Paul Hallam

Paul Hallam is a British DJ and former Mod Impresario. Born in Staines, Middlesex, England in 1965, Hallam began his career as a professional Mod in 1983 aged 17 by djing and promoting his RnB nights at Feltham Football Club and a Mod club called Sneakers, which was run by he and Richard "Shirley" Early and is now fondly remembered as "the mod club" of the 1980s period.
Later that year he launched his own fanzine Sense of Style - which was arguably the first professionally typeset and printed fanzine due to Hallams day job in print and design.
In the latter part of the decade he along with many others left the mod scene preferring the Jazz Revival scene which saw Hallam work as the resident dj at the world famous 100 Club for nearly 10 years.
In the early 90s Hallam partly abandoned music for a career in politics. Running twice for councillor in very Tory Cobham and also making a speech at the Labour Party Conference of 1992 introduced by the then shadow home secretary Tony Blair.
In 1997 at the height of Brit Pop he dj'd and promoted Club Popcorn along with fellow former mod Dave Edwards at the Oxford Street club. Other 100 club events he was responsible for included the reformation gig of the Mod Revival band The Chords and the sold out 20th anniversary Punk festival (which was unfortunately 21 years on after the original event) which saw the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and Mark Perry return to the club for the first since the original festival.

In 1999 he became associate producer for the Save GLR campaign promoting the 2 night fund raising concerts at the 100 club which included Bez and Joe Strummer, Inspiral Carpets Tom Hingley and Spizz Energi who would go on to work with Paul in the next decade.
Just before the turn of the millennium he bought a 50% stake in the Northern Bohemian Velvet Rock Club in Teplice.

In 2000 he fulfilled a lifetime ambition of owning his own London bar by opening the S.M.E.R.S.H. bar in the then not quite so fashionable Shoreditch. Ran with fellow former mod Eddie Piller the bar sold eastern European drinks in a cold war style bunker.
BBC'S Big Read top 100 books of all time used SMERSH to film its James Bond piece in 2003 with Hallam providing the cold war narration for the TV show. Bizarre in the fact that Hallam had never read an Ian Flemming book.
Smersh is generally remembered as the first cool bar of Shoreditch.
Throughout the early 2000s Hallam worked on radio with the former Punk legend Spizz including a residency on one of the pioneers of internet radio Soul 24-7 for almost two years before being sacked for "talking too much on air".
In 2003 he founded the company Filthy Lucre Limited which purchased Filthy Macnastys pub in Islington - spiritual home of The Libertines and former real home of Pete Doherty who worked was working as a barman and the Gladstone in Borough. Filthys claimed to sell the second best Guinness In London.
Hallam DJ's less these days but did guest on the Craig Charles show on BBC Radio 6 in 2005 and has worked at both the Isle of Wight festival - on the same bill as the Rolling Stones and is a regular at the Isle of Wight scooter festival every August.
He is married with two daughters and lives in Cobham, Surrey.

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