About The Show   

Dancefloor classics has been on Solar Radio since the former London based pirate radio station first began broadcasting on satellite in 1998 when an opportunity arose for the station to lease airtime from the classic rock satellite station EKR. It has remained a regular weekly show presented by Les Adams through the various metamorphic developments of Solar radio to it’s current home on Sky digital. 

Les is joined each week by Brett Baker an avid soul music fan and collector who plays his "Baker's Choice", a selection of four great soul dance records from his extensive collection.

The show covers the full spectrum of soulful dance music from disco to jazz funk and soul classics, mainly from the 1980’s, considered by most to be the prime decade for the genre. It also plays some of the great 70’s and early 90’s classics. 

Other features include the weekly non-stop 15-20 minute mix of soul classics blended in Les "Mixdoctor" Adams style and The Chiller.

Whilst the show has been available on the Internet for some years, the recent addition of a broadcast quality podcast has extended the audience with thousands of subscribers in more than 40 countries including the USA, Asia and Australia weekly. The number of listeners and countries increases on a daily basis.

Apart from the great soul anthems you might expect to hear, the show concentrates on the lesser played gems that will have you screaming TUNE as the memories of when your Saturday night was THE night for dancing to the best in soul dance music.

Putting a show together - Production

Dancefloor Classics is pre-recorded, usually on a Friday morning and production of the next edition starts almost as soon as the show has been broadcast. Days are spent replying to listener emails and sorting through the requests. if a listener asks for a song that is not in the library a search is made on download sites such as Napster and itunes. If it is not available from there the search is expanded to the Internet, specialist record shops and Ebay.

The music library is indexed on a spreadsheet showing the BPM (tempo), title, artist, library index details and the date the track was last played on the show. Dozens of songs are first highlighted to compile a "short list" from which the final selection is made. Once the final list is completed artists are researched on the Internet to find snippets of information about them to read on-air.

The weekly mix is pre-recorded for playback on the show.

After pre-production, the show is recorded in "real time"  and ad-lib just as a live broadcast would be.  Mistakes are left in as this makes the show sound more spontaneous and natural. 

Once the master has been recorded, the technical side of getting it to you begins. The show has to be compressed in two different formats, ogg.vorbis for the Sky broadcast and mp3 for the podcast. The masters are then uploaded via a high speed broadband link to the Solar radio and itunes servers respectively.

See music policy page for a more detailed explanation of the show’s playlist policy.  

View the Playlists to see the details of every record played on the show since January 2004