Each year, I try to get away for an extended holiday/dj tour around Christmas time. Normally it happens in January, but this time round it took place in late Dec, as documented in the previous instalment. Therefore, I’ve spent the very snowy month of January holed up in the UK doing more studio work than usual, cranking up towards the normal velocity of djing as the month progressed. I took the first couple of weekends of January off. The first one was immediately after NYE, so not many folk would have ventured into the clubs anyway. The following weekend (Jan 7/8) was also a bit sparse on the clubbing front- just about every dj I spoke to reported the same thing. Most clubs stay shut between NYE and mid-January, when the gigs properly kick back into action. The only exception was a student outing to Plymouth’s Oceana on Monday January 11th. With fresh student loans hitting accounts, the student fraternity were about the only section of society with any financial liquidity so soon after Christmas. The place was rammed to 2500 capacity. Highly irregular for a Monday night, but a cracking first gig of 2010. My road manager Pete and I were very lucky with the weather. 36 hours earlier the road journey would have been impassable, with the UK’s worst winter conditions in 30 years. The big thaw continued through the weekend, and my next gig was at Fusion in Guernsey, the second biggest of the Channel Islands. This involved a flight from Gatwick, which had seen almost all flights cancelled over a 48 hour period earlier that week. Gatwick is the furthest from home of London’s five airports; sufficiently far away to have a decent sleep in the car en route down. The venue, Fusion, was a privately-owned 700 capacity club close to the quay front in Guernsey, accommodating both ravers and the vip fraternity. Guernsey’s low tax regime has made it a haven for the mega rich, particularly since the announcement of an increase in top-rate tax in mainland UK. Fusion had both a glassed-off private vip bar and regular club. It was only the second venue I’d played featuring the fresh-out-of-the-factory Pioneer CDJ2000 cd turntables. They incorporate (amongst other features) the ability to play directly off memory stick or other USB storage device. Having started life lugging around heavy record boxes (with regular damage to my shoulder ligaments), and later graduated to (much less bulky) cd cases, as soon as every club has CDJ2000s, all djs will be able to roll up with the tiniest of memory sticks off which to play their tunes, with the bulkiest thing to carry into the club being a pair of headphones. The night was excellent, topped off by the lighting guy keeping a bottle of Jagermeister and shot glasses under his console. It would have been rude not to… Having enjoyed the relative tranquillity of only two gigs during the first half of January, the more hectic final two weeks kicked off with a trip to the other main Channel Island, Jersey, on Saturday 23rd. Although I later corrected myself, I’d made a bit of a cock-up by getting the two islands mixed up when mentioning the respective gigs on Radio 1, which can’t have enamoured me to the local population. I flew to Jersey with British Airways from Gatwick, with my frequent flyer status allowing me to use BA’s First Class lounge, with plentiful bottles of vintage champagne at one’s disposal. I’m not much of a champagne drinker, but half a glass wasn’t too excessive. I spent a couple of hours at my hotel (The Radisson) before going to the club. The promoters told me that the hotel had been denounced as an architectural carbuncle by the Jersey media when it opened. To me it seemed nothing out of the ordinary, and The Radisson’s views, across a marina to an illuminated old fort, were spectacular. The gig was relatively small-scale (attracting roughly 600 people), which seemed about right on the weekend that’s generally considered to be the nation’s ‘skintest’ of the entire year. For the second consecutive Saturday I had the luxury of finishing at 2am, an hour at which I regularly start on other weekends. Jersey to London is the shortest jet flight that one can take to or from the capital. Although I’d booked an extra legroom exit row, it barely seemed worth the effort, as we were in the air for a mere 30 minutes. Back at Gatwick, Amanda, Jake and Phoebe met me, and we drove to see my manager Charlie at his new house in nearby Burgess Hill, watching Arsenal lose 3-1 to Stoke in the FA Cup. My next outing was in London on Thursday 28th for the RNID’s ‘Safer sound/Don’t lose the music’ campaign, which aims to highlight the risk of permanent hearing damage from listening to music too loud for too long. Clearly I’m not advocating listening to less music, but have joined forces with the charity, aiming to highlight the need to give your ears a breather and perhaps invest in some earplugs for particularly loud environments. You can find out more at Dontlosethemusic.com. The party took place at the offices of M&C Saatchi in Soho’s Golden Square, which had breathtaking views of central London from the higher floors, and a very good atmosphere for an event with such a mixed bag of people in the crowd. The last weekend in January is always one of the best of the year in clubland. Many folk haven’t been paid for between 4-6 weeks (since pre Christmas.) Once money appears into their accounts in late January, people go totally crazy. On Friday 29th I played my monthly residency at the MoS in London. With an hour before my set, in the djs’ Green Room I met my old school mate and Faithless founder/producer Rollo, chewing the fat about his life since moving up to Norfolk from London. Matt Darey was also having a drink, and only 90 minutes earlier I’d made his ‘Urban Astronauts’ track my Tried & Tested record of the week on my Radio 1 show. With relatively few January gigs under my belt, I had so many tunes I was simply gagging to play on the Ministry’s crazy system. First, I took a look around the refit in the main room dj booth, which now has (and I’m not exaggerating) five CDJ2000 turntables. I recorded my set, which is already on the site and available for download as the ‘Feb mix’ if you fancy it… Incidentally, you can also check out my bi-weekly podcast, which has reached a whopping quarter of a million subscribers, via the link on the homepage. On Saturday 30th, I flew to Glasgow for Inside Out, at its temporary home, the O2 Academy. The Arches, its regular venue, is closed due to reconstruction of platforms at Glasgow Central Station, directly overhead. Playing immediately after Eddie Halliwell, it was great to return to the legendary Inside Out atmosphere, one of the world’s loudest crowds, as I played the closing set til 3am. It was good to see Eddie, who will be playing four times at Judgement Sundays in Ibiza this summer- can’t wait! Good sense would have suggested staying in Scotland for the following night’s gig in Aberdeen, but family and football loyalty saw me flying back down to London for the afternoon, to watch Arsenal v Man Utd at the Emirates. What a let down, seeing my team play so spinelessly... However, I’ve painfully learned to avoid allowing a dodgy football score to rupture my djing karma. What very nearly did spoil things for me in Aberdeen was the weather. All week I’d been checking the generally-reliable BBC weather site, as I’d experienced snow related delays on a couple of previous winter visits to Scotland’s North East Coast. Although it pointed reassuringly only to ‘light snow’, in the event I was very lucky. Aberdeen Airport was closed for a couple of hours on Sunday evening as they cleared the snow, whilst flights in front of us circled in the sky for over an hour until the snow on the runway could be brought under control. Thankfully, by the time we landed the worst was over, but the conditions were clearly going to make things very difficult for the gig that night. Over 700 advanced tickets had been sold, but more than 300 didn’t show because of the weather. I’ve gotta