On Djing...

my hour last week went really well. I was so nervous for the first ten minutes - what if I broke the unfamiliar equipment? What if I flubbed my mixes? What if nobody enjoyed what I played? - but I looked up after finally realising I was fine with the set-up, and I saw a busy dancefloor with everyone singing along to I.Jordan's "I'm Waiting (Just 4 U)" and a room full of people who were enjoying themselves. I played some speed garage which went down well and Hugo Massien's "No Return" (which is basically Ashanti's "Foolish" with a massive bassline donk over it) went down REALLY well.

After it I had people coming up to me to tell me it was really good and I've picked up a few new followers on the socials. One guy asked me to contribute to his podcast mix series. I feel like I definitely held my own with the rest of the line-up. My group of best pals, not a single one could make it due to prior committments, but it turned out for the best - I didn't have them there to rely on being present on the dancefloor for me, so I know that my success was all my own. It also meant I could actually chat to people rather than worry about who was where and what was happening with them. The guy who runs the night told me that he was really happy because I clearly understood what the vibe and idea of the night is, which was really nice to hear.

I mean, it's not much in the grand scheme of things - a busy dancefloor in a small city centre venue for an hour - but I'll take it. I don't have anything on my calendar now, either the pub or Actual Dance Music, but I'll see what happens next.

heard this, thought of youse..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9t6LDJpd3k
Auramatic - Talk 2 The Deejay

there's an italian-american social club across the street from my apartment, the building's been there since the sixties but the society itself has existed since the mid-to-late 19th century. the club has a giant wooden dancefloor illuminated by many chandeliers and a disco ball, a stage, a wood-paneled bar that looks like it hasn't been touched at all since the 1960s, and an indoor bocce court behind the stage. every month they host large pasta dinners that are open to the public, and they have a bunch of events that are open only to members of the club and their guests. the bocce court is typically open for members a couple days during the week, it's mainly older retirees who play and they occasionally host tournaments there with other bocce leagues in the city.

the club started getting a lot of attention last year because of their social media presence - about a year ago only a couple dozen people at most came to the pasta dinners, now they routinely sell out a couple hundred tickets within 24 hours. i started following them on IG and they posted a story asking if anyone who follows them happened to know any italo disco DJs, and i obviously jumped at the chance lol. i ended up getting a tour of the building from the president, and we talked about the idea of me playing music there sometime. i started regularly attending their dinners and eventually applied for membership, i became inducted as a member in december of last year. i've gone to a lot of the member events since then and i've also volunteered to help at their events too, it's been really sweet and great to be a part of this community for lots of personal reasons i won't go into here.

anyway, one of the member events they're doing now is a first friday deal where the bar and the bocce court are open to members and guests, and they asked me if i'd be interested in setting up in the bocce court to play some tunes while people played games of bocce. they set all this mood lighting and had glow-in-the-dark bocce balls and it looked really fabulous. my playlist was all italian music from the 70s and 80s - italo of the robots n' synths 83-and-after era but also lots of '76-82 italian disco, your raffaellas and minas and ornellas and whatnot. not super easy to mix those eras together but i think i managed to get a good flow going. one guy was stoked that i played moroder's "the chase" lol. it was one of the best gigs i've ever played - i got such a warm reception from everybody and several people were like "we gotta get you on the dance floor at some point!" seeing one of the older members, a guy who's very easily in his 70s and was born in italy, bopping along to "a far l'amore comincia tu" made my heart swell. i am a little headache-y from the negronis i had but all in all, a wonderful night :)

I love this! 83-84 Italo has a special place in my heart.

so cool

wow dr i'm so happy for you

tremendous

What a dream

that sounds amaaaaaazing i wanna go to the next one so bad

same

that sounds amazing. bocce! italo! glow in the dark!

do post a tracklist when you do it

:) :) :)

i didn't keep a tracklist, but off the top of my head and in addition to what i already mentioned i played:

- lots of the "big" italo tracks ("hypnotic tango", "take a chance", "dirty talk")
- some deeper cuts (helicon - "you...see", angie care - "your mind", laura angel - "if you want")
- "magic fly" (duh)
- a couple petrus/malavasi joints ("the glow of love", peter jacques band - "going dancin' down the street")
- the 1978 version of mina - "città vuota"
- honorary italian amanda lear - "fabulous lover, love me"
- closed out w/ this v sensual ballad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AMpZGNx5EE

maybe i'm still riding on the high of last week's bocce gig but i had my regular happy hour gig last night and i feel like i played a really confident, technically smooth and fun set. i'm self-critical about my abilities to a fault but after my set i was like...idk maybe i'm halfway decent at this thing after all?

also re: this from my post about the italian club:

several people were like "we gotta get you on the dance floor at some point!"

this may actually be happening next month :)

same

I spent the night recording a two hour mix in my new spare room. I'm so excited to share it with you guys

I avoided this thread for years because I was always afraid it would turbocharge all the bad feelings I’ve felt about my dashed amateur dj aspirations, which never went beyond my bedroom. Having come to terms with that, I’ve really enjoyed reading this thread. It’s fun and inspiring to see people embracing meaningful opportunities to dj out and I appreciate everyone sharing these stories. Way to go ilx dj massive!

