Seb Sharp

So, it’s been forever since I blogged and I’ve got so much to catch up on. What better place to start than with the now notorious New Zealand Holiday story.

Myself and my best pal, big buff Reuben had been planning a break from work for a few months, and eventually decided on a snowboarding holiday in New Zealand.

Anyone who knows me well will know that this is a completely laughable idea, as I’m completely uncoordinated and very prone to smacking into things at inopportune moments (“Hi there completely hot guy, can I buy you a drink? I’ll get it just as soon as I trip over something that’s not there and bang my face on a concrete pillar….”) but I was feeling adventurous and was extremely excited about seeing snow for the first time.

So, flights and accomodation booked, agoraphobic panic attacks taken care of and suitcases packed, we arrived at Perth airport for the first of three flights that would take us to Queenstown.

All was going well at check in until we were told that we were supposed to be on the previous night’s flight. Our travel agent had booked us for 12am Sunday morning rather than 12am Monday morning. This meant that all of our connecting flights would have to be rebooked too. It was at this stage that we also realised that our itinerary didn’t mention where we were staying when we got there. Well done, Flight Centre lady. I made a mental note to make her cry on our return. Not just a little cry, either. Big, heaving sobs with snot bubbles and a subsequently shameful afternoon of puffy face.

A bit of hyperventilating (me) and gentle co-ercing of counter staff (Reuben) managed to get us seats on that night’s flight. Our connecting flights were a bit trickier, but they worked things so that we would arrive at our destination in about eighteen hours. Yep. Eighteen. Flight Centre lady was going DOWN.

The first flight to Sydney was pretty uneventful. We watched a really bad Kate Hudson movie (is there such a thing as a good one?) and tried to get some sleep. In Sydney, we had a few hours for breakfast and a bit of duty free shopping before our connecting flight to Aukland. This is where I realized that having a gay best friend must be influencing Reuben’s taste as he bought five bottles of designer fragrance and completely ignored the sports shop. To make up for it I made sure we talked about boobs for twenty minutes thereafter.

On the way to Sydney, Qantas had managed to seat us together, but the Auckland flight was heavily booked, and we had to sit separately. We asked the guy sitting next to me if he’d swap seats, but he just pulled an annoyed face and said no. To explain properly the indignation and rudeness of his tone, imagine how you’d respond if someone walked up to you and asked if you’d care to eat some of their boogers. Talk about rude.

Of course, me possessing an incredibly low tolerance for rudeness doesn’t help this situation, as I plonk down beside him and say ‘Thank you SO much. I hope you’re not going to need to go to the toilet at any time, because it’s going to be far too inconvenient for me to get up.’ This of course made him turn slightly purple as he suddenly became very interested in the contents of the in-flight magazine. It was then that I realized that although I’d gotten the last word in, I now had to share an arm rest with the guy for the next five hours. Uncomfortable? You bet.

Meanwhile, Reuben had struck up a conversation with the gorgeous english girl next to him, and proceeded to have a very enjoyable flight, filled with laughter and stories about binge drinking and waking up naked in stranger’s houses. Not fair. I was stuck with captain grumpy, the grand poo-bah of nastyville. At least I had some consolation in the fact that he probably came very close to peeing himself towards the end of the flight.

When we finally got to Auckland, Reuben and I helped the english girl with her cases and snowboard and offered to share a trolley with her as we went through customs. She was hilarious, and really sweet. As we waited in line to fill out our customs forms, it began to finally feel like we were on holiday. We only had one more flight and we were at our destination. It was finally coming together.

Except for one minor thing. This being my first international holiday, I wasn’t as sure as I am now about the do’s and dont’s of entering another country. I now know that if :

a) You have a new passport, especially one issued in the last month, and

b) You can’t tell the nice customs lady where you’re staying when you arrive (thanks again, Flight Centre!!) , plus

c) There’s been a mix up with your flights and your tickets have been re-issued, therefore making it look like you just bought them, and you’ve

d) Truthfully filled out your ‘entering the country form’, putting ‘nightclub dj’ as your occupation,

…….you might as well walk up to airport security and say “Hello, I’m a big, nasty drug trafficker, please pull me aside and search me thoroughly, making me miss my connecting flight.”

