CBA DJ

I could not be arsed to DJ on Friday.  Strange isn’t it?  Something I’d dreamed about for years, if not close to 20 years, many years assuming it was something out of my grasp, out of my abilities, way away from my total lack of confidence when I was younger.

And I have my dream in my hands yet on Friday afternoon I was simply wishing to go home and go to bed.

I think part of it might have been that nobody was coming to support me – originally it was a birthday plan but I quietly dropped that idea when the lack of interest became clear.  Plus I was doing the first hour and the last 30 minutes which are the quietest times so I wasn’t especially excited about them.

Nevertheless, I trooped on with a sneaky suspicion that I would have fun.

I arrived a little early, to find that the vinyl decks were not set up for our headliner as requested in advance.  The manager of the Turtle wasn’t amused, but thankfully set about re-arranging the whole set-up for us.  I just hoped we would make it busy enough for it to be worthwhile for him.

So my set started 30 minutes late and I started it playing minimal.  I had considered a deep house warm-up.  I’d actually practised one, but the night before when downloading tracks, I changed my mind and decided to play what I love most.

I started with a more hypnotic tip, playing the likes of Cristi Con’s Bird In Space:

As I had a couple of gangster-girl foot-shufflers, I had the genius idea of playing Seuil’s gangsta-minimal track, Al Capote:

I finished on a recent favourite by Riccardo (not Villalobos) – Lapiuta:

Everything had gone well.  All the mixes were in, I think maybe one was marginally mis-timed, the crowd were sticking, the crowd were dancing, and I handed over to Sam & Stuart, who were followed by Saphe, our headliners.

All played really good sets – and seemed to figure out after one or two early interesting selections, what the crowd likes down there.  In fact, I’d say it was the closest to having a whole night where all the music flowed, with the crowd enjoying the night as a whole, as opposed to one or two sets, and where all the DJ sets made sense together.

I managed to get rather messed-up and wasn’t sure of my surroundings at one point, so ended up having a pint of water to rescue me back into reality as I realised that I was supposed to be closing.

I didn’t particularly want to take over, more because I was enjoying the music that our headliner was playing, but I still wanted to play.  Though I had a feeling that I couldn’t.

In went my CD, I cue’d the track up and yes I mixed it in fine.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Until I realised that it was the same track I’d finished my earlier set with.  Oops.

The rest of the set went without note, I had little sense what was happening and rather blurred vision, so I ended up playing tracks that sounded right – I couldn’t read the labels so I had no idea what I was actually playing.

And I went home happy.  It had been a really good night, very busy for most of it, lots of good music – easily one of my favourite nights that I’ve DJ’d at.

Next month is my detox DJ set.  Eeek.