Hard to imagine now but I was once a hot club DJ. I now need to go to bed on the same day I got up but once upon a time – in fact, hundreds of times upon a time – I dropped big tunes at famous clubs including Le Beat Route, the Camden Palace and Stringfellows. I was knee-deep in cocaine and hookers but had no interest in either. My only interest was the glory I gleaned from filling a dancefloor with shiny, happy people.
Being irredeemably shallow and easily flattered, I faux-reluctantly agreed
Playing clubs was relatively easy. Revellers were keen to dance, especially those who arrived, shall we just say, ready-stimulated. Far harder were the countless parties and weddings in featureless function suites, council estate community centres and the backrooms of pubs that made the Queen Vic look like Claridge’s. There is no crueller shame than an empty dancefloor, where nothing you play will coax any guest to shake a leg until Dr Alcohol has done his work. Your only friend is time, so you have to use it wisely and skilfully until eventually, a handbag is placed on the dancefloor and three girls start dancing around it.
You then need to keep them there and encourage others to join them. Not verbally – nobody wants to hear your sprightly repartee – but musically. You have to build the atmosphere slowly, keeping an eye on your demographic and playing what you think they might enjoy. Take requests by all means but unless a high percentage of guests are male, long-haired and double-denimed, ignore the bloke who keeps saying, ‘Got any Quo?’
All this came back to me as I entered The Windermere, a rambling old pub near Wembley for my mate Pete’s daughter’s 21st birthday party. It was in the function room at the back – a venue I’ve played many times but not since there were Cortinas in the car park.
Surprisingly, the place was mostly unchanged – apart from the DJ equipment. Instead of big heavy decks and weighty crates of vinyl, all the DJ needed was a laptop containing thousands of tracks and a software program to mix them together into one seamless set. Though such sets are often mixed in advance with little thought to whether the punters will actually enjoy them.
Such were my musings when Pete, at least four pints in, seemed to read my mind. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ he grinned. This was ridiculous. I hadn’t ‘played out’ for years and I told him I wouldn’t have a clue how to operate the software. But Pete was having none of it. ‘It’s a laptop’, he said, ‘How hard can it be?’ For a technological dimwit like me, very hard indeed but Pete then played his trump card. ‘You were so brilliant at our wedding’, he said, ‘Do it for me and Kath’.
Being irredeemably shallow and easily flattered, I faux-reluctantly agreed and once I’d been shown how it all worked, I realised how absurdly simple being a DJ has become. Drag and drop a track onto the virtual turntable and press play. That’s about it. Among the laptop’s compendious library of dance tracks I didn’t recognise, I still found plenty that I did. So I dragged them out of retirement and dropped them into place.
Bang! The opening salvo of The Trammps’ ‘Disco Inferno’ roared out of the speakers and the number of people on the dancefloor immediately doubled, as did their average age. The kids watched with a mixture of horror and awe as their parents partied like it was 1979.
I dropped one 20th century floor filler after another and the kids quickly went for it too. God, I was enjoying this but I’d been very lucky. It was already 10.30 so I’d unwittingly timed it to enjoy all the glory but none of the grief.
Cuing up The Gap Band’s ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ I couldn’t wait to see the utter bewilderment on the twentysomethings’ faces as the fiftysomethings inexplicably sat on the floor and pretended to row a boat. To my delight, however, their progeny were only too keen to join them. I’d also been lucky because the rowing boat roisterers were all pretty well lubricated. Though the same couldn’t be said for their knee joints, so it was a good job their kids were on hand to help them up again.
When I wound things down with Judy Boucher’s ‘Can’t Be With You Tonight’, younger eyes widened again, this time at their first sight of a time-honoured mating ritual known as the slow dance. I wondered how many of these couples had met this way and how many of their kids owed their very existence to a slow dance.
As I drove home, I thought how much the whole concept of DJing had changed. But when I thought of all those people on the dancefloor for Oops Upside Your Head, I realised that nothing had changed at all.
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