Both Reuben and I were pulled aside and asked to wait at a search counter, along with our english pal, who started looking extremely worried and immediately started denying any knowledge of ever knowing either of us, even though we’d spent the past half an hour in a queue talking and laughing loudly with her.

An officer, who I can only assume was New Zealand’s attempt at a butch lesbian, called me over asked me to open my bags so she could search them. She also made me turn out my pockets and hand over my wallet and phone for ‘drug scanning’. She told me that if I had recently used drugs and handled my phone that it would show up instantly. I hadn’t, but began to panic anyway.

I handed her my backpack, and she began to rummage through it. She then pulled a face, and pulled out a book, completely covered in electric blue coloured slime. A giant bottle of shower gel had burst in my bag during the flight, and had completely coated everything in it. This didn’t make her happy, and she immediately began quizzing me about drugs.

It’s pretty much assumed that if you work in the nightclub industry you use drugs, so even if you’re truthfully saying that you don’t, people think you’re lying. So I said no, and of course she didn’t believe me. Half a dozen pointless questions later, and with our flight leaving in less than three minutes, I was ready to slap her, and began to ask her questions about the compensation I’d be entitled to if she made us miss our flight. She ignored me and began searching my suitcase.

After unfolding all of my (admittedly obsessively) neat packing, and then being totally unable to fit everything back in, she unzipped the top compartment of the suitcase and rummaged around. I was about to tell her that I never pack anything in there when she said ‘Hello, what do we have here?’, and proceeded to pull out

*suspenseful pause*

a really big, long box. She let out a gasp, and then held it out for me to see. On it was a picture of a giant pink penis, with the words ‘realistic, multi speed satisfaction’ emblazoned in yellow across the top.

I nearly died on the spot.

Seven years earlier, I had been living in Sydney, and when I left to return to Perth, I was given the “Pleasure Master 2000″ as a joke going-away present from my co-workers. I had packed it in my suitcase and completely forgotten about it. Every time I had gone through airport security with that case on subsequent trips it would have shown up on x-rays and I was blissfully unaware that I was ‘the 6 foot five guy at work today with the giant dildo in his suitcase’ story being told at dinner parties around the country.

I did the whole , ‘I swear I had NO idea’ thing, just as Reuben wandered over, saw what all the fuss was about and burst out laughing. This lightened the mood considerably, and the New Zealand version of a Lesbian Security Officer seemed to be so amused at the shades of red I had turned that she decided that we were harmless and let us run to catch our flight.

A quick sprint through the airport, a two hour flight to Queenstown and the lucky discovery of the name of our hotel in a local travel guide and we finally reached our destination.

A week of face planting in snow, being flung around in jetboats and an almighty stack while racing down the side of a mountain in a brakeless go kart followed, alongside a Ben Stiller movie festival and the discreet disposal of a certain sex toy. Combined, these events ensured a fantastic holiday and a near flawless return journey.

Now if only people would stop calling me Dj Dildo.

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.

In my life there exists a particularly bizarre phenomenon. It’s called Sydney Demo Syndrome, or SDS. I’m currently in the midst of a major attack of it, and felt the need to warn others, lest the same affliction strike them in the way it has my good self.

I first encountered SDS in December 2002. I had received an email from a dj friend in Sydney, telling me that the Mardi Gras board had asked for demo cd’s from dj’s interested in playing at the next big Mardi Gras party. All I had to do was record a demo cd, displaying my mixing skills, and I could be playing to thousands of screaming homosexuals in hotpants, all gyrating lewdly and calling my name. Easy.

Well no. For some reason, a perfectly simple process turned into a meltdown-inducing nightmare.

For starters my pal had sent the email to me with four days to spare. So time was going to be tight. Especially as I don’t have equipment set up at home, and need to go into the club outside of opening hours to make a demo.

On a Monday night, I picked a stack of records out and went up to the club to ‘lay one down’ , so to speak. I had taken my minidisc deck up there on Saturday night to record a set for a friend, and left it there, knowing I would be back to use it again on Monday. I got to the club, lugged my records upstairs, set everything up, and then noticed that said minidisc recorder wasn’t there. Great. A number of text messages and phone calls later, I located it at one of the other dj’s houses, he had ‘borrowed’ it, thinking that I wouldn’t mind. The other bonus was that the deck was at his house, and he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until tomorrow. Demo attempt number one aborted.