Same

lol I was the same as you but just stumbled into an opportunity

I do this thing at a local bar where it's me and a couple of turntables, I bring a variety of stuff and encourage others to bring in their own records, then we make a DJ set out of it. it's all over the place but evey time I think I get a little better. it's something I've always kind of dreamed about but didn't think anyone would really be interested in. but I think there are lots of people who are really into an idea like that, you just need to find the place to make it happen.

The manager of the pub I've been playing at monthly has gone on maternity leave and a new guy has come in to replace her.
Suddenly I find my slot has disappeared from their promo calendar, so I emailed in.
"Ah yeah, sorry we forgot to say we're itemising the entertainment at the Bell, so we'll be concentrating strictly on garage and drum machines bass going forward. Big apologies".

Well needless to say, I wasn't too pleased at the unceremoniously ghosting. Naturally, I understand they want to go for a more student-based market and it's not as though I was bringing hordes of people in every Thursday, but still, it would have been nice to have been told.

Last night I decided to commiserate, drink a few beers in my new little home studio room and put together a mix based on the kind of house/disco grooves we often used to play out there

https://on.soundcloud.com/DG3SY

frogbs, that's lovely. Very similar to the thing I was doing. I'd often get a friend or a fellow dj to guest with me, so it was a great way to improve and keep me on my toes

yeah it's fun when my friends show up, especially the music dorks who you know have always wanted to do something like this. you can just bring 'em behind the decks and tell them to pick something out. i love making it interactive like that, it's cool when people show up with obscure records because they always wind up being really cool. like obviously it's a risk telling people to bring their own jams but the people who do put more thought into this than I do

I can relate dog latin. My thursday ghosted me too, in January. (The bar is currently closed lol.) After just taking a break from it all I’m currently knocking on new doors. A few vague possibilities. It was nice going back through old posts recently and remembering I’m a good dj. I don’t know if you need to hear this or not, but you are too.

Local coffee shop hired me to do a Saturday afternoon mellow set — looking forward to having a chance to play tracks that don’t sit well in the more upbeat sets I’ve been doing — like Wings’ “Arrow Through Me,” Air’s “Femme d’Argent,” Sun Araw’s cover of “December” by Teenage Fanclub, etc.

I would go to that

i'm playing at the italian club tomorrow, on the big dancefloor. there's a sit-down dinner that's happening first so the evening will basically be a social hour, followed by dinner, followed by dancing, and the whole evening is a charity fundraiser for an animal rights org. i'm pretty excited about it all, buuuuut...

the host of the party gave me some ideas of things he'd like me to play that i'm feeling a bit stymied by, tbh - like a lot of things he suggested i'm happy to play (madonna, gaga, blondie, etc) but he also mentioned this one current-day italian rock band, i listened to some of their songs and i think they're awful. he also mentioned neil diamond and asked if i could play "murder on the dance floor" as the last song of the night (tbh i'm at a point now where i just never need to hear that song ever again, and i like the damn thing). idk, just feeling vaguely annoyed by his requests - but also maybe i'm just being a brat, and it'll probably all be fine.

had my usual happy hour gig a couple days ago, not as well-attended as the last few i did but still fun. had a few ppl ask for song IDs, and the guy who runs the bar's kitchen (who also occasionally DJs) proposed we play out together sometime, which was cool - don't know him super well but he always says really kind things about my sets. maybe i'll take him up on it! feeling very "seize the day" about things in my life lately.

you're not a brat, i'd be more than vaguely annoyed

yeah I am done with Murder On The Dancefloor as well. Can you play all the Neil Diamond/Italian rock stuff at the start of the night so it's out of the way? Or save it til the end, and tell him you're leaving it until everyone is drunk and ready to sing and dance along? That way you don't have to think about this stuff as part of your set in the same way

there's always Neil's synthpop phase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b9bWNA1dKs

ok glad it's not just me lol

yeah i'm def gonna start out the night on the more rock end of things, and the dinner may start out as quieter ballad-y stuff that slowly builds into a groove by dessert time or so, leading into the disco bombs portion of the evening

i believe i have found a way to breach the neil diamond impasse at the very least:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msWuL-g_KA4

