How The Streetbeat Salsa Co. began

This April 2025,  I clock up thirty years as a salsa teacher, most of which have been as a full time salsa teacher and promoter.  It’s something I’m proud of and as part of that celebration, I wish to offer some personal reflections on my life in salsa.
 

 

A good place to start is with the birth of The Streetbeat Salsa Co. The origin story.

 

 

 

Fliss a.k.a. DJ Felicidad and I had been learning salsa since Aug 1992. We’d learnt in central London mainly from the late Stephanie Lipton who founded Salsa Fusion and Julio who still runs it today. By 1993/4 we were in their demonstration team where we made many lifelong friends. In Summer 1994 many of the demonstration team danced at our wedding and later that year Fliss and I started to do some demonstrations at various events around London. I’d helped out with the Salsa Fusion classes a few times but really didn’t have any ambition to teach.

At the time, there was a fair amount of interest in this strange new Latin dance called Salsa, although not many people had seen it. It was ten years before Youtube started in April 2005! Few had access to the internet and it was sloooooow with dial up modems often taking minutes to reveal a single image. There were even less websites around and Streetbeat was a relatively early adopter with our first web site in 1996! This was where the term ‘London Style’ (of salsa) was first ever published. But I digress...

One gig in March/April 1995 was at an arts showcase on stage at the Old Bull Theatre in High Barnet on the northern outer edge of London. It had the usual problems of rubberised stages and miss understood sound cues, but that never seemed to matter because nobody had seen salsa so it looked fresh and vibrant whatever we did.

 

Unknown to us there was supposed to be a ten week salsa class starting at the Old Bull a week or two later led by a Colombian couple. Then out of the blue, the Old Bull called and said the Colombian teachers hadn't shown up for the first class and since they had our telephone number (land line of course!) could we cover the class as it had sold out? It is strange now to think back to this pre-internet world where you had to know people in the know to access their contact details. I said yes, and off we went for our first ever class in April 1995. It went well enough and we completed the course and then continued with a regular weekly class. 

It became clear over that first course that I liked teaching salsa and there was also an exciting opportunity to explore the marketing of classes. This was a big appeal as at the time I was managing a garden centre in Harrow (oh the rock ‘n roll lifestyle!) and most of the marketing/ buying decisions were annual e.g. Guess how many Christmas trees we’d sell this year based on last year's sales? By comparison, marketing a dance class was instant. Place an advert and people either came that week or didn’t. This feedback loop of action and response meant that adverts could be tweaked and improved all the time, which is vital. As John Wanamaker (1838-1922) said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

 

In this period salsa dancing was just breaking out of central London and most of the suburbs were competition free. In addition to the weekly salsa classes at the Old Bull, I started classes in Harrow. Once a month on Fridays we started a salsa social and at the Old Bull. The Old Bull’s bar area was cool with a good replica of the famous Lascaux prehistoric cave painting of a bull, but my regular classes were in a portacabin in the car park out the back of the centre! I like to say I’ve worked my way up from a carpark to a basement! But at least I can say I started to teach by invitation!

Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that we (Fliss and I) weren't called The Streetbeat Salsa Co. back then! The original name was ..... The Red Hot Salsa Co. Back then ‘Red Hot’  was a well used catchphrase in advertising so I hopped onto the trending band wagon. Unfortunately just after I’d had some T-shirts made I found out there was another Red Hot salsa who'd beaten us to the band wagon so we changed to The Streetbeat Salsa Co.

This was the nineties and new ideas we're emerging like NLP. I didn't want to teach the same way that others did. Traditional classes spoon fed students with a trickle of information to be repeated until perfected. A perfect teaching system for ballet perhaps, but I prioritised the students becoming  ‘club competent’ i.e. being able to get onto a dance floor and dance salsa. The sooner they could dance, the sooner they would come to our events and spread the word at other promoter’s events. I also found that ‘Fun’ was essential to a successful class. In my opinion then, as now, super disciplined drills were an awful way to spend your free time and do little to develop freestyle creativity. I needed a way to differentiate my approach to other’s so I branded the teaching method Salsa Rapido® and trademarked it. I gave Salsa Rapido a strap line of ‘The Fast and Fun way into Salsa’ which shrank to ‘Fast ‘n Fun’ and these days with the psychological content and well-being themes has grown into ‘Fast, Fun & Feeling Great’.

It’s worth recognising the huge benefit of the pay as you go system of salsa teaching that is still dominant in the UK today. As a rookie salsa teacher I made mistakes. We all do. Those mistakes meant some people didn’t come back and I felt their loss. Had I run ten week courses, those mistakes may have not been felt so clearly until the end of the ten weeks and my teaching wouldn’t have improved as quickly as it did. Give me another thirty years and I’ll get it just right :)

Conclusions:
If you have a passion, do it! Don’t wait to be asked, although being asked is very nice, it's also very rare, so the chances are you won’t ever get started. Be a player, not a wannabe waiting hopefully on the sidelines. I’ve seen so many people who could teach salsa dance very well, but they never took the opportunity, so my first point is:
Do it!! Break into your market!