On Tuesday I worked all day, then went and collected my deck from the dj’s house after work. I went straight to the club, recorded the demo and went home to transfer it to cd. As soon as it started playing I noticed that the sound was only coming out of one speaker, and there was a massive humming sound in the other. It turns out that my friend was a little heavy handed when removing the plugs from the pack of my deck and had broken one of the inputs. Demo attempt number two aborted.

Wednesday I tried to get my deck repaired, but was told it would take a least four days. I only had two. Bummer. Not one to be beaten, I called some of the other dj’s I knew and managed to borrow someone else’s deck. That night I recorded the set again, and wearily staggered home to transfer it to cd. Half way throught the first track the sound dropped out, then came back in again. Then it did it again, and again. It turns out that the disc I had bought was faulty, and was part of a batch that many people had reported problems with. Demo attempt number three aborted.

Thursday was the absolute latest I could send off my demo to ensure it was received in time, so the pressure was on. As luck would have it, I had to work all day, so I got up at four in the morning and drove down to the club to have one last attempt. With one eye half closed, I recorded the set again, checked it had recorded properly (it had!) then raced home to transfer it to cd. I had just enough time to run it off and get to the post office before I started work. When I arrived home, the house was in complete darkness. Of course, there was no electricity. I later found out that someone (who obviously didn’t appreciate my music) had slammed into a telephone pole on the way to work and blacked out half the suburb. By this stage, a lesser mortal would have just given up, but having gotten this far, I was determined not to be beaten. I got my cd recorder and drove back to the club. I hooked it all up, and got ready to transfer the ****ing demo onto the ****ing cd and mail the ****ing thing to ****ing Sydney.

I put the minidisc back into the deck, and the display flashed for a brief moment, before displaying two simple words that would strike fear into the heart of anyone in my situation.

ERASE?? YES.

And then it wiped the entire disc. Yep. The whole shebang. All gone. Game over. See ya. Good luck in the future.
I checked the display panel, half expecting it to read ‘HA! HA! HA! SUCKER!!’ but all I got was

BLANK DISC.

There is no logical reason that this should ever occur, and according to my friend, his deck had never done that before. But it did it that morning, when it was the last thing I needed it to do.

So I did what any self respecting thirty year old man would do in such a situation. I bawled my eyes out, and went to work.

I went a bit deranged this week from taking too much work on and have realised that I’ll have to slow down or I’m in danger of climbing up a tower and throwing Ministry of Sound compilations at innocent bystanders, screaming ‘Request this, motherf***ers!!’.

Take the last five days for example. Here’s a nice, easy to read, diary style recounting of my neural meltdown.

Friday – Go into club, pick up printing, lights and new email list. Go home, type 150 new email addresses into database. Accidently delete. Swear loudly, eat large packet of chips, then enter again. Save on a cd, a 3″disc and print a hard copy. Realise that all of them have already been entered by someone else who didn’t mark the sheets as done. Drink a litre of Vanilla Coke and swear loudly. Go into club for bar manager’s shift, get told that we are one staff member short. Decide that’s okay, but then regret turning up as all other staff make excuses to leave with the exception of one very tired whiny barperson. Do entire close with two people when it normally takes four. Get fingers tangled in random clump of hair and dry retch for ten minutes. Make mental note that all persons entering the nightclub should be bald or shaved from this day forth. Go home and have strange nightmares about alcoholic hairballs getting in my way as I try and mop up a roomful of fat homosexuals.

Saturday – Get up, organize records and go into club to record promo giveaway mix cd. Get home with finished mix and find a slightly dodgy moment at the end. Try to edit mix, and erase entire disc. Swear, throw Ginger Spice Doll out of window, pack records for night’s gig. Go to gig with minidisc player, and re-do mix. Cheer up as it all goes well. Begin to feel really tired, so lock door to dj box, stating to the world ‘NO VISITORS’. Wearily smile, hug and make small talk with sixty people who all think ‘NO VISITORS’ doesn’t mean them. Finish gig, go home in bad mood brought on by exhaustion and visitors. Dream about living in a caravan that has no door. Wake up shouting at my pillow.

