Former St Martins DJ returns 38 years on for 2025 reunion
On Saturday 23 August 2025, I’ll be returning to DJ an event for a St Martin’s crowd for the first time in 38 years!
It’ll be more a case of Alan Freeman than Fatboy Slim, but I’ll be spinning all the favourite JCR tunes from the 80s, 90s, and, no doubt, some other decades too.
That’s the date of the SMSU Reunion 2025, the must-attend event of the year if you attended St Martin’s College in Lancaster during the years 1985-1995.
Book your ticket and find out more HERE.
We’re also holding an online SMSU 2025 Warm-Up Party with a live radio show on Friday 25 April ... but more on that later!
I’m Paul Teague and I attended St Martins from 1983 until 1987.
I was the editor of ‘The Saint’ magazine in 1986, the year before my graduation.
Although my degree was in teaching, I came to Lancaster with the sole intention of starting a career in radio. After college, I taught for three years, then finally landed a job with the BBC in 1992. I’m now a BBC pensioner. So, to that end, two of the first things I did when I arrived in Lancaster in 1983 was to contact the then head of entertainments, a student called Mark if memory serves me correctly, and to sign up for a weekly radio show at University Radio Bailrigg, Lancaster University’s student radio station.
I’d set up my own disco at the age of 16, when doing my ‘O’ levels (remember them?) and I'd run it until I left for St Martin’s in September 1983.
I then moved to the Junior Common Room (JCR), that wonderful Student Union (SU) location where generations of Smarties students have danced the night away and become a little worse for wear.
I loved doing events in the JCR and would take on as many gigs as I could lay my hands on. If you remember the DJ who used to finish the night with the theme tune to Postman Pat, that was me. That song was supposed to get the persistent stragglers off the dance floor, but still they kept dancing!
In those days it was vinyl only on the decks, 45rpm records, all lined up in a large wooden crate. We didn’t take many photos either in the 80s, so I don’t actually have any images of me working in the JCR. If you have any images of the JCR we would love to see them (email alumni@cumbria.ac.uk)
The SU did an excellent job of keeping the tunes up-do-date, so the dance floor was always packed with students getting down to the latest tunes.
Here are my Top 10 tunes from my DJ-days from 1983-1987 - this is what we were all dancing to back then.
- Blue Monday - New Order
- Jump - Van Halen
- Relax - Frankie Goes To Hollywood
- New Song- Howard Jones
- Bad Boys - Wham
- You Spin Me Round - Dead or Alive
- It’s Raining Men - The Weather Girls
- Chaka Khan - I Feel For You
- Modern Love - David Bowie
- Temptation - Heaven 17
It’s a connection from those years that led to me spinning the tunes at this year’s reunion event, and it came about in a circuitous way.
Charlie Satterly was in charge of Entz in my latter days as a student, so it was Charlie I used to deal with whenever I was booked to DJ. Charlie is one of the fab team organising this year’s reunion event. (Charlie used to book in a brilliant covers band called Shady - anybody remember them?)
These days I’m an author, writing crime thrillers, and Charlie just happened to have read my Morecambe-based series. He left a comment on my Facebook page (a positive one, I’m pleased to add!), I recognised his name, reached out to him, and it turns out that we’ve both become runners since leaving college. So, these days, Charlie is usually taking photographs of me participating in Lancaster-based 10k races, red-faced and exhausted (me, not Charlie!)
So, it was only a hop, skip and jump away when I decided to resurrect my DJ career and offer my services for this year’s reunion event; I think they’d refer to me as an ‘OG’ Smarties DJ these days.
I’ve turned sixty this year, so instead of buying a sports car and dying my hair jet black, I decided instead to go back to some of the things I loved doing before careers, mortgages, car loans and kids came along.
I’ve bought all the kit, loaded up with music and got the hang of using MP3s though, to be fair, I have used electronic music files for years on the radio.
In the old days, when I was 16, me and my mate pinched our disco name - Cloud 9 - out of Record Mirror. These days you need a DJ name - apparently - so I’ve gone for DJCheezMachine.
I’m specialising in older audiences, so 70s, 80s & 90s are my primary years. That audience grew up with old-school DJs spinning the tunes on vinyl, so that’s what I’ll be recreating, the ‘good old days’ of our youth. As I said earlier, more Alan Freeman than Fatboy Slim.
We’re also trying something new this year in the form of an SMSU 2025 Reunion Warm-Up Party. This will be a live ‘radio show’, delivered via your PC, laptop, tablet or handheld device, on Friday 25 April, 19:00 – 20:00.
For two hours I’ll be playing your favourite tunes from your JCR days at St Martin’s, passing on your messages and dedications to your fellow alumni, and telling you more about the main event in August.
Just click on THIS LINK at 7pm on Friday 25 April, and you’ll be able to join in.
Thanks to technology which wasn’t even thought about last time I DJ’d at a St Martin’s event, you can now send music requests and dedications directly to me - and virtually - while I’m doing the live show!
So, if you’ve already bought your ticket, if you’re on the fence, or you can’t make it but desperately don’t want to miss out, join us at 7pm for the live, online radio stream.
And if you haven’t got your reunion tickets for Saturday 23 August yet, you get them HERE.
When I DJ on that night in August, it will be a time of wonderful nostalgia for me and I can’t think of a DJ gig that I’d be happier to deliver in my mid-life return to the decks.
For attendees, it’ll be a wonderful night of memories, fun, dancing, laughing and reminiscences - along with great food and the occasional drink.
Oh, and I won’t be ending the evening with the theme tune from Postman Pat this time around.
See you there!
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