Cross a DJ with a Nerd, you get a Seb.
Archive for September, 2004
Punter Shunter
Sep 29th
I was talking with a friend last night about random punters. Working in an environment where you have to entertain people who are usually seven different shades of mindless can be quite a challenge. People say things that their brain has yet to process properly. The following are my favourites. Bear in mind that Dj’s have a very short amount of time to talk before they have to return to the mix, so we have to get conversations over and done with within a verse and a chorus.
1.”Hi! I ‘m here for the first time tonight, and I’m here with my friends Miranda and Toby and Marcus, and we went out to dinner earlier, and we were talking about a song that my cousin Lisa played at her wedding and hey, do you have your tongue pierced, euwwww, did that hurt? So anyway it’s got this singer y’know the one that sang the song about the thing ummm what was it? You’d know it… it’s in the charts and it’s in that movie, the one with her from Melrose Place, but not the dark haired one……hey! I’m talking to you!…..”
2. “Do you have any, like ‘songs’?”
3. “Hi! You know how the music’s really boring tonight? Are you doing that on purpose?”
4. “Hi, what are you playing tonight? What’s next? What’s after that? How come? Can I go through your stuff? How come? Who else is playing tonight? What do they play? How come?”
5. “Hi, can you play harder? I want it harder”
6. “Can you stop playing this hard shit?”
7. “We’re all on pills that make the sounds go like really spaced out. Can you be careful what you’re playing? David’s epileptic.”
8. “God, you’ve put on a lot of weight, haven’t you? Can you play Madonna?……. Hey you look really pissed off, are you ok?”
9. “Can you play some Kylie? Any Kylie?”….. “Oh… except this one! I hate this one. What else you got? Have you got the one that’s not out yet?”
10. “Can you play Ministry of Sound disc two track ten…..No, that’s what it’s called. Don’t you have any Ministry? I don’t know, it’s disc two track ten! On Ministry! You know, you played it last week! Track ten! With the ‘whooshy’ thing and the girl….Track Ten! On Ministry! Ministry of Sound!”
All of the above should provide clear illustration as to why it’s good that it’s so hard to get a firearms licence.
You’re Here, You’re Not Queer, We’re Used To It
Sep 20th
The results are in – I’m playing Perth Pride in the main room from 10-12. This will require all of you to start imbibing your alcohol/drugs/drain cleaner/xenical fat metabolizers at around eight pm so that you’re ready to dry hump the dj console while screaming (any of) my name(s) by about ten thirty. After a smouldering discofied start, my set will reach pounding house heaven nirvana at around ten forty-five. Consider yourselves warned.
Then I’m off to Connections for the rest of the evening, to play one of the strangest nights of the year. The staff at the club call it ‘gay for a day’, which is an incredibly accurate description.
In years gone by, the club would be a tumbleweed laden ghost town as, post Pride Parade, every homosexualist worth his or her salt would be at the Pride after party. This is a massive annual event usually held in a nearby warehouse and is generally filled with the entire gay populace, all gyrating lewdly in hotpants upon a podium, or a random person they’d just met, or for the extreme exhibitionists a cheeky combination of both.
This left no-one to fill the city’s only gay nightclub, which sometimes got thirty or so stray wanderers until the incessant whining of the bar staff annoyed the manager enough to close the club and let them escape to the party.
Luckily, three years ago the management team had an idea. The Pride parade attracts thousands of spectators. After viewing a few hundred gayers mincing up and down the street in fabulous costumes and flapping their wrists wildly atop glitterball adorned floats, these spectators often remarked how much fun the big gay lifestyle must be and how fantastic it would be to strap three frantically back-combed wigs to your head and wobble about in heels to a Gina G medley.
The club capitalized on this by offering said spectators a chance to have the full gay nightclub experience, by way of a flyer distributed thoughout the parade by our dedicated staff, telling them our doors opened immediately after the parade and that we practically invented back-combed wigs and Gina G.
From the first year we tried this, hundreds of parade watchers poured through the doors, all of them desperate to create their own piece of fabulousness and maybe even be lucky enough to steal a faux-boob from one of the show queens as a permanent, tangible reminder of how homo-tastic the whole parade had been.
Of course, as any good dj will tell you, when playing to a completely new crowd it’s best to play as safely as possible, starting off with a few familiar favourites to test the waters, then slowly taking the music in other directions according to said crowd’s response.
Unfortunately the straight crowds that visit us on Pride night have quite a different view on the music that “the gays” love. Try and deviate from a Kylie/Britney/Generic Random European Girly Disco Song About Dancing All Night/Kylie/Britney/Kylie/Kylie/Kylie/Kylie programming pattern and they demand that you play “Connections music, like on a normal night”.
Try to tell them that we do dance to other songs aside from ‘It’s Raining Men’ while waving a mirrorball in one hand and a dildo in the other and they look at you with utter confusion and almost burst into tears.
So, year after year, it’s been the gayest night of the year, with the gayest music of the year, in a gay club jam packed with non-gays. The most ironic part is that while Johnno and Linda Suburb are dancing the night away, waving their feather boas to ‘We Are Family’, marvelling at how much fun “the gays” must have every week at our club, we take turns to nick off down the road to play to “the gays”, who are happily dancing away to a selection of minimalist tribal and trance, with nary a boa in sight. If only they knew…..
But hey, ten years ago people would have been too scared or predjudiced to even walk up the stairs, so if the worst they think of us now is that we love The Cheeky Girls and Steps Medleys, drive electric pink Honda Preludes and dress like someone put a stick of dynamite in Cher, then so be it.
Happy pride 2004, everyone. Especially Johnno and Linda.