Not Enough Friends On The Dancefloor

Friday night DJing was fun, as always, but there was one thing missing:

Friends.

I don’t like hassling friends to come and see me DJ – I know most are not that interested in my music, though sometimes they are interested in a night out.

It was a quiet night in general – the Turtle was never that busy even in the garden, which you’d normally expect to be very busy on a reasonably warm night.  It is a tricky time of year – students have mostly gone, it was Royal Ascot week and of course festival and holiday season.

I had that slightly sinking feeling that all promoters get when it looks like it is going to be a quiet night, though for us without any financial outlay to recoup, it is only a matter of personal pride and wanting the night to be busy for our own personal enjoyment and that of our guests.

It did still get reasonably busy, particularly for when I was DJing and I feel that I was much better this time, back on form – one totally cocked up mix but plenty of good mixes to compensate.  Musically I had absolutely no plan, not even the first track, but I did play a fair few tracks from my latest mix, which went down particularly well.  I did kind of run out of ideas towards the end though - the problem of taking roughly 1 million tracks with me.

In fact, one thing that I noticed which really pleased me was that the more underground I played things, the more reaction I seemed to get.  When I played something verging on crowd-pleasing (for my standards!) or something rather tough, I’d lose people.  I still think I am a long way from being able to read a crowd properly.

The main difference between this night and others was the lack of that little group of friends – even having 4 or so makes all the difference, as they tend to be close to the dancefloor, which encourages others to stick around and helps build a dancing crowd that little bit easier.

Oh and not to mention – no Ian Hills.

There are a couple of regulars though, including a young lady from Syria who spoke to English who danced for 4 or so hours solid, along with another young lady who seems to barge into me on a regular basis, especially when there are any other girls near me.   Hmmm.  We also had quite a group of Spanish people down there.

Next time we have one of my really close friends DJing, Ben Zagorski, which I am really looking forward to.  I always say that, of course, but I am.

I assume I will be doing a minimal-laden warm-up, hopefully with a few friends in support this time.  Or at least a few friends hassled/guilt-tripped/blackmailed into coming.