The day the music died: why I’ll never be a superstar DJ

Ever since I was 14 and we first started sneaking out to clubs, I wanted to be a DJ. I spent the next seven years of my life trying to make that happen - largely successfully. Ten years later, however, it’s time to pack up the records, put them in loft and move on. My lifestyle is no longer compatible with becoming a superstar DJ, were it even a realistic possibility now. And besides I have a new fixation - something which is much more realistically attainable - to keep me occupied for the next few years. This is the story of how I got there.

(Warning: this is overly long and quite self indulgent. And with hardly any cheap gags in it at all. Normal service will resume intermittently).

The early 1990s was the start of superstar DJ culture. Decks were then new guitars and clubs the new live gigs to hit. And I desperately wanted to be at the centre of it all. Sasha ruled the world then, getting paid thousands per minute for a New Year’s Eve gig - and I wanted part of that, no matter how small.

The slightly problem was the cost of the equipment - Technics 1210s (still the industry standard) sold for £400 a piece and you needed two. Add on a mixer - anywhere from £400-£800 for a decent model - and you’re looking at a bill of at least £1,200 before you can even get started. When you’re working in McDonalds on £3.25 an hour that’s an almost mythical amount of money.

In the end, I picked up some shoddy decks from a car boot sale that had pitch control (so you can alter the speed of the record, match beats up and create a seamless mix) and fashioned a mixer out of some volume controls from an old Tandy radio. I was nothing if not resourceful. I then spent every bit of spare cash I had on vinyl, preparing for the day when I would one day be able to play it out properly. Loud, on a big ass sound system. The way music is meant to be heard.

I picked which university to go to not on what subjects they offered or the quality of teaching, but by which had the best Union, with the most packed Ents schedule and the number of potential places I could DJ. As it turns out, Warwick not only had a killer venue and packed social calendar but also one of the best business schools in Europe, making my resulting degree in Computer and Business Studies actual worth something after all.

Upon arriving, I spent my entire student loan on a pair of 1210s and mixer and signed up to DJ at the Union. Back then, House was still massive and Culture was the Saturday night I aspired to DJ. What I in fact got was the 80s night (Decadance) and the cheesy Monday night Top Banana - Pop, Pop and yet more Pop, through the ages.

But this was actually no bad thing, as it meant I learned how to work a crowd and keep them going all night - and there was little chance of ruining it all by misreading the audience and playing the wrong track. So long as you stuck to cheesy pop, you really couldn’t go wrong.

Then, after two years, came the Culture auditions. Culture was a massive deal - it wasn’t just student night anymore. It was making a name for itself as the place to see the best DJs of the day and here was an opportunity to play support to the biggest names in the industry and get paid for it too. Every fucking week.

I spent a long time picking the right tunes, practicing until I had my audition mix down near perfectly and headed to the Union to await my turn to show off my skills. The last six years had been building to this point and I was ready. When my name was called, I stepped up to the decks and threw on my first track, before very quickly mixing in a second. I wasn’t just going to string tracks together like everyone else - one minute of, albeit impressive, overlap followed by four minutes of, well, just playing a record. Any halfwit can learn to do that if they try hard enough, I was going to wow them by remixing tracks live, on the fly. At least that was the theory, and in the next 30 seconds I learnt a very, very important lesson - not all 1210s are made equal.

You see, although every deck can increase or decrease the record speed by 8 percent in either direction, over time the accuracy can wander. So +1.25 on one deck and +1.25 on another could differ by a huge margin. It also depends on how often you’ve had the decks calibrated and it turns out the ones in the Union DJ booth hadn’t been touched in years. As a result, they were massively out. When I quickly brought record two into the mix, at exactly the right point, everything was lined up and it sounded amazing - more than the sum of its parts. But it quickly started to drift - with incredible, shocking speed. This happens all the time when you’re DJing and one of the skills of beat mixing is catching it before the untrained ear can tell and quietly pulling it back into line before anyone notices. Which is fine when you’re well into a long mix and you’ve got a feel for the decks.

