Cloud And Sun DJ Services Weekly Blog

Hi And Welcome to my regular blog. I will try and keep it humorous which may mean mildly colourful language at times. I hope you enjoy it and won't be offended. In order to protect the guilty; no Customers will be mentioned by name unless it's complementary and even then I may opt for anonymity. This is only because I wanted to impress you by putting in the word "anonymity."  If I can think of any other slightly more pointless and annoying rules, I will let you know in due course.


 

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  1. Love, champers and flashing

    Posted on

    Hi all,
               Sorry no blog last week but I was a bit busy entertaining the woman of my dreams! Yes, I flew out to Germany to meet her for the first time and we hit it off so well She suggested we fly back together. What a brilliant idea! I felt like we were such jet setters all be it on the cheap with Ryanair.
    If you ever fly with them and you're only taking hand baggage and you're a couple of kilos over, don't worry, don't do what I did and own up, get directed to one of their deliberately confusing extra baggage machines and get over charged on your credit card by some £40.00. Just take your pre-printed boarding card/ticket and go straight through to security where they don't have any scales and make sure you don't have a pen knife on your key ring or more than 100ml of any liquid and put your hair gel etc. in a plastic clear bag (why???)
    and you'll get straight through without losing anything like I did. £17 quid that Swiss army knife was. Torch, knife, nail file, scissors. All a traveling man could want, gone in an instant and all because the Americans invented Al Kieda to rob us of our human rights, not to mention aftershave and pen knives.. Of course I can't verify that fact but I've yet to hear a proper explanation for the pentagon hole on 911.
    Flying used to be a pleasure before the most suppressed and badly fed people on earth's government decided to do all this stuff to us. I really feel for Americans. Their government is run by a  bunch of private bankers and it loans them their own money under emergency finance conditions, using them as collateral. What a cheek! Only in America. Trouble is, our government do whatever they tell us to. Hence the ghastly experience of modern day flying. So many wasted penknives, scissors and toiletries!

    What has all this got to do with the life of a mobile DJ I hear you ask?..Nothing at all. except that I am a mobile DJ and this is my life.

    I'm loving the fact that my lady: Becky is not afraid of helping me with the equipment when I'm shunting it in and out of venues. In time she might take out another show under the Cloud And Sun DJ Services name.
    No promises though. First and foremost she is trained in estate agency type stuff and hopes to put her hand to it over here. In Germany I don't think they have quite the same reputation. You have to do quite a bit of official training in various property laws. Already they're sounding better than ours aren't they?

    Also this week after waiting some time for it to arrive, I got a new controller for my strobe light. Not many Deejays have these things these days. Perhaps it's the musician in me but I like to accent certain bits of the music with this type of lighting. I've been doing it from the start but I recall seeing "the Killers" do a set on the "Brit awards" a couple of years ago and they had a whole row of strobes which were used to great effect on at least one song at the peak of the main phrase (he doesn't look a bit like Jesus etc.).  Anyhow, the old controller started making a giant cracking noise across the speakers when you switched it on, so it had to go after nine years of good service, leaving my microphone stand as the only original remaining piece of kit. Talking of which, I can really relate to my microphone stand. Like me it's getting on a bit and to keep it working it needs it's nuts tightening every now and then.
    This new controller though is the dogs danglers. You can push various buttons with instant response (unlike the old one) and so create a much better light show. I'm guessing by now that you understand why I digress from the main topic so often...(yaaawwnn...)

    I must tell you about the Eric Cantona look-alike the other week (French as well) who decided that It would be a good idea to spray all the guests and the show with vintage Champagne, much to my annoyance and the poor bride and groom who lost most of it in the process. It's the only time to date that I have told a guest to stop spraying his fluid all over the equipment and piss off!

    You know what they are trying to signify in a James Bond movie when he pops a cork on a bottle of Bollinger 53? Well I was joking to Becky in my best "Clouseau" accent that he obviously loved the show so much he wanted to ...uh..... all over it even though he....uh.... knew it was wrong.......he just couldn't...uh...help himself!

    Here endeth this weeks blog.

  2. Black list if you want

    Posted on

    Hi all,
             As I sit in Beckie's office here in Bremen, so tired from staying up all Saturday night after the gig to make it to Stanstead and so relaxed with a change of scenery, it's hard to get in the mood for that of which I am about to rant.