Secondly: you don’t have to be the best, just good enough, but you do have to be in the game. Once you’re in you gain experience quickly. You’ll learn more from mistakes than successes so get out there and make some mistakes.

Finally: Expect the unexpected. When I started teaching in 1995 I would never have guessed I’d still be teaching salsa thirty years later. I’d never have guessed that the salsa scene would have been here thirty years later!  It was just a ten week gig that grew into something special, something exciting and something that still fires my passion for dance be it: the Salsa Rapido courses in London, or the Thames Salsa Cruise, or the new and shiny Mambalsa Project. It’s been a great journey for me, so what about you? What's you passion?

As Hunter S. Thompson said:

    “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well preserved body,
        but rather to skid in broadside,
            thoroughly used up,
                totally worn out,
                    and loudly proclaiming,
                        “Wow what a ride!”
   

More soon :)

Bar Salsa! and Me

In the blink of an eye, we've clocked up thirty years!

A better question is why? Well, a couple of years / a few years / several years / many years ..... Okay! Thirty years ago! we did a very similar thing at the same venue, but back then it was titled: my Stag Party!

 

 

 

Salsa Soho AKA Bar Salsa AKA Salsa! is the cornerstone of the UK salsa scene. Like Ronnie Scotts just up the road it's been around for ages and everyone in the London salsa scene knows of it. To some it's the home of their social life. To others it is the living hell of a salsa club diluted with non-dancers and less purist dancers than their personal offinaddo status deserves. Whether alluring or sleazy, a parody of Latino culture or a home from home, Salsa! endures. Buyout after buyout owner after owner it now resides in Stonegate's ‘special portfolio’ of quirky but profitable venues. Profitable because it navigates between bar, restaurant, cafe, dance studio and club seven nights per week. Always vibrant and exciting.

Unlike Ronnie Scotts and it's status within the jazz community, Salsa! has never traded off its Latino heritage. It's always selling itself to the next generation of dancers who've just discovered Latin music and dancing. The closest it has come to being the ‘home of salsa', was after a refurb many years ago when the corridor to the toilets was going to become London’s ‘Salsa Hall of Fame’. The teachers at Salsa!, myself included, were invited to provide a framed picture (at our expense) to hang under a brass plaque announcing ‘Salsa Hall of Fame’. No doubt as internationally famous salseros visited London they too would be inducted. Sadly the plaque was never made and my picture hangs, along with the others on the ‘Corridor to the Toilets.’

Click for a YouTube clip of us dancing

Last Thursday was a special night for Fliss and I. We went out dancing, albeit middle aged style, with cocktails, a meal and mucho vinos!

Where did we go? Salsa!

Yep! That's us 30 years ago at Salsa!

We haven't changed a bit! Honest!

Salsa Soho has been going even longer than our marriage! I'm guessing it was around 1990-1992 that it was converted from a US chain restaurant: Chicago Meatpackers. It wasn't much of a conversion as the mezzanine was kept in place that once had a model railway running around on top of it. The tall and very solid round tables below are today  used by the bar, and if you ever have to move them you'll find out just how solid they are! I often joke that some of the chewing gum under the tables have world heritage status! Maybe future archaeologists will prove me right.

I never went to it before it was Bar Salsa but I believe Jorge, who runs the highly successful Sunday night at Salsa Temple used to work there as a waiter! Food blogger Bill King, writes in his blog

“We especially liked Chicago Meatpackers in London’s Charing Cross district, where they had a lot of railroad memorabilia and a model train chugging around the room. We got a kick out of a notice on the menu (aimed at British customers, I assume) advising that good steaks should not be eaten well-done!”

Originally Salsa! was a group of five restaurants. I believe the tiny one in Edinburgh’s GrassMarket is still going but under different ownership. There is also Salsa Temple above Temple tube station by the Thames. Slasa Temple was not quite the expansion of the Salsa! brand people think. At the height of the property boom fueled by dodgy Russian dough, the landlords of the block in which Salsa! resides decided to reclaim the basement venue and convert it into luxury apartments. Stonegate, Salsa!’s operating company, had just brought out the Walkabout Pub group, the largest of which was at Temple. This was rapidly converted into Salsa Temple and all teachers DJ's etc were given the order to move. Just before opening the property market in that sector crashed and Salsa Soho's least was extended leaving two bar Salsa!s hence Salsa Soho and Salsa Temple.

So I'd met this violinist years earlier at a pub in Hampstead where I'd hired out my mini PA system to a band she was playing with. Fling became dates, became a trip around the world, became moving in together in a nineties version of an ageless story. 

We went to the Notting Hill Carnival in the summer of 1992 and to avoid the crowds, we slipped down a side street away from the main procession. There was a Latin sound stage pumping out some strange alien music with people dancing a partner dance that clearly wasn't jive or ballroom. Whether it was the music, the dance or the sunshine, I don’t know, but it looked good. I remember reaching down and picking up a flyer. ‘Free one hour class before the dance’. Perfect! I remember thinking an hour would be more than enough to be able to dance all night! We went, enjoyed the class and sat and watched the dancers dance with a far greater appreciation of their skill. We were hooked!

