Denys Avis

THEY are all hand-built, using the finest – well, bits and pieces is possibly the best description – Denys Avis could find.

Carefully bolted, glued and nailed together, his Wheelie Bag sound systems have been sent out to all four corners of the British Isles to thrill, enthrall and entertain.

Denys, aka DeeJay Wheelie Bag, designed and built nearly 50 eye-catching mobile record decks and sound systems for the enthusiast of performance quirk.

Denys, who lives in Highbury, had carved a reputation as a DJ playing records off his home-built entertainment system – and so spectacular was his work that he began making them for others.

But 10 years ago he decided to donate his vast collection of 45s to a charity and concentrate on his other love: inventing games and toys.

Now, a decade on, he has contacted those he made Wheelie Bag sound systems for and tracked what has happened to them since. The result is a hilarious book about the adventures his inventions have been on.

DJ Wheelie Bag combined playing 45s with audience games. “I stopped DJing and turned to making games,” he recalls. “Some were based on games I’d play with people while I was doing the show.”

Denys invented OK Play, a game of skill using coloured squares to form five in a row – a game so popular it has now sold 500,000 units and is the number one travel game sold on Amazon.

It made him turn his mind back to the fun he had as a DJ and entertainer. “Due to OK Play doing well, I thought how lucky I had been to live a fairly interesting life, so I thought it was time to start writing the story about DJ Wheelie Bag, and include that in the invention of this game.” he told Review.

He invented OK Play In the mid-1970s Denys was working as a teacher at the Kingsway adult education college in Clerkenwell and inventing toys and games after school.

A friend of his was a painter and worked for the artist Bridget Riley, known for her striking modernist / abstract patterned canvases.

“I said to Bridget, ‘What’s it like, painting all these lines all day long?’ She said ‘They start vibrating after a while’,” he says.

“I was interested to see if this was true, so I started painting squares, with the idea to see if I could invent a game with vibrating colours.

Wheelie Bag No 20

“They didn’t. But I had made all these little squares that I was fiddling about with. Around that time Connect Four had come out but it is a game that is limited because you play it in a frame and that makes it a bit restrictive.

“I thought – what if there is no frame? What if you need to get five in a row instead of four? It would make it more tricky.”

It was an immediate success. “Hamleys put it in their store and I went to demonstrate how to play it. It sold out in the first weekend.”

When he hung up his headphones in 2015 and went back to inventing games, he recalled the success of OK Play.

“I looked back and thought – well, if I am making games, then I should make this one first. I put my hard-earned DJ-ing money into getting it made and I took it to the Toy Fair in Olympia to demonstrate it.”

But toy manufacturers had already got wind of Denys’ invention.

“A company came across a copy in a Shoreditch bar owned by a friend of mine,” he says. “They had one for customers, and people working for a toy firm called Big Potato had found the game there and enjoyed it. Before the Toy Fair began they were licensed to produce it.”

Denys now decided it was time to find out what had happened to his other most successful invention – the DJ-ing wheelie bags.

He had written a Wheelie Bag annual 25 years previously to celebrate the range he had made. “I thought I’d write my memoirs and I began wondering what had happened to the 50-odd Wheelie Bags I had made,” he says.

He searched for Wheelie Bag owners and with a bit of detective work managed to track many of them down.

“I invited them to tell me what had happened to them since they got a Wheelie Bag and send me a picture. Every person I met had an amazing story to tell. As I discovered, a lot has obviously happened to them down the years.”

Perhaps the best known Wheelie Bag owner is Gaz Mayall, who runs the Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues sound system at the Notting HIll Carnival.

Denys created a “polished chrome chassis” paired with a funky leopard skin interior and a selection of his favourite 45s on display.

It was recently part of an exhibition Gaz curated at Fulham Town Hall depicting the history of the Notting Hill Carnival.

“It now sits just inside his front door in full working order, patiently awaiting its next wheel out,” he says.

We hear of Wheelie Bag Number 38, called Sonic Friction – which lives on a roof terrace overlooking Athens, Greece, and is still well loved and well used. Number 26, built for DJ Treasure Island – a man called Jamie – is in good working order except for castor wheels that like to head off in different directions. It has made it to Italy.

DJ Bootlegger’s Wheelie Bag has done nearly 500 gigs and remains on the road with DJ Captain Phil, while another called La Trolley Bergere has spent time on canals and the Thames.

“We all shared this spirit of playing 45s,” says Denys. “It was not just making a crazy machine, it just kept this wonderful artifact, the vinyl 45, these little pieces of history, heard. They were all special performances, one record at a time. Writing this book reunited me with people I had not seen for years. It is amazing – a celebration of life in all its glory – and some of them are still rocking.”

DJ Wheelie Bag / Denys no longer makes these marvellous machines: “I am afraid I am at the age that I don’t like crawling around on the floor looking for nuts and bolts, fiddling around on my back looking to attach this to that,” he explains.

“And the music world and DJing has changed, the type of music played is so different. I used to do a lot of speaking and playing games while I played records, interacting with the audience, and that’s not done anymore.

“The thing about being a DJ is it lets you perform with other people’s brilliant music. You see the crowd being pleased and the music turns an event into something special.

“I played music I could talk about – I was always on the microphone. And that’s what the Wheelie Bags let people do.”

• Wheelie Bag Annual 2. Available for £10 at www.deejaywheeliebag.co.uk/about/