Strictly News met Melanie and Adam, the people behind Melanie's Swingers and Melanie's Amateurs. Their videos of genuine swinging parties and first-time porn stars are well known, and are available through their own web sites and at Strictly Broadband, as well as on DVD from all good sex shops.

This is the first time we've interviewed swingers for Strictly News, tell me how all this started.

Adam: We've been together since kids – just after school.

Melanie: don't want to say how long, I'm only 21! (laughs)

A: We've been together for a long time haven't we?

M: We've been doing the web sites for nearly ten years!

Have you always been swingers?

M: No – him and magazines, that's what corrupted me. Mayfair was the first one, then we just started... I found his stash first and I was intrigued about it, then we started talking about swinging, fantasising about it, bringing it into our play, imagining what it would be like with other people, then a few years later we decided to take the next step, to actually try it, and we did!

So you had a party?

M: No, we got a computer and went to a site we saw on New Direction, one of the first swingers' sites. We joined and met a couple from Norwich. We met them at a Little Chef for security reasons: to avoid taking axe murderers home! They seemed really nice so we went back to ours. Nobody did anything for hours, because nobody dared... nobody had the courage to start off so we were babbling total shite for ages, waiting for someone to make the first move. After about five hours, about one a.m. I decided, “Fuck this”, so I took my top off and got naked. In fact I think that's how every meeting we've ever had starts! And it went from there... so we had a great time, swapped partners and we were sitting round the fire having a drink, and they suddenly started talking about moving in, and falling in love and stuff!

M: Exactly! That was our first experience and it did put us off for a few months. We were still going on the Internet but in most of the mags most of the people were in their 40s and above. We were in our 20s and it was hard to find people our age into swinging. So finally we got ripped off on a pay site and the site owners basically said, “What you gonna do, build your own?” So we did! We built a home page to start with... there weren't many free swinging sites around. There were only two other sites around then, plus ours. Our first one was called UK Contacts. So it started as a home page for us to meet other couples, but then people started mailing us and saying “Will you put our details on there?” And it just grew and grew, with Adam sitting there all weekend typing in HTML on one big web page. I know nothing about computers at all, Adam does all that. I just worry about organising the swingers and making the movies.

You seem like a good team!

M: We haven't told you how we funded the building of the web site. It was about 1999, and Adam's Mum won the lottery (five numbers plus the bonus). At the same time, the News of the World had just gone undercover at a party we'd organised, and were going to expose us. So we thought we'd better tell the family what we'd been up to. So we told his mum first, and she basically turned round and said “Where do you think you get it from?” which was mortifying! Then I told my Mum, and they were perfectly fine with it. The posh part of the family don't like it... so we don't have to buy them Xmas presents anymore!

Did the News of the World do the sting?

A: No they didn't, in the end they didn't. Back then the fact that we were swingers was a big deal. The police were still busting swingers parties back then. These days, nobody bats an eyelid.

M: So anyway, the web site was becoming more and more work to maintain. Adam says to his Mum that he's thinking of quitting the clinic (where he worked as a physiotherapist), and she said, “OK, I'll pay your wages, whatever you were getting at the clinic, for six months”. And that's how it all got started!

Back to your amateur days. A lot of people would think it's weird seeing your partner with someone else. Was there jealousy?

M: In the beginning – not exactly jealousy, but... you see Adam's quite big and I can't do certain things with him, like deep throat him, and this first couple we met, the girl could deep-throat him, and in my head I'm like, “You bitch!”. But then, I can't ride Adam like I can with smaller guys, so I could with this other guy, and Adam was like, “Hey we can't do that”, so it was that sort of jealousy, not because we were with different people. We did have a couple of rows in the beginning, and then we thought, hang on, it's not because it's better, it's just different.

A: The other thing is, people think we swing 24/7. We don't! Swinging's just a part of our sex life, it's not our whole sex life.

M: We don't have to worry about cheating. We don't cheat because we always do what we do with each other's permission. Another thing was my bi side – I really wanted to play around with girls, and I couldn't if we didn't do this. That's my main thing now: the ladies. I've done the guys, done everything I wanted to try, on more than one occasion! But we both like the ladies, don't we?

A: Yes we do! She likes them and I like them. But, with the pressure being off over affairs, you're less likely to go looking around.

M: It's like, if I'm on a night out, Adam says “If you pull, bring her home!”

A: She can bring home who she wants.

M: So long as I phone him first so he can get the house tidy! (laughs)

A: I don't own Mel. If that what she wants to do, it's her life, you know. So that's cool. But luckily she brings home the ladies.

