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Tuesday 22 August 2017

"Thank God For That"

Ahhh the trials and tribulations of DJing.

It being August, I was expecting a quiet night, and my expectations did not change upon arrival.  Students are away, it is holiday and festival season - August should be a quiet month.

I plugged my headphones in, which I had just received back from the beautiful person that I had lent them to, and they only worked in one ear.  Sigh.

Then some guy started having a go at me about playing a 'warm-down' set.  He was pretty much the only person on the dancefloor, yet he was expecting me to bash it out for him - the usual "you don't know what you are doing" kind of shit.

At one point he was like "come on then", intimating me to mix the next track, to which I said "there's another 5 minutes left of this track", in a jokey way.  He didn't appreciate my sense of humour and for a short while I thought I'd be calling for security.

Thankfully, my good friend, Jack, from Mixmag, was on hand to help explain that it was a warm-up set and drag him into the garden.

I was a little unsettled, but I was trying to concentrate on playing a good set.  I had not practiced (no headphones), nor did I have any new tracks, or any idea of what I was going to play.  I had simply put in a random minimal CD and taken it from there.

I did, of course, end up playing some tracks that I'd played before - one of which got a couple of compliments - quite a sparse, spaced-out bass-filled track - one Italian guy was trying to tell me how much he liked it.


His English was more minimal than my music, but I think he asked me what the track was called.  I didn't have the name, so I told him to Shazam it. He opened Linked In and I gave him my details.

It started to fill up quite nicely, so I progressed into house music, and it this track certainly got the crowd moving.



I was very happy by the end of the night, people were enjoying my music, I was getting a fair few compliments (and requests for all kinds of shite - Sean Paul anyone?) and most importantly, people were dancing.  It was busier than normal downstairs and people were sticking.

And then when I finished DJing, I thought I heard someone say "thank god for that".  Not only someone, but someone we had booked to DJ before.  I'm not going to say who, in case I am wrong.  Most of you won't know him anyway.  But I wasn't amused.

It was an awesome night overall.  Super-rammed for a while and continued busy until I left around 2am to go to Perfect Fried Chicken for the first time in a decade.  Yeah it's shite.

I'm pretty gutted that I'm not DJing next month - I asked for the month off.  Doh.  But I'll be back in October, and it will be one that the old Mango crew will be very keen on.

And all being well, I'll have a copy of the set to put up.  I don't think I fucked up much?!