How I got into salsa

The two questions I always get asked are:
How long have you been teaching salsa?
How did you get into salsa?

Fliss and I c.1996

Back in the early nineteen nighties (last century!) my girlfriend Felicity aka Fliss aka D.J. Felicidad and I went down to the Notting Hill Carnival. Way off the main drag was a cul-du-sac with a loan sound system playing some alien music. "It's salsa" Fliss had had a Mexican landlady who'd taken her along to a virtually unknown artist call Celia Cruz. When I say unknown, I mean of course to the mainstream British public.
In front of the sound system people were dancing. It was a bit like jive and a bit like ball room but strangely different. There was no apparent uniform, everyone worn the fashions of the day. The movements were spinny and wiggly and smooth but nothin like I'd seen on Come Dancing ("mum can we turn over pleeeeaaaase") For years I thought it was sequin dancing as they all wore sequins. I still think that's a more accurate term than sequence dancing!
My point is, that this dance was different.
There was a flyer on the floor so I picked it up. It was for a Saturday night dance in Leicester Square run by a company called Salsa Fusion. It had an hour's class before so we could do that then dance all night!
We went, we did the class, we sat down and watched all night. Clearly more classes required.

To cut a long story short, we kept going to classes. We joined the Salsa Fusion demonstration team who we're still in touch will and danced at our wedding. We started to do some demonstrations of freestyle salsa for fun. One was at The Old Bull Art's Centre in High Barnet. By chance the following week a Colombian couple was supposed to start a ten week course. They didn't show so I got the call asking if I could take over the course.
That was April 1995
But the way: that picture was taken by my late father against some green curtains with Fliss wearing mum's high heels, a size to big, as she didn't have any! It's been part of our logo ever since.