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    Hey Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms DJ

    Anyone done it? I know that BOREDOFEDUCATIONISACUNT formerly of this parish had/has a club night so I am assuming he does/did.

    I have a couple of mates who are DJs. One is a vinyl only junkie who used to promote nights we played in bath, for which I am still extremely grateful, and had an internet radio show. He specialised in 50's rock and roll, 60s garage, 70s punk along with some other obscurities and nuggets. His genius pairing was "Down on the street" by the Stooges seguing into "I feel love" which I insisted of having played after we finished our set. My other mates are part of a punk rock band who, April of last year, realised that there was no Northern Soul night in Bath for them to go to so set one up. It was an instant success selling out the debut and every night that they have done subsequently. They also started an 80s night and an Indie night. The aforementioned vinyl junkie got very jealous about the latter's instant success and bitched about them regularly on Facebook about their use of laptops, playlists and single genre nights. He also fell out with the venues he was doing his nights at and appears to be only DJing out of town or abroad. Another couple of musician mates are the current kings of the local scene as they have a regular Saturday night gig playing Motown, disco, funk to hundreds of people.

    Anyway, another mate was DJing a downstairs room at the Indie night and I went to keep him company which was needed more than I realised as there were only one or two people there. He showed me roughly how to use the CD twin turntables so that, when he went to the loo, I could look after it. I really enjoyed it and was asked by the Indie/80s/Northern Soul collective to partner him at the next Indie night. As it goes, he couldn't do it so I ended up doing a 4 hour solo session. I decided that, as upstairs was 'indie', I would go for everything independent. I planned for this to go from "Theme from 'Shaft'" to "Leaving Here" by Motorhead via "Love Missile F1-11". I experienced many school boy errors - dead air, knocking "Holidays In The Sun" back to the start again, having two songs skip repeatedly for 30 seconds before realising because I thought they were remixes I hadn't heard and scaring a couple of unwitting pensioners pre-watershed with the unedited "motherfuckers" intro to "Kick Out The Jams". It was fun, funny and quite interesting observing people. Trying to work out what to play for the next song to keep the sole person dancing was nerve-wracking. I found out that the whole concept seems to involve 30 seconds of blind panic followed by record collection filing to the sound of the middle bits of your favourite records. Oh, and everyone but everyone loves "Tiger Feet" by Mud.

    #2
    I have run a few club nights. It is often a lot more about promotion and timing than ability.

    The vinyl purist guy is an arse, particularly as technology, serrato and other things have improved to the point it simply isn't necessary to haul a half tonne of records around.

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      #3
      Yes, I am very fond of him but he is an arse. There are things that I can do that he can't (playing 'requests' off of YouTube on my I-phone) although I can make fuck ups he can't. I had a genius segue between "Theme from 'Shaft'" and BAD's "E=MC2" spoilt by me chatting to a mate and missing the I-phone going onto a track by an obscure West London 80s band instead of BAD. To be honest, I was only supposed to be using the I-phone for some tracks that I didn't have in any other format but we had an issue with one of the turntables being unreliable. All this said, the mixing, choosing and sequencing on the tracks exactly the same.

      I think you are right about the promotion and timing but the real clincher is the unpredictability of people's tastes. I put the Prodigy on and got my first dancers up. In a panic, I then jettisoned my chosen next track - The Sonics version of "Louie Louie" - and tried to find something that would keep my dancers going. As I did, someone came up and asked if I was doing a set in the upper room as they preferred my music and then someone thanked me, as they were going upstairs, for what I was playing. I was overjoyed until I realised that I had cleared the room apart from the couple of dancers I was now putting "Love Like Blood" by Killing Joke on for.

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