Sunday – Get up, run off master copy of mix cd from minidisc, make fifty copies, pack records, go to gig. Am more tired than ever before. Lock door and threaten death to any staff that let someone in to dj box. Play gig until 3am, go home and collapse. Dream about costume malfunctions. Wake up with large erection.

Monday – Day off. Listen to a copy of mix cd, and realise to my horror that it stops dead and cuts off the last two tracks of the mix for no apparent reason. Confirm that all copies given out with my name all over the cover are the same. Eat two packets of twistes and swig a litre of iced coffee. Spend evening with pals, talking too fast about nothing in particular and grinding teeth. Go home and dream about marrying the club’s manager and having mindblowing threesomes with her and some unknown hot man. Decide that she might not want to know about this dream, owing to her being a lesbian. Resolve to tell her anyway.

Tuesday – Get up after four hour’s sleep, walk into city for day job. Open store, smile blearily at customers until record shipment arrives. Sit in office for five hours, processing four boxes of import vinyl. End up doing two hours unpaid overtime, due to the delivery being late. Walk to club, collect mountain bike, proceed to cycle home. Halfway home get knocked off bike by idiot bimbo who goes through stop sign and then drives off. Get back on bike, try to follow her while shouting obscenities but just fall off bike again. Get up and walk bike home. Curse bike for not being equipped with heat seeking missiles. Once home, sit at computer for three hours, waiting until email that is supposed to be sent to me at six finally gets sent at nine. Copy information to html format, upload new pics, send out to mailing list. Have huge problems with embedded pictures and eventually go to bed after fixing the problem at one a.m. Dream of arguing with other assistant manager about me having to take on all of his workload because he’s moving to Disneyland. Halfway through dream he turns into a pickled onion. Wake up sweating and strangling a pillow.

Wednesday – Get up, turn head to look out window, pull neck muscle. Go into club for weekly four hour meeting. One hour into meeting suddenly burst into tears while making completely non-tear requiring point and end up saying things like “I just can’t….can’t….bhaaaagggg….hyyyyyglll..cahuckkkk…..snurfle….”. Realise while looking at disturbed faces around me that I’ve gone stark raving bonkers and should just shut up. Totally ignore calm, soothing voices while trying to stop leaky eye problem. Try speaking again. Stop immediately as throat is so tight voice resembles powerpuff girl.
Resolve to just be red and squelchy for a while until moment passes. Nod in agreeance as other management suggest that I’ve taken too much on and need to leave everything else and just concentrate on my djing for a couple of weeks.
Go home feeling relieved but really really embarrassed over whole sobby snotty cry-ey thing. Pack records for gig, pull other side of neck carrying records to gig. Spend night walking around like Herman Munster in a Diesel cap and t-shirt. Dream about waking up every five minutes in immense pain. Realise it’s not a dream. Do the cry-ey thing again.

Thursday – Try to get up. Ow. Neck completely immobilised. Wince with pain every time I try to move. Eventually manage to get up and loosen muscles in hot shower. Realise that this is completely stress related and resolve to cancel tonight’s gig and relax at home. Ring promoter who tells me to ring club owner. Ring owner who sounds very unhappy at the prospect, but offers to find a replacement. Calls back three hours later saying that he can only get someone in from eleven, and can I do the first hour. Racked with guilt, I agree. To make it easier, club owner suggests that I stand there and play a mix cd if it’s easier for me. I agree, and walk to chemist to buy upsized super deluxe combo pack of Voltaren and Nurofen. Read on box of painkillers that it is unwise to take more than six in 24 hours, so decide to take 8 in four hours. Begin to feel immensely stoned. Grab mix cd and two records, float downstairs to car and drive on a shiny moonbeam to club. Once there, play cd while standing behind decks with headphones on and two records spinning, pretending to dj. Fill dancefloor. Gaze dreamily at lights as painkillers really kick in, and give new Kylie picture disc to next dj because he’s ‘so lovely’, even though previously I’ve never said more than two words to him. Proceed to wish him a “Fab……. thingy…….good….see…..bye..bye…” then float down to car to return home. Two hours later, regret giving away Kylie record and curse painkillers while ordering another copy on the net.