(i would rather eat glass than ever, ever play "sweet caroline" in any of my sets, for the record)

oh there's an italo disco version of that one too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUA2rVQ-feE

ha! nice find

so my bar closed in march and forfeited their liquor license (weird utah alcohol laws).

i've tried two other gay bars. one basically shooed me away. the other expressed some interest but now they're ghosting me.

i'm tired of dead ends. fuck this city into the ground. can't wait to ghost this place after it's ghosted me so many times. i don't vibe with anyone here at all. such a lame scene, juvenile and not for me anymore, i never fit in with those douchebags anyway. ready to hang up my hat for a while. i've been mostly listening to metal and rock lately anyway. time to drop all the frustration and move on with my life.

xp to NickB - I thought you meant an italo cover of 'Sweet Caroline'. That would have made my day!

Ewww lol no! There is a Fun Fun version of I'm A Believer though. It's... not great

sorry things are so dispiriting map <3

tho tbh your post flashed through my mind at my gig yesterday after a woman not once, but TWICE, requested that i "play music that people know"

and someone did, in fact, request "sweet caroline." i told him i didn't have it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

DJ Ötzi version is the only one you need:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFq2v5MC4YA

SO GOOD
SO GOOD
SO GOOD

haha ty dr. i'm ok with it tbh. sort of just want to be a fan and not feel like i have to 'keep up on electronic music' all the time. i'm thinking seriously about a pretty radical career change too. if i ever want to dance i'll probably try to find an amateur modern dance troupe or something. no pressure no social scene bs just move around emotionally to music some time before 9 pm lol.

and hmm yeah i can see that gig resulting in some dispiriting requester situations. good luck and godspeed.

got another one tomorrow, all I know is I'm gonna start with Cups by Underworld and at the end blam Rydeen

ok this one was kind of sweet, basically my deal is if you bring in vinyl I'll play it almost no matter what it is. I'm the "professional DJ" so I'll figure out how to make it work (or not). anyway this one guy came who was mentally handicapped and maybe looking for an excuse to get out, so he came out for this because he had exactly one thing on vinyl - a boxset of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. he won it in some raffle. he was pretty excited we were playing "his" record, apparently unaware he'd brought in one of the greatest jazz recordings of all time lol

my pal's hairdresser had a 40th last night, and her DJ cancelled with only three weeks notice, so my pal suggested that I play it. Doing "mobile discos" really isn't what I want to be doing, but the birthday girl offered decent money and I felt bad for her having to scramble to find someone, so I took the gig. We had a chat when we first made contact and I explained that I'm not really someone who is going to play Brown Eyed Girl and Build Me Up Buttercup and Sweet Caroline, so if she was looking for something like that then I wouldn't be suitable. She said she didn't want something as traditional, and she was basically wanting a warm-up party for before her trip to Ibiza this weekend. So I thought, this is something I could manage - some cheesy stuff, some disco and lots of pop-house.

So to make sure I was prepared I asked her if she had any specific requests for songs, and times to play certain songs (eg last song of the night etc). She said she didn't want too much house music, but then sent me a playlist of 30 tracks that her and the people she works with love. It was all hard trance and techy stuff - think Billy Gillies and Hannah Laing, who are huge names in the world of crossover dance music in 2024 despite being pretty terrible.

But, it's not my night, so I decided to go with it. I planned to play an hour of disco, an hour of r&b, and then two hours of clubby pop-house and planned to keep the hard trance stuff to the end, so that when everyone was a bit drunk and lively they would dance to it. I don't think there's anything worse than seeing someone playing fast and hard to an empty room.

My night was a disaster.

First, the venue was a nightmare. She had hired it before it made the news a few months ago for an event that went massively viral for its awfulness. That event was blamed on the organiser, but having now spent a night at the venue I can see they weren't solely to blame. The staff were useless last night. They were more interested in pouring their own drinks than serving anyone. The "low lighting" was still like having the main light on in your living room. The speakers were terrible - really murky, and even with the volume cranked up it felt very quiet.

The birthday girl had hired a saxophonist to come play for an hour. This seemed a bit strange to me but I'm open-minded. The woman turned up and she was lovely, really nice, great chat. She was due to start about an hour into the party and play for an hour, and while she was setting up we were chatting and we were in agreement that it was a tough crowd. The dancefloor space had been reduced for a photobooth which didn't help, but you could tell that people were out for a nice subdued drink rather than a big night out. As we were working out when she would take over, she asked if I could skip a few things I had planned to play because she was going to play them as she played her sax over them.

