I was in the mood to get smashed on Friday and certainly endeavoured to sink a few beers.
For the 158th month in a row I was on warm-up duty. For the first hour, anyway. I was in quite a bad mood, albeit tempered somewhat by the reliable beauty of beer, so I wanted to play 138bpm evil techno. I knew I shouldn’t so tried to play some plodding darkish dub techno instead.
I then veered into minimal and finished on Enzo Siragusa’s Desire. It didn’t feel like it flowed well enough, though I haven’t been able to listen back to it yet.
I’ve been craving the opportunity to do the midnight until 2am set for months, but I’ve been craving the opportunity to do a B2B with my very good friend, JP, for several years. We do occasionally have a mix together, and it always goes well – we both have slightly differing tastes in house music but we tend to compliment and challenge each other well.
We decided to plan a set, which isn’t my preferred way to go about things as you cannot tell in advance what the crowd are going to be enjoying, nor what you feel they need next – I’m not keen on the rigidity of a set plan.
That said, it does help when it comes to mixing quality, if you have actually practiced the mix and have confidence that the tracks work well together – but I kind of get off on the danger of not knowing if something is going to work – the excitement of something new working outweighs the disappointment of something not working. For me, anyway.
The set went well enough (as far as I can remember!), though it probably went better than I thought, my mood was making me doubt myself and still is.
Towards the end of our 2 hours, Martin stepped in to do some B2B with JP, and it worked unsurprisingly well. As it should – they are very well-versed in DJing together, and it was more off the cuff than what myself and JP had planned. I enjoyed it more than my own set!
I did have an interesting drunken conversation in the garden with someone who loves our underground sound, as to whether we could do the party more regularly and in a proper nightclub. I pointed out that Reading doesn’t have a suitable proper nightclub and we cannot afford to fund anything. He reckons he can find a venue and the money. We’ll see on that one! The more pleasing aspect was to hear again, and again, from repeated visitors how much they appreciate what we are doing with our night. It's almost like public service - but bloody enjoyable.
Tim came on after and played a very reliable tech-house set which had people dancing until towards the end.
But he earned a true accolade in enabling some lesbian action on the dancefloor. Two seemingly straight girls ended up kissing another girl, all were pretty cute. The guys they were with all night seemed pretty shocked. Maybe we should cancel the night whilst we are on a high – can we get any better than dancefloor lesbian action?
Then again, we’ve only just started.
Sadly I was in such a state of delirious lesbian-fuelled wonder at the end that I left my headphones there. Albeit they were shit, broken and cheap so I’m not exactly fussed. A new pair of shit headphones has been ordered at the sum of £13.95 in the hope that I can have a mix this weekend.
Next month we have two very good DJs from the old Mango days – Sam Red and Stone Collins. It should be well up my street, musically – and yours. Friday 17th June. See you there.
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