.
Fortunately, Simon had a DJ friend who taught her what to do. “There’s an awful lot to remember,” she admits. “But he is very patient. He says: ‘Now what have you forgotten?’ And I stop and think and after a while I remember. You put your CD on and you play it and you listen in to see when it’s time for a change and you get the next one lined up and you get it in, you put the earphones on, twiddle twiddle, and you get both discs going the same speed and when it’s ready to switch over, you switch over.” Sound complicated? For four or so years it was — Ruth learnt the trade but never got asked to perform anywhere other than a handful of small, private parties.
“I was thinking, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all, all this tripping over to Paris. But I love a challenge and I’m not one to give up easily.” Her determination bore fruit last year when a representative of the exclusive Murano hotel group stumbled upon a MamyRock clip on the web and decided that she was the DJ needed for its annual party at the Cannes Film Festival. The night was a stunning success and marked her take-off into the clubbing stratosphere. She has since done gigs in Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, Holland, Belgium and Portugal, as well as France. Dates in Eastern Europe and South and North America are to follow.
The only country which appears to think that OAPs should be sitting in their dressing gowns and slippers is the UK — to Ruth’s regret, since she would love to perform at home. But it’s difficult to imagine that Britain’s youth culture will hold out against the granny beat for long, and in the meantime, she can bask in Continental popularity.
“What I enjoy is meeting all these young people . They love me and they say I’m wonderful. I get messages from people saying you’ve given us hope, you are an inspiration,” Ruth says. “A young DJ wrote to say that he’d been trying to break into the business for 10 years and I’d given him the hope to carry on.”
Perhaps the greatest compliment came from her grandson, now a teenager. ”He thinks I’m the coolest thing that’s ever lived,” says Ruth. It seems that no one in Paris is going to disagree
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 124489.ece
I want to die young, not die old.
I want to be headbanging and wigging out to top tunes when I'm 89 1/2.
I want to live till I die!
Pretty cool, but funny!