If you’re less than a minute into an audition that you’ve worked six years to get to and could massively change your life, it’s an entirely different mindfuck. I could hear it slipping out almost a second after I’d bought it in. As I went to correct it, as I’d done a thousand times before, instead of trusting my instinct and just going with it … I stopped to think. Huge. Fucking. Mistake. Next thing I knew I was questioning in my mind which track was running fast and before I knew what I was doing I panicked, slowed the wrong record down throwing them completely out and resulting in a clash of beats so bad they actually asked me to stop. There and then. I hadn’t even played for a whole minute and I was being hauled out of the booth already. It really couldn’t have been any worse.

I tried to explain it was just a stupid mistake and they humoured me by letting me play again at the end - although as both of us knew there was no way, quite rightly, they could have risked putting me on the Culture line up in case that happened in front of a paying crowd. I went home, probably the lowest I’ve ever felt, thinking I’d wasted the last six years of my life, not to mention the thousands of pounds I’d spent on records and equipment. It was a distinctly non-brilliant time.

The Culture auditions had been held at the end of the final term, ready for the new academic year. The DJ manager was also a student post, and as happened every three years or so it rolled over as the outgoing manager graduated and ventured off into the real world. Even though I knew this had happened, I was still surprised to get a call from the new DJ manager asking me to come in for a chat at the beginning of the new year.

With all the focus on Culture and the other nights, there’d been some sort of mix up when it came to getting someone to do Mojo - which was originally an Acid Jazz night (remember that?) but had evolved under the watch of Duncan Beiny and his Dirty Fat Beats crew into an eclectic, scratch-heavy, anything kind of goes sort of night. Almost Big Beat, but in the days before the Boutique and Norman Cook went massive.

Turns out Duncan was off - as were the rest of them - and the new DJ manager wanted to know if I’d like the gig. In the intervening summer - between car crash audition and the start of term - I’d spent most of it going through my record collection and just having fun. Culture was House - and pure House at that. Four to floor and nothing more. As a result, I’d only been playing about 20 percent of my record collection and although I’d still been adding oddities, rare tracks and Coronation Street theme albums to the pile of vinyl, I’d mostly over looked them for the sure fire Culture candidates.

I’d had a brilliant summer putting together some mixes for fun and just getting back to enjoying splicing tracks together to create something new and exciting, so I jumped at the chance of getting back behind the decks. True, it wasn’t as high profile as Culture, but there’d be much more free rein about what tracks to play and as everyone knows - Thursday is the new Friday, which co-incidentally is the new Saturday and so in no way a step down from what could have been at Culture. Especially when you’re a student.

Of course, following on from Duncan was a daunting prospect - he’d grown his audience over years and with the other guys they’d created a distinct sound for the night. He was also a shit hot scratcher, and although I was pretty good by then he was still ten times better. But it was a gig, and a chance to play the music I wanted to a crowd that (hopefully) wanted to hear it.

I’d also be DJing another guy - Laurent Corneille who I kind of new vaguely - so at least there’d be someone else to blame as well if it all went to shit. I’m a big believer in the live experience, over pre-preparing stuff in advance. Especially given how quickly my meticulously prepped set had unravelled in the Culture audition. Luckily Laurent seemed to agree, so we kind of played each night by ear, working off each other and constantly trying to one up each other with track selections. As a result each night was completely different, but largely the crowd went with us and came back week after week to see what we were going to do next time.

We gradually won over the audience over and started to make the night our own. I remember one particular night sticking on Clubbed To Death by Rob D - which is a good seven minute track if you let it play out to the end - one minute before we were meant to finish. I then mixed in Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack at the same time and the crowd went mental. So much so, that when the stewards threw on the bright, white, fright lights to try and get people to leave - instead of everyone awkwardly looking around themselves, feeling a bit silly and skulking off into the night they all carried on dancing. As if it was broad daylight. It was only luck that the record finished of its own accord before they pulled the plug on the whole soundsystem.

One night, Duncan even came back for an impromptu appearance. We managed to get them to setup an extra deck and mixer so one of us could be scratching and dropping samples over what the other person was doing. If there was any night I wished I’d taped so I could listen to it again, it’s that one. Seriously, we were on fire.

By the end of term, the night and audience were ours. Unfortunately it was our time to leave the safety of full time education and go and get proper jobs. But not before we’d had one last blow out performance.