M: Well these days, Adam's actually in the movies, so I'm going out and finding him shags. I can't play at the moment as I'm pregnant, but he can, so he's having all the fun! (laughs)

So you're his pimp? (laughter)

M: He says he'll go on Trisha and complain that I force him to do it...

A: Can you imagine the publicity?

Do it!

M: I really reckon you should! (laughing)

A: It'll get us loads of hits on the site. Get the URL out there! It's easy... we got to the stage at one point where we were getting friends to “out” us to the News of the World, because we'd figured out the entire marketing plan, had the web site ready to go and everything. But they never ran with the story.

So after your simple listings site, what then?

M: We started making money from AVS (Adult Verification Systems).

A: It was purely a contact thing, but then Mel decided she wanted to start making movies.

M: Yeah, we used to go to Amsterdam a lot, and bring a lot of porn back for ourselves. But we got bored of the same old porn, with girls doing the same old positions, getting banged and looking bored stupid. So I thought, “I'm gonna give it a try and see if I can do my own”. So I started off with some crappy home cameras. It was really fun organising the first shoot. I advertised a party on the web site and people started contacting me saying, “Actually that sounds like fun”, I had some single guys, some single girls, a few couples, I had more people say they were coming – some let me down at the last minute. The party was supposed to be in Redcar, in Yorkshire. We had people staying in the hotel where it was supposed to be filmed, and that morning the hotel phoned us to say, “You can't come here, the press are outside, they've got wind of it!” So we thought, what can we do? We've got thirteen or fourteen people coming down, couples are staying at the hotel, you know... so I had this friend who was helping me film, and she rang around to call it off – then she finds out that one of the guys involved has got a big posh apartment in Carlisle that we can use. So we rang around and everyone was up for it. So we changed the plan, and we all met at a leisure centre first, so everybody got to know each other beforehand. Then we got to this guy's place and because everyone knew each other by then, it went great, it was so easy!

How many people were there?

M: There were twelve players, then there was the other girl Tiff who was helping me film. But halfway through I turned around and there's Tiff standing there naked and joining in, and her camera's on a tripod! Me and Kaz were trying to run three cameras. I was going in close with the hand-held, and I'm climbing over people and going around people, and Kaz is trying to run 2 cameras while Tiff's right in the middle of it. Then again so was Adam!

A: You threw me in darling!

M: One of the women, Wendy was saying to Adam, “Come on, come on”, to him... so he's like “OK, why not?”

So you were trying to direct but your crew fell apart?

A: (laughs) Yeah, but it was the best shoot we've ever done

M: I've got guys there, shagging away, and I'm saying to people, “Can you hold your hand out so I can hold on to you and climb over?” It was funny! So that was the first shoot.

What year was this?

M: 2003. We sent the tapes a a distributor, but we got messed around, nothing happened and eventually we asked for the tapes back. It was 2004 before we got the tapes back, so we went to find someone else, and found Greg from Primetime, and he was really quick off the mark.

A: Great bloke, very sharp, knows everyone in the business.

M: So he started editing, I took him the tapes and got a DVD back which was nice and easy. But after a while I thought, I reckon I can do this myself. So I got some books, and now I edit my own movies.

M: Melanie's Swingers. Then we did a couple of Melanie's Amateurs, then Swingers 2.

Do they have different themes?

M: - Swingers are all shot at real parties, Amateurs titles are couples, small groups, threesomes, that kind of thing.

What's your full catalogue now?

A: We have Melanie's Swingers 1 and 2, Melanie's Amateurs 1 to 5. Then there's Newbies, so that's eight titles and another 2 or 3 coming out.

M: Actually I've got another 4-5 waiting to be edited! (laughs)

A: The DVD market's really not good, so we don't know if it's worth bringing out any more DVDs.

M: People don't want DVDs, these days they can download it.

Is piracy causing a problem?

A: Yes, and restrictive practices. HMV can still sell DVDs by the shed-loads, but it's the restrictive adult market that's hurting DVD sales.

M: If we could sell by mail order it would be different, but UK law doesn't allow us to. It is ridiculous – that other countries can make money by selling our DVDs by mail order but we can't. But that's why online does so well, so we're not complaining.

You run your own sites don't you, as well as sell your films at Strictly Broadband?

M: Melanie's Swingers and Melanie's Movies

A: We've got a load of other sites too – we've been building them for a decade

Do you earn more online than on DVD? Ben Dover told us that he only recently started selling more online than on DVD.

A: We've always sold more online than on DVD – we started off online

M: It's what we know

Mel and Adam, on behalf of Strictly News, thanks very much for your time.

Check out all their movies on Strictly Broadband!