So now it’s early Friday morning, my neck is killing me and I’m processing the last few days. My mission is in the next two weeks decide whether to give up some work, change some aspects of my life (maybe a short course in learning to ‘let go’?) or to just learn to tell most of the people around me to get f***ed more often. In fact, having just written it, I think it might be a combination of all three.

Whatever I do, I HAVE to write more in my blog. It’s the one thing I really miss. That and sex with beefy porn stars.

Well, it all begins with me arriving at my Wednesday night gig with a great big box of house tunes, ready to play another set to the mirrorball humping masses. As I approached the venue I noticed that it looked it had quite a large amount of people crammed into it at the early hour of eight pm.

Feeling that this was a bit peculiar, but being open to the possibility of unleashing a bit of disco mayhem to an already busy room rather than having to gently coax them to par-tay by playing cheesy shite and batting my eyelids in the hope that Gazza and Mandy Punter will dance and therefore save my career, I ran inside, all excited and happy.

The excited/happy feeling soon changed into one of abject horror. The main room was decked out with rugby flags, and had a twenty-five foot blow up mascot in the corner. On the far wall was a massive screen showing two truckloads of beefcake chasing a funny looking ball on what at first appeared to be someone’s front lawn but I was later informed was a ‘playing field’.

The room was filled with men, which would normally please me no end, but these men were a bit different to our normal crowd. They had no product in their hair. The hair on my neck would have stood up in horror, were it not plastered down with gel wax.

These men were either staring up at the screen, or chewing on the supplied barbecue and swigging beer. The majority of them looked to be in their late thirties, and were invariably either sunburnt to within an inch of their lives or looked like they had walked into their local plastic surgeon and asked for ‘The Grand Canyon’ (TM). The sound system was pumping out some weird rugby anthem/rock ballad, and they all nodded along as they chewed and slurped and sent grooming product retail outlets bankrupt.

Absolutely terrified, I sidled up to the lighting tech, and asked if I was still required tonight, because to me, it didn’t look like they were really ready for the services of the gayest dj in the southern hemisphere and his little box of Minogue.
‘Yeah, It’s the South African Springbok supporters. They’ve taken over the venue for a week. Be careful, they’re all shitfaced and arrogant. Have a good set.” He replied, encouragingly, before scampering off.

So there I am. Poof with a job to do. I sent two messages to my nearest and dearest leaving them my collection should I be beaten to death with a lamb chop, then stepped up to the mixer. I grabbed my first record, and carefully faded out a cheerful rendition of Rugby fave “Kill the bastards, Eh!!” by The Springbok Seven.

No. Baaaaad Move. If you are ever in the same circumstance, do not do this. Every head in the room instantly turned towards me. Slightly deterred, but with nothing else to lose, I started up the four/four beat. Worse move. Five red faced South African men climbed up the steps to the console and immediately began shouting at me.
“Whoareyou!!!”
“Whossaidyoucoodooothat??”
“Putthetbeckonummediately”
“Whereusourmusuc?”
“WHAT’S THUS SHUT?? UDIOT!!”

I opened and closed my mouth, stuttering as I tried to think of some way to bring on spontaneous combustion.
“I….um…..the lighting tech….it’s just that….I always….it’s eight o’clock and….”
“THUS US PATHETUC!!!” bellowed one of the men, before marching off in search of the venue’s owner. The others continued to yell at me until he returned, with a very apologetic looking manager in tow. It took him five minutes to calm them down and explain that I was there to play to our regular crowd, who would be arriving any minute.

They muttered a bit more, then under sufferance agreed to leave me alone to do my job. The regular crowd started to filter in, and the Springbok lovers slowly filtered out. About nine-thirty, one of the guys that had gone all ‘Taxi Driver’ on me earlier marched up and demanded his rugby anthems cd, looking at me like I was some brown thing he’d just discovered on the bottom of his shoe. I handed it over, and he snatched it out of my hands and walked off without saying a word.

Shuthead.

Of course, I won’t say that I wouldn’t like to hang out with them again. Especially when a big bunch of them demand to hear their precious cd, someone puts it in the player, and Dannii Minogue starts to belt out “This Is It”.

Having a spare Dannii cd to slip in their cd case…….priceless. For everything else, there’s Mastercard. ..