She then played what I can only describe as "Scottish Floorfillers: The Megamix." In Glasgow we have a local radio show that's really popular called "The GBX" which is basically donk versions of pop hits and club classics. In an hour she played all the biggest anthems, the stuff you would rely on: "You're A Superstar", "Boom Boom Boom Boom", and Scotland's other national anthem "Bits & Pieces." She also played all the big 80s stuff "Sweet Dreams", "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "Young Hearts Run Free." Every time she started a new song my heart sank because it was a song I was expecting to play and get a decent reaction. Even then, people were still in their seats, not really feeling it.

She finished at 10pm. That left me two hours to play. But when someone has come in and played all the biggest crowdpleasers before you, where do you go from there? I get that if you're only playing for an hour and you want to be booked again by other guests you have to show you are the most fun and great entertainment. But it really fucked me over.

I started with some chart dance-pop. It was going OK. Then, just to really knock me off, my laptop froze and Rekordbox crashed. I could have just crawled under the table and died at that moment and it would have probably went down better. A minute to reset and it was fine again, but nobody dancing. I was playing stuff from the playlist the birthday girl sent me, which I wasn't even enjoying myself and nobody else was. I did a pivot to 80s pop. Still no dancing. I tried some 90s pop. Still no dancing. I went full cheese - "9-5", "Don't Leave Me This Way", "A Little Respect." Still no dancing. Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, The Weeknd. Still no dancing.

At the end of a Scottish party it's traditional to play Runrig's "Loch Lomond." Everyone gathers in a massive circle, holds hands, and sings along to the slow bit, then do a weird running/mosh dance to the fast bit, while the person whose birthday/wedding/etc it is stands in the middle. It's standard procedure and it would be odd to go to this type of event and have that not happen. When the time came to play that? Still no dancing.

It is fair to say that I completely bombed last night. I know logically that a lot of it isn't my fault - a lacklustre crowd, someone else stealing my energy, a venue that didn't offer anything conducive, and a tech glitch - but I genuinely felt embarassed going home with cash given how underwhelming the whole thing felt. At the same time: this isn't the type of thing I want to be doing, and I don't feel sad that I didn't flourish when attempting to do something that I don't really want to try again.

My phone fell out my pocket on the taxi home and I won't get it back until this afternoon, and that somehow feels like a metaphor for my evening.

Wow! I can't imagine anyone is ever going to have a worse DJ gig than this to beat such an incredible story. I'm so sorry you went through that, but what a tale! The saxophonist part absolutely blew my mind.

I do think this will be an outlier in just how awful a gig can be and I hope one day you can appreciate it for what a great story it gave you. But yes, i think I'd be fairly traumatised after that experience!

It did teach me what a crap Scottish person I am though as I never knew that about Runrig's "Loch Lomond." I asked my wife if she knew that and she just burst out laughing saying how can you not know that!!?. Oops!

Anyway, super sorry but thanks for sharing!

I am now trying to picture you playing "Loch Lomond" in Queens Park tomorrow and it is cracking me up

Yeah, that sucks. A Little Respect is a bit of a litmus test for me: if they won't dance to that, they won't dance to anything, and there's nothing that I can do to fix it. I had a saxophonist with me for a party earlier this year; she sent me a playlist of half a dozen tunes, and I put them into a mix at the start of my set. It was... fine. And then everybody disappeared upstairs, and almost nobody danced for the rest of the night (I did the A Little Respect litmus test, after which I just relaxed into the situation.) The person whose party it was felt bad about it, and gave me a bottle of wine the next day to compensate!

I didn't know that Bits & Pieces was a Scottish anthem!

My Friday nights are still going well BTW. I have an optional extra half hour which depends on how busy the bar is, and for the last couple of months I've been playing it in full - we always get a late surge of punters, even if it's been quiet earlier. The renewed interest in country has become very apparent: Wagon Wheel is massive (US readers: feel free to roll your eyes, but it was never a hit over here, and it seems to be having a moment), and I get a good reaction to Tebey's recent cover of Blinding Lights, which TBH I prefer to the original.

My most loyal regular - at least 70 years old, less than 5 feet tall, zero dress sense and an amazing dancer, Nothern Soul spins, the lot - has become something of a mascot; everybody wants to dance with him, nobody takes the piss, and something about his gentle enthusiasm helps to set the mood in the room. He drives about 35 miles to get there, and books a room for the night in a local pub. I'm honoured!

I am now trying to picture you playing "Loch Lomond" in Queens Park tomorrow and it is cracking me up

ha ha! i shoud do it to see what happens.

mike, your most loyal regular sounds amazing. what a hero.

oh, and yes - I didn't know that Bits & Pieces was a Scottish anthem!

i honestly think if this was designated Scotland's official national anthem a good % of the population would be all for it.