» Listings for July 2010

1. Weather, arials and bad radio blues...

   Posted on 6:03am Thursday 29th Jul 2010

   Hi all again. Not a bad summer is it? Not too hot. No rain to speak of.. and one of my broken bass bins (now repaired) comes back tomorrow by courier hopefully.That's such a weight off, as I've got some biggies coming up and I need the extra oomph!

   I'm doing lots of gigs right now of either weddings or foreign students. I've had to resort to taking in paper and pen, as the other week a Russian 13 year old asked me for "leeki par-nmm" Eh? 5 times he tried to get the message accross and you've got to remember that I'm standing in a loud environment at the best of times, so it's a delicate balancing act trying to hear them without getting your ear drum shattered from the requestee shouting in it. Turned out it was "Linkin' Park - Numb". What do you mean you've never heard of it? Oh you're a radio 2 listener are you? Well confession time...I do Chris moyles in the morning (only in the biblical sense) and Number 2 there after as it's more random and just brilliant for picking up back catalogue tunes. Refreshingly, You never quite know what you're going to hear. How many stations can you say that about? Not many commercial ones that's for shure.- ooops, that's "shure" the microphone company. I thought that was wrong.

   That reminds me. I must get the arial replaced on our old but gorgeous VW golf. I love her to bit's. She drives like a dream (1.8 CL) but only picks up BBC radio Sussex on the inherited stereo (won't play cd's either) unit. Now there's a radio station! Every tune a thousand years old guaranteed! I'm going out of my mind. We've got an ipod, but with all the DJ business I can never get round to putting any more then the 300 odd songs on it already. Ipod owners will know that this is an obsticle that must be confronted in order not to get bored with your all time favourite songs and literally lose the will to live any more. For without those to fall back on; what is the point of it all?

   Have a great weekend and think of me working my nuts off!
   

   Enjoy now some classic Benny:here
   

2. Mass survey and sunburn

   Posted on 2:27am Thursday 15th Jul 2010

   Hi all again. Well this last weekend I didn't have a booking. I had a request last minute to DJ for someone's wedding for another company but (sorry Erik) Becky and I were 100% focused on getting out surveys for my over 25's disco night out in Chichester which I am determined will happen! Becky stayed in the town centre giving out postcards and I tramped about 5 miles in the searing sun posting them through letterboxes. We played on our talents. Becky's great at her bit and I'm better at the distance thing. We both got a bit sunburned but we got 1500 cards out between us (50% each).

   So far we've got about ten surveys come back so you can see it's a fairly thankless task right now!
   

   I've got a venue in mind, but everyone's been advising me to go for starting out small. I checked out a smaller venue today but they were not willing to hire it out for a "public party".

   I can almost hear them sniffing as they look down their noses at my email. Never mind. I have the costings on the larger venue now and I know we need to have a lot of punters from the start, so as from this evening I've set up a facebook page to get members to commit to joining.

   Well got to be going out the door right now but if you know anyone over 25 who want's to go out dancing away from the thursdays teenyboppers please send them to my survey page post haste!

   We finished sometime in the afternoon by the way and I have to say it's been a long time since a beer tasted quite that good...
   

    

   Have a great weekend and I'll catch up soon.

    

   Mike.
   

3. Where are we all going? And can we take sandwiches?

   Posted on 5:58am Wednesday 7th Jul 2010

   Hi again. Sorry I haven't been back for a while. I usually stay away when I've not got much to say, even about the DJ life so as not to bore you. This time however, I'm prepared to make an exception... Just kidding!
   
   Oh well, let's have a round up. I've had some good gigs and some "everyone want's to stay outside in the warm weather and talk" type gigs. The latter type are fine but a bit too easy for yours truly. The good ones are when it all comes together and the guests want to go wild. I love those. You get inspired and you really want to go for it. You come up with stuff that you may not have played for a while and when they don't run off it's so much better for the DJ. Some crowds are so fickle that if you're not playing Bryan Adams or Los Lobos  (Macerina), off they go. If they're the type that are waiting to see what brilliance you are going to gift them with next, it get's so much more interesting. It's no good just sticking with the hundred most cheesy songs of all time either. I would get bored to death and each crowd is different anyway (thank God!).  
   
   I used to think it depends on the venue as to how interested the guests are but it's not that simple. I personally think that we're going through a period when a lot of music isn't that interesting. We've had definite big trends over the last ten years of business and of course before that too. I'm the first to admit that apart from a few major artists same-y styles exclusive to them, I'm struggling to find a link. All in all, there's no big exciting thing going on right now and most wedding guests are too young for something solid like say...70's disco and don't seem to go for much from the last ten years as I suppose it just doesn't have the staying power that the older stuff has. For instance: verses sound the same as choruses and solos have disappeared completely. I hear a lot of music and much of it doesn't have the dynamic that it used to. For instance, just compare the FOO FIGHTERS with NIRVANA. The former have their arses licked regularly on radio 1, but the latter were far superior. Compare MICHAEL JACKSON to TINIE TEMPAH...Stuff is going down hill!
   Or is it? LILLY ALLEN, MARK RONSON, CALVYN HARRIS...maybe things aren't so bad yet...Such a funny business music isn't it? I bet there's loads of stuff out there that's better then what we're being sold. I used to play new stuff that I thought was good, but until radio 1 caught on, no one would dance to it. By the time it got to number 6 in the chart, everyone was asking for it. Suffice to say, my influence counts for nothing right now so on that note, I'll ship out and shut up for this week. Wherever or whoever you are, have a good one!
   
   Mike.
   
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC31Oudc5Bg Classic Bird and Fortune..