» Listings for 2015

1. Shorter gigs.

   Posted on 11:17am Friday 21st Aug 2015

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   Hi there again. In all my years of doing this job I can't help noticing one thing in particular. Long 5 to 6 hour gigs tend to drag on not just for me, but for the guests too. Sometimes particularly weddings seem to have to go on depending on the venue and set up situation. But if you can keep cool and restrict our performance to 4 hours or better still say 3 hours, what you will get is focused attention!

   Time and time again I've done long sprawling 5 to 6 or even longer gigs where the crowd knows I'm there for ever and a day and they don't pay much attention until the last hour or even worse the last half hour!

   Then guess what? I've been on my feet for hours and and looking forward to the end vs. The crowd suddenly doesn't want anything of the sort! Sometimes they are able to pay me to go on for extra time and I have to take a deep breath and psych myelf up again, but more often than not the staff at the venue are also anxious to get away and the owner is thinking of the neighbours and his licence restrictions. The bolder and sometimes more drunk members of the party are insisting on one more song after one more song (even after the encore) and I am having to be a kill joy and refuse! Not a role that I relish, being who and what I am..

   So here's the other side of the coin: This usually happens when it a dinner dance or wedding and the dinner part runs hopelessly over time. I get a 3 hour window or maybe a 2 hour wondow to get everyone up and dancing their arses off. Attention becomes much more focused on both sides. I have to fill the floor from the get go and the crowd can't spend hours and hours wasting time outside sitting about by the waterfall/walking to the car/hanging out in their bedroom/smoking/having sex in the toilets/fighting/taking drugs/insert your activity here... What they do is stick around and get their request in before it's all over! And the result? Full floor from start to finish. Tonnes more atmosphere, Better sounding compact performance with no time for long introspective musical journeys for me or a small clique of guests ie: There is no time to play those tracks which empty the floor for the sake of one or two people.

   I don't know if it will ever happen this way as I'm just one bloke and this system is ingrained now for better or worse. What I am saying is that quality beats the hell out of quantity everytime and you being the booker have the power to change it to just that. Remember that timeless saying in entertainment? "Allways leave them wanting more".

    

   Until next time, all the best,

    

   Mike

2. Spring roundup

   Posted on 8:06pm Monday 20th Apr 2015

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   Hi all,

   This is the time of year when winter apprehension starts hopefully to ease off a bit as bookings start to come in again for the summer ahead. Seems slower than usual, but I think that most years, so perhaps it's just normal.

   Starting this season with a revamp to the heart of my show: My DJ Console. You're looking at my DJ facebook page for April 20th. If you're looking at the dates on here and wondering why the post frequency has gone down in recent years, It's because most new ideas and mutterings are now quickly posted to that page. Anyway, When deejaying went digital, the industry wasn't really prepared to cater to the needs of the digital DJ in terms of flight casing the gear. It was fine if you had a pair of record decks or CD decks, but with laptops and various 19" rack shaped controllers (decks that play mp3 files from a hard drive or laptop drive) you were "shagged" really. So I being one of these early pioneers, designed my own case. It was well made, but when it arrived, the lid came up too high and I could only just peek over the top. My mate Ian joked that perhaps I could cut a slit/postbox hole in the lid and have a type of burka console. Well I lowered it by introducing a wooden (but tastefully blackened) prop. This had the effect of making my face visible to the crowd if of course you looked through the lighting without being dazzled in the process. Honestly folks, I thought no one want's to really se the DJ do they? Well I may be right in some cases, but not in most. So now with the lights to one side and the new case without the coffin lid, I should be more in the spotlight and less intimidating. If I'm haveing a great time, the audience will see and it should spread the mood onto the floor a bit more than before when I relied mostly on great music alone! 15 years as a DJ and I'm still learning. Back to the days when all you had was a set of cd decks between you and the punters! hold onto that lager! Don't come near the stage with that you p***head! (all my protection is gone!)

   One more good thing: As I emptied the old "coffin" case today, I realised that part of the reason why it weighed a flippin' tonne is not so much because of what I had in it, more because the case itself weighed a ruddy tonne before anything was put into it...Looking forward to easier times...

    

   Bye for now.

    

   Jack Dee on being drunk