Dan Reed Network / FM / Gun
London Shepherd’s Bush Empire
With three bands each celebrating an album’s 30th anniversary, and taking it in turns to headline, it’s time to party like it’s 1989.
If success is measured by the company you keep, then Dan Reed should have been a superstar. Back in 1989, the singer and his band, Portland, Oregon funk rock contenders the Dan Reed Network, were holed up in New York, working with funk legend Nile Rodgers on their second album, Slam. Rodgers was the founder of disco visionaries Chic, and the producer who dusted albums by David Bowie and Madonna with platinum.
When they weren’t working hard, Reed and his bandmates would head to the Columbus Café, an Upper West Side eatery favoured by the Mob. Reed remembers hanging out with Wall Street stars Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen while the latter laughingly related “how he just got his ass kicked by a kung fu expert cab driver”. Other times he found himself invited to card games in underground clubs in Chinatown. “Five or six poker tables set up, musicians, actors and Mafia guys playing cards, beautiful women walking around.”
It was at the Columbus, too, that Reed met John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family and at the time the most powerful Mafia boss in America.