By the time we first went to Salsa! it was in full swing as a Brazilian/ Latin American restaurant. That's why the signage colours are still green and yellow. People forget, or weren't born - which is a fair excuse, that Brazilian dance i.e. Samba and Lambada were arguably more popular than salsa in London in the early nineties; and the combined Latino scene was smaller than the Modern Jive scene, created and led by Ceroc. Ballroom and Latin was in its death throes as venue after venue was converted into Supermarkets (Archway, Muswell Hill)  or lap dancing venues (Tottenham Court Road Spearmint Rhinos, Farringdon's EC1 club). Ballroom had yet to be resuscitated by Strictly Come Dancing, which twenty years after its launch is now in its death throes as bullying and harassment claims amount.

The London Salsa scene had gained a foothold in 1987 when Nelson Batista started teaching (he'd forgotten the exact year when I last asked him). He was closely followed by Colombian Xiomara Granados (forgive my spelling). Nelson's original sidekick was none other than Elder Sanchez who by the early nineties set up Salsateca. I once borrowed, and sadly returned, a VHS video of a T.V. documentary clip on salsa featuring Nelson and Elder dancing away. They both looked hilariously young! Oh how I'm eating those words today as I compare myself now to our wedding pictures! 

1994 was the start of the golden era for salsa dancing in the UK. At the time there were under eight teachers in London at central London venues. I would drive twelve miles from Stanmore to Euston to meet Fliss for our salsa classes with Salsa Fusion. Parking was a lot easier back then! By the end of 1995 salsa had broken out of central London and into the suburbs and suddenly there were over eighty classes inside the M25! It felt like surfing a tsunami wave spreading out from central London!

Salsa! was was my list. We all had one. A list of venues spanning the week that everyone knew about. Mondays Salsa! with Ramero's night (before he moved to Sound in Leicester Square). Tuesday's Bar Rumba- Shaftesbury Ave, Wednesdays La Finca- Kings Cross, etc. 

Ramiro Zapatta ran a competition once a month and we saw Robert Charlamagne and partner in a dance off against Susanna Montero and Chandi. It was awesome and in hindsight significant. Robert, at the time, represented a smooth, fluid, rotational London style that fused Cubanesque moves with Afro Caribbean effortlessness and a lot of Robert's personal funk. It was playful and inspiring. Susanna captivated us with the cheeky aire of a ballet dancer being naughty. Her style became more linear as the LA style influence grew in London. A style she championed at the expense of the original London style. 

I first used the term London Style on my website in 1996 but Leon Rose later used it in the late nineties to refer to a soft linear style that had swept across Europe and remains prevalent today. Let’s face it, it's hard to maintain the anger and angst expressed by the underprivileged Los Angeles Latino communities through L.A. style, when you've grown up in some leafy European suburb! I didn't know it then, but Robert and Susanna were playing out the ancient story of the wren, representing the old year, being killed by the robin of the new year. (Yes that's why we have robins on Christmas cards)

Having started teaching in 1995 my first professional association with Bar Salsa! was in 2002 when I set up a monthly get together of salsa teachers called The Salsa Instructors Forum. Its aim was to share good teaching practice and it was useful and successful. I was also venturing out to Europe dancing a solo demo with a mop and office chair (called Catno. as in catalogue number) 

By 2003 I ran my first full day improvers course and then at beginners level and kaboom! I'd hit on the untapped market of people wanting to learn dance who couldn't make or tolerate weekly classes. The Salsa Rapido 1-Day Intensive course was born, but I'd run out of weekend days and my congress demos and forums fell by the wayside. 

Although I'd been a full time salsa teacher since 1997, only now did we have enough income and stability to buy a home. To the young people out there, I know what it's like to spend years working hard but watching the housing market seem ever further away. 

My courses still run weekly and my teaching has evolved immeasurably to today's intersection of dance psychology and well-being. The 1-Day courses and its five hour group dynamic, also gave me the chance to develop my comedy skills and I credit my five shows at the Edinburgh Fringe to the many many guinea pigs that were tested on during my salsa intensives. It was also the 1-Day courses that fueled my interest in psychology. The group dynamics and the systems of fun, communication etc, all led me to a point where I trained as a counsellor. It was a retirement plan that I had little intention of using in any significant way until I started seeing clients during training who allowed me into their lives. The retirement plan really paid off when I needed chemotherapy last year and could barely teach dance.

That leads me onto the purpose of this piece. It's an open letter of gratitude to three things that are very special to me:

Bar Salsa! AKA Salsa Soho. A dear friend that has been with me on my journey for over three decades. The kindness of the management team during covid and my cancer journey was of the highest calibre. 

To Salsa, that strange alien music and dance that still inspires me.

Above all, to my wife Felicity AKA DJ Felicidad, who has shared and witnessed my journey. Happy anniversary :)

Me with Fadi and Fliss

Salsa! in full swing