    Fridays gig was wild and a "chandelier swinging" experience. One or two of the wedding party blokes got a bit too drunk and nearly sent my entire lighting rig crashing to the floor, all about £1,000 worth of it. But that, as crap as this is, (and boy is it!) is just a part of the job.
    No. Saturday's gig is what pissed me off. I'm not going to go into the technical workings of a a noise limiter here, as I've already covered it in another blog post. Suffice to say this one at the Brighton Hotel (Best Western) remains the most severe one I've ever dealt with. It's so hard to put on a show when you the punters are asking if you supply hearing aids help them to determin where the sound is coming from. I'm seriously considering starting a page of "venues to avoid like the plague" mainly to warn you poor happless clients before you commit to booking with such places. As I said before it's not usually the venue's fault that neighbours have moved in next door and ruined every future party until eternity; but that doesn't stop it from ruining your event now does it? If I got all the other deejays I know to help me compile a list of venues with these "evil", "party pooping" devices in then we might actually be able to be like here in Germany where no one seems to have heard about such attrocious aparatus....
    It's up to you folks out there. Email me and let me know if you think this would be valuable service...OR when booking, ask the venue if they have one.
     
     

  3. Don't squash the artist. As if you should need telling damn you!

    Posted on



    Hi all. Hope you had a nice week despite all the rain. what has happened to the summer? I don't know but at least we get randomity here. I've lived where the sun always shines and despite the jealosy when I tell people, let me tell you, for me it get's boring. I love living here (despite Gordon and the crew) and watching the changing of the seasons and all that goes with it. There's nothing quite like a cold crispy winter evening and the smell of someone's coal fire burning in the air..or the smell of the summer morning with or without a rain shower..

    Anyhow, Friday nights gig was at "Wiston House" near Steyning in West Sussex. A famous old house no doubt steeped in history. I had a couple of "bedroom/just do it for a laugh" deejays wander over to have a look at my "dash board" behind the public front of the show and they were awestruck at the technology on show! You can't help feeling proud at moments like that can you? All that hard work and investment over the years hits someone square in the face and you suddenly get a reminder on the weight of what you've gone without holidays and the like to achieve.  

    last night's gig was a great in that the couple I was playing for (wedding couple) were older than of late so it gave me a chance to play some old skool disco for a change. These days when I do a wedding gig, of which I do a lot these days, I play for a lot of younger folks while the older folks don't seem to want to get involved in the dancing part of the evening. It never used to be that way. My mate Ian says that fans of nineties piano house and the like are getting married these days and he's been waiting for this time for all his career! Good for him. I love that too but I don't seem to get as much opportunity to play it as he does. I seem to be playing nothing but "Boom boom pow" and "Bonkers" and "Wearing my rolex" and other heavy bass rap type grooves these days. Oh well, It beats "Come on eileen" and the "Macerina" for me. One thing that spoiled the gig for me was that at the Landsdowne as at other various venues was an evil box in the corner called a "noise limiter". It's not so much the hotel's fault these things have to be installed (although sound proofing would go a long way), but nearly always the local residents who nearly always move there after the hotel was doing ok for many years
    beforehand and seem to be able to get the full weight of the council behind them on getting these draconian devices installed.
    Some past deejays have to take the blame for having cheap over loud and destorted systems that blew everyone's ear drums out and invoked this horror in the first place, but not always. Sometimes the neighbours just didn't have all the info before parting with hundreds of thousands of pounds of the bank's/government's/tax payer's/their own money. What happens with these devices is that if you have any bass at all - that's the low frequency stuff that makes you want to move youre feet; it cuts the power to your super expensive computerised system causing as mentioned in last blog, my laptop to go mental mental, chicken oriental. So what do you do? I'll tell you what you do: You go over to laptop deejaying on vertual auto-pilot whilst you spend all night watching the l.e.d. diode box on the wall with one hand on your bass knob (insert pun here) on your mixing desk. Occasionally you quickly turn it up to it's normal "unity" - meaning neutral level just to tease your self and remind your self what it would sound like at a normal non suppressive gig, though not for more than a couple of seconds, lest the dreaded black box circuit breaker do it's cold unemotional deed.
    I just think it's great testimony to people in general that they still make the best of bad situation and have a good time anyway. I suffer more because I want to give the best show I can and find my self stymied/cut short/suppressed/choose your own adjective at it all. The only upside is that thankfully these things are relatively rare. If you're a customer reading this, ask the hotel or even me if the venue has one before booking. You'll have a show with much more impact if you avoid venues like this. There. Did you spot that? I've just started a crusade! We'll sort it out. "Bookings go down for noise limited hotels" Good job too I say!