Yes yes y’all! And you don’t stop. Well, I did last week. A thousand apologies for missing a blog, but as you can see in my absence the page has had a complete refit. So if you started to get bored with it all, you can associate a one weeks lack of Domu news  with the sparkling new look of the page, hopefully the two will counteract with each other to quell your fiery anger. Did you miss me? Hope so. I was ill with rave flu after a silly bank holiday Sunday. Co-op at East Village and then Lend Me You Ears at Gramaphone left me a snivelling wreck for about 4 days. Both were great parties and  big love to all that attended them. I believe LMYE raised £800 quid for a children’s deaf charity, which is truly wonderful. I only hope my drunken crap DJing and shouting over Dorian Concept’s set didn’t spoil it for anyone. Apologies if it did.

    Anyhow I feel much better today, and have decided to stop drinking for a while. The last few weeks have been full on rave tastic, culminating this weekend with THIS IS UK SOUL, a day after my wife’s best friend Anya’s wedding.  So anyone that thought I seemed a bit tired and jaded at TIUKS, you would be right. We battled on in our room with Adam Rock and Bunny Bread to raise the vibe and had some terrific moments. Reel People with Omar rocked the main room, and I think a pleasant and soulful night was had by all. But for today’s blog I will focus on the wedding, and an eery coincidence which is probably only in my mind.

     This was the special day off my friends Richard ‘Pinky’ Parry and Anya Peirson, and i must say was an tremendous success.  I offered to mix some of their special music to play in between the band they had hired for the function, the aptly titled Jazz Dynamo’s. They were great I must say, and I do love a good wedding band, especially when they seem warm and to get into the whole day. But I often don’t like the music they choose to play in between their sets, usually because the band want to be the highlight, and the music they choose is a bit nothing-ee, simply to create a background noise whilst guests get a drink, go to the toilet  or get accidentally impregnated by distant relatives. It has always been my belief this causes a great dip in the evening, so I asked them to give me a list of songs, including the first dance, so that I could pre-mix and play from the start and fill the gaps when the band had a rest. Hopefully my pre-mix of smashers would keep the floor going, and to some extent they did. After begging, stealing and buying everything on their Excel spreadsheet of songs, I now possess a quite lethal wedding arsenal. You might think you could fare quite well with your Billy Jean, Hey Ya and other cool classics, but I now own some of the most lethal madrigal floor killers in history. Dancing Queen, This Ole House,  Status Quo’s seminal Whatever You Want, and my most prized secret love, Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen. But what is the coincidence here then, I hear you ask? This all seems fine, a favour for some friends, an everyday task which wouldn’t take more than a few hours to prepare. Well…

    It happened on exactly the same day I decided to go DJ digital. I had ordered Traktor Scratch, mainly due to Frank from Soulparlor hooking me up with the main dude at NI in Berlin and getting me 50% off, and it arrived the morning i was preparing my wedding mixes. And my main concern had always been that as a DJ I considered half, or at least a quarter of my job, to be selecting from the records I had chosen to bring. If I only had broken beat records and the club didn’t respond to it, what would I do? Be inventive. Play every last bit out of anything more accessible, be sly and clever and win them over so that eventually they understood a complex polyrhythmic 7/8 jazz workout.  But now, with a library of thousands of easier songs at hand on my hard drive, what is to stop me playing the same easy things I know will work every time. Hit after hit after hit. And what if they start to lose their impact? I now owned the most deadly enemy play list for any soldier in the underground music war. WEDDING MUSIC. If it starts to go wrong now, I have to fight the temptation and not play Come On Eileen. It is going to be hard, maybe I will need your help, maybe I will need to lock it away on a different hard drive so it doesn’t come out with me. But I will need to learn a new type of control, to be assured that I can guide the dance floor as strictly and finely executed as I always have done. And I think I know what will help me the most in this magical DJ quest.

                        I am going to stop drinking alcohol, before or whilst I DJ.

Afterwards, fine. At the end when it all gets a bit silly and there are three people left, fine. But I think im going to stop completely for a while now, so we will see how these gigs turn out. I will of course, keep you posted. Oh, I’m also going to eat less and exercise more, so it’s all change from today on.

              It is the beginning of a new chapter my friends, so till next week, love to you all, and onwards and upwards!