The relationship between the Union and University had always been a strained one - but no more than it was in the spring of 1999. Prior to then, the Union only had a license to run until 2am Thursday, Friday Saturday and midnight other days. Someone came up with the cunning plan of applying for a 24 hour licence, fully expecting the University to see the application and object, but at least it would open a dialogue so they could at least negotiate the possibility of opening later. In actual fact, the University missed the application entirely and it was passed without a problem as there was no opposition.

This wasn’t as great a thing as it turned out, as the University felt the Union had been a bit under hand. And while it agreed that there was nothing legally preventing the Union from now running all night events, the University felt that it may struggle to run any events at all in the long run if the £1m of funding it received every year was withdrawn. So ultimately, there was a 24 hour licence in place, but no one could use it.

Until, that was, we came to the end of term. The University was having increasing problems with an all night party that traditionally ran on a satellite campus on the last day of term. It had grown from a small gathering to a major concern and it was something it was desperate to shut down. So the following plan was proposed: in order to stop the unofficial party happening, the Union would be prepared to host an all nighter on the last night of term, so those that wanted to party all night could do so in a safe and controlled environment. The University reluctantly agreed.

It was a full Union event, but we’d been told we could have our normal room - the largest actual club venue in the building - from 2am until the sun came up. We’d told our usual crowd to arrive then and as the clock ticked over we slowed turned down Kylie singing Locomotion, left a bewildered dance floor looking at us, getting decidedly edgy as they were on a dance floor, obviously mid-Locomotion and now no more music was forthcoming. We then did the only thing we could - threw on the drum and bass remix of Fugees Ready Or Not and cleared the whole, entire dance floor. With that done, and exactly the sort of cliental we didn’t want quickly scrambling to other parts of the Union we could start again and build the night we wanted.

At six am, with the room still packed, people dancing away, appearing to be having an the time of their lives and the first signs of dawn peeping through the windows I looked across the dance floor at what we’d made. And I thought, it probably doesn’t get any better than this. And I was right.

A month later I was in London, starting out as journalist and I didn’t have a clue how to carry on DJing in London. There was no way to build an online buzz in 1999: MP3 files took forever to download over dial up and there was no such thing as social networking. The only way to get your name out there was to make mixes - probably even on tape as CD writers were still pretty expensive then - and physically hand them to (hopefully) the right people.

Of course, even now it wouldn’t exactly be easy - but given what I’ve learned from producing two unofficial remix albums (without getting sued along the way) and my knowledge of how to create an online following, I would probably have a pretty good shot. But my days of staying up until the sun comes up are mostly behind me now. Mostly.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t possible to create a loyal following back in 1999, just using the tools available then. A couple of years back I asked Ian, a friend who I had in common with Duncan, what he was up to (Duncan, not Ian) - and more importantly was he still DJing (Ian didn’t DJ, so obviously Duncan again). He was one of the best I’ve ever seen, so it would be a shame if not. Ian said he’d seen him DJing just the night before - Ian had been out for his birthday and he told me he’d gone out for a big night and managed to do two things: not tell anyone it was his birthday or that he knew DJ Yoda, who happened to be playing that night. My reply, naively, was: that’s brilliant - so does Duncan DJ with Yoda? No, Ian said, Duncan IS Yoda. And yes - he’s still shit hot.

And if you’ve got this far and want to hear how it ends, here’s a mix I put together a couple of years back during the time I threw myself into the bootleg/mashup scene in an effort to re-start my DJ career. It never happened, but I had a lot of fun along the way and got to DJ at the legendary Bastard night with my mate Dan - who I also met through that scene - and is my partner in special projects and (perhaps more importantly) not getting sued.

This mix is done as live - which means, yes, it’s a bit rough around the edges but it’s nothing you couldn’t get away with in a club. Plus the slight glitches - including the part when one record skips, somehow almost an entire bar to land back in time - shows that it is live and not digitally enhanced. It was made with just two turntables and a mixer in a single take, and through out about 85 percent of it both decks playing at the same time. Obviously it’s a feature packed 30 minutes, compared to a full four hour plus set and there’s no audience to work off so it’s deliberately hit heavy. But that said, it’s something I’m pretty happy with, all in all.

You can grab it here (right click, save as, if you would):

Will Rokier - Analogue:001

There’s even some covers, if that’s your ting: front and back. Made by super artist Pheugoo.

And the new thing? Well, that’s a whole nother post.