Deejay Wheelie-Bag with his new games

A DJ who says he is too hard of hearing to get everybody on the dance floor any more has started a new adventure designing wacky games.

Inventor Denys Avis is well known throughout north London and the festival circuit as Deejay Wheelie Bag after making a mobile music unit on four casters.

It saved him carrying around his vinyl records to pubs and parties, and soon he found he was making more for friends who loved the idea.

But after donating much of his 7,500-strong collection of seven-inch records to charity, he has been searching around for something new.

“My hearing went and I thought, ‘I can’t really DJ and not hear’,” he said.

“So I decided to focus on making games instead. Lockdown was very difficult for people like me and my partner because we were in our 70s, well we were vulnerable and we couldn’t go out.”

His new inventions are flat-pack tabletop games that players have to build themselves.

“The games are not about commercialism and making money,” he said.

An early mobile music unit invention

“It’s about the fact that I lost touch with people during lockdown. I never went out, didn’t see people, and I couldn’t perform any more because of my hearing.”

He said his love of DJ-ing had always been about bringing people together.

When he made a wheelie-bag unit for other record collectors, he insisted on one request.

“I said to everyone that if you have one then you must come to an annual event,” Wheelie Bag said.

“So, all of these people with wheelie bags turned up to the Mildmay Working Men’s Club, and if you didn’t agree, I said I’ll come round, give you your money back, and take the machine back.”

He said he wants his games to create a fantasy world of innocent fun at a time when technological instant gratification is what is on offer to most of us.

“People say that kids just want things straight away – they don’t want to learn anything, they just want to open a box and play it and chuck it away, or they want to go on a screen,”he said.

“This is just not that. If you want to play one of my games, you’ve got to build it first.

“You’ve got to understand how it works, and that slows everything down.”

Wheelie Bag’s games are illustrated with 1950s-style comic book characters drawn by Vince Ray, one of his friends from the music scene.

“My games have to look not just like the comic, but like the front cover of the comic. The best bit of the comic,” he said.

The DJ is selling his wares on Amazon, but anyone can come down and look at the games in his FUNpack games showroom in Higbury Quadrant, if they make an appointment via email,  info@funpackgames.co.uk and go towww.deejaywheeliebag.co.uk to see how the games are played.