28/04/2024
27/4/2024 2:45 AM
When I had a website, I used to do a DJ diary once a week detailing the goings on at my events, but since my website www.djchimpy.co.uk was targeted by hackers it down, I’ve pointed it to my page www.facebook.com/djchimpy . It makes sense as other than people passing my mobile number on, I get most of my gigs from there, but during my long drive home this evening, I had a thought that I could continue it, so here goes.
The gig this evening was a 60th birthday, I was sent a playlist that included a lot of 60’s and 70’s which is what I expected, when I arrived, both myself and the birthday girl’s husband agreed that we would play background music for a couple of hours, then there would be a speech and cake cutting before we get into the dancing, this is pretty standard for a birthday party, the first couple of hours are all about people arriving and getting some drinks / food in etc.
The party itself was in a huge Marquee (about 30x20 meters, it had a couple of high points in the middle which made it a bit easier to find when I was on my way and got a little lost, the only issue that was pretty obvious when I arrived was that due to the constant rain all day, there were quite a number of leaks in the roof & there were pockets of drips not only on the dance floor, but in the area where I was setting up.
It didn’t look too bad where I was setting up and I positioned all my stuff, the main lighting stand and speakers were free from any drips, but I had to rotate the DJ table at an angel to avoid any equipment getting wet.
From 7 until about 9:45 I played a lot of 60’s, some 70’s and used a lot of song from my Soul classics album too, I did get a handful of people dancing to some of the songs, but I wanted to keep some of ones from this era that people would dance to until the later stages of the event, as it was a 60th, I was expecting to play this stuff for pretty much the whole night.
Anyway about 9:15 pm, this is where the problems started, I was advised when the cake could be ready and was asked if my Microphone could be used for a speech, but I couldn't find it for some reason, I looked in all of my boxes and even the car, but couldn’t find it, so I was trying to figure out how I could get round this, from past experiences, I know that you can use headphones as a microphone and as I had a spare set, I plugged them into the 2nd Microphone channel and it seemed that everything was sorted, but I was wrong……
What I noticed when testing out the microphone as that whenever you touched any of the metallic parts of it, would get an electric shock, not a major one, but enough to notice, I did advise the Louse not to hold the headphones in a certain way so that she wasn’t touching any of the metallic parts & all seemed well, but whilst I was adjusting the sound levels on the speaker, I got another shock off the main lighting stand, I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, but I soon found out.
The worst thing that can happen when you are playing a set is a power cut, it makes everyone who is dancing stop and look at you & it happened to me, both my CD players and mixer when off and it stayed like that, all my lights stopped, and I had no sound whatsoever, although it was thinking Holy s**t at the time, I thought of TCUP (thinking clearly under pressure) would get me out of this.
My initial thought was that one of my extension leads was getting wet without me noticing it, but after swapping a few of them over and getting no change, I traced the problem back to the socket from the generator, this had been underneath one of the drips and was a little wet, I knew this was the issue because there were a couple of other things plugged into it that had stopped working too, so I then quickly connected all my power leads back up, then I the main extension lead into the same socket that the caterers were using as I could see that they still had power and after a little configuration, we were all back up with sound / lights and people dancing!
I thought I was going to stick with what was planned from a music side, but I moved onto the 80’s and then after getting a request for Fatboy slim (tight here right now), I played that and moved onto the Chemical brothers (go), Faithless (Insomnia), Mory Kante (Yeke Yeke), the Shapeshifters (lola’s them), Darude (sandstorm) and Delerium Silence (Tiesto mix).
We then finished off with some singalong songs including hey Jude and Don’t look back in Anger to round the night off and after packing all my stuff up I took it very easy on the way home as there was a lot of surface water, I thoroughly enjoyed this at it makes me want to get into the festival scene as I can see myself turning up in a Campervan / converted Transporter and banging out some tunes..
More next time..
I started to listen to music during the mid / late 80's and since then, I have been a keen fan of m
