Rob Gallagher - Galliano/Earl Zinger - 2001

Can you keep a secret? In some ways it seems unfair to blow his cover, but Rob Gallagher has avoided detection for some time under aliai and project names such as Galliano, Two Banks Of Four, and the increasingly prolific, Earl Zinger. 

CMU agents met the man in a confidential location to trade microfilm:

“While I was at school I was getting into soul. We used to go to the Electric ballroom in Camden in the early eighties, and it was funk downstairs and jazz upstairs; it didn’t mean JAZZ it just meant anything at a 100 miles an hour. In about 1983 when Gilles took over from the DJ, Paul Murphy, I met him there and we became mates. Later on we were putting on jazz nights while the Nicky Holloways and Danny Ramplings were doing the soul-weekenders and Ibizas.”

“It must have been around 87 or 88 that Galliano formed. I was just doing mad rants at places like Dingwall’s [Camden], and I met Eddie Piller [Acid Jazz] who said we could make a record. Although everything we’d done previously was DJ/club based, he was coming at it more from the live angle.” 

 “By the end of 97 we had gone our separate ways, and I started doing a lot of little things all over the place. If Galliano was anything it was a door, a door into a whole range of musical opportunities. So everyone’s doing their own thing now.” 

Unlike most artists, who are lucky if they can hold down one working project, Zinger started a lifelong habit of having “many fingers in many pies”. These pies included indulging the many  sides of his own fractured personality as well as the creation of his own Red Egyptian Records and the home-studio in the upstairs of his house.        

“For a year or so after Galliano, I was just upstairs making obscure music. Putting out weird little things here and there. But that was good because I didn’t have to think about selling – I just thought ‘well no ones doing that so I’ll do it a little bit like this’. I was just doing anything: I did loads of mad Talking Headsie kind of coming-off-all-weird early-eighties New Yorkie-tip, a sort of four to the floor stuff. But I was doing that at the same time as doing the Red Egyptian stuff at the same time as writing the Two Banks Of Four thing [which amongst others included the talents of Valerie Etienne and Demus of the Young Disciples]. There wasn’t a definite ‘I’m inspired by this – lets do this’: the various styles and projects all happened at the same time.”

For the last couple of years Earl Zinger 7” ebbed into the racks, a strange yet pleasing combination of urban poetry, sub-cultural satire, parody, dub, beats and wit. With their limited numbers, the 7” soon became highly sought after, and soon K7 licensed the ‘Put Your Phazers On Stun’ LP, a compilation of 7”s and new material.  

“People get genuinely irritated that I only do 500 copies. Which is why I put it all on an album. People love collecting things, which I never thought of. I meet people who have got all the things… and I think ‘Ah, maybe I should have kept some’.”

Earl Zinger and his Red Egyptian imprint have seen talents such as Aquinas Tunebelly, Lenny Kostanza, Mr DC and most recently Angelo Hectic: about which there is a rumour circulating – the track ‘For All the Girls I’ve Loved’ is said to be by Zinger and another prominent person on the leftfield dance scene. 

Here are your clues super-sleuths: Koop/Sie collaborations, Red Egypt, Secret Waltz and be suspicious of artists with names like Ryuichi Iyota. Hunt this man down.