Patrick Forge is a London DJ and broadcaster from Ipswich, Suffolk, who co-founded the Sunday club night Talkin’ Loud and Saying Something at Dingwalls in Camden with Gilles Peterson in 1986. He hosted Kiss FM’s Cosmic Jam for 21 years, until September 2008, and has recorded and toured since 1994 as a member of the Brazilian-influenced group Da Lata.
Six years running Dingwalls with Gilles Peterson
Forge and Gilles Peterson ran Talkin’ Loud and Saying Something, a Sunday afternoon session at Dingwalls in Camden Lock, from 1986 to 1991. The name came from a James Brown and Bobby Byrd record. Peterson already had the residency and invited Forge to co-DJ after hearing his pirate radio show on Kiss FM. Forge later recalled the first night drew about 150 people, with doors running from around 12:30pm to 6:30pm.
Forge has pushed back on the retrospective acid jazz label the night is often filed under, saying flatly that calling Dingwalls an acid jazz club is wrong. The bill mixed modal jazz played at peak time with soul, house and live bands rather than sticking to one sound. Peterson and Forge revived the format in 2008 as an occasional event, Another Sunday Afternoon at Dingwalls, and it has continued as a periodic booking since, most recently a Christmas all-dayer at Neon194 in Piccadilly on 22 December 2024.
Forge’s own route to Dingwalls started when he stood in for Peterson on the Special Branch show at the Royal Oak, a slot he had wanted for years after building up a collection of jazz and Latin records. Wikipedia’s entry for the venue describes the resulting Sunday sessions as mixing jazz dance, rare groove, fusion, Latin and the newer sounds of hip hop and house for a crowd of dedicated dancers.
Twenty-one years on Kiss FM’s Cosmic Jam
Forge started on Kiss FM while it was still an unlicensed pirate station, before it won a legal London licence in September 1990, and kept a Sunday-night show there called Cosmic Jam for 21 years. His Discogs artist page describes him as the only DJ still broadcasting on Kiss FM in 2008 who had been there since the station’s start, with his final Kiss show going out on 14 September 2008.
After Kiss, Forge lived in Okinawa, Japan, for roughly two years before returning to London around 2010. Cosmic Jam carried on under the same name on Mi-Soul Radio, broadcast Sunday nights from 11pm to 1am, with an online archive of episodes running from at least 2015. He has hosted a monthly show on NTS Radio since 2014. In 1996 he compiled The Rebirth of Cool Six with Trevor Wyatt for the label 4th and Broadway, one instalment in its long-running jazz and hip-hop compilation series, and wrote its liner notes.
During the Kiss years Forge worked at Reckless Records alongside Jonathan More, later of Coldcut, and crossed paths on air with other early broadcasters there including Norman Jay. Away from radio he also ran residencies including Inspiration Information with Phil Asher and Brazilian Love Affair, both at Notting Hill Arts Club, each running for more than a decade.
Da Lata, Songs from the Tin and Fabiola
In 1994 Forge and multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck formed Da Lata, a group built on Brazilian and Afro-Latin rhythm drawn from the same records Forge had been playing on Kiss FM and at Dingwalls. Da Lata’s debut album, Songs from the Tin, came out on Palm Pictures in 2000, followed by Serious on the same label in 2003.
The group then worked without a major label, releasing a cover of The Jam’s Going Underground as a single in December 2012. Fabiola followed on the UK label Agogo Records in October 2013, the first Da Lata album made after Forge and Franck moved back to London from several years living in Japan.
Da Lata’s albums featured guest contributions from Baaba Maal, Bebel Gilberto and Femi Kuti among others. The group grew out of an earlier, differently named project Forge had recorded with Franck and percussionist Carl Smith for the Paris label Big Cheese Records in the early 1990s, before that lineup broke up and Da Lata took shape with Franck as the constant partner.
Discography
| Year | Release | Label |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | The Rebirth of Cool Six | 4th & Broadway |
| 2000 | Songs from the Tin | Palm Pictures |
| 2003 | Serious | Palm Pictures |
| 2012 | Going Underground | |
| 2013 | Fabiola | Agogo Records |
What the night is actually like
There is no 2026 Ibiza date to list for Patrick Forge. None of the Ibiza venue sites, ticketing pages or trade press checked for this record show any booking, past or present, and his documented career runs through London club nights and UK radio rather than the Balearic circuit. The more reliable way to hear him now is the periodic Another Sunday Afternoon at Dingwalls reunion with Gilles Peterson, most recently staged in December 2024, or his monthly show on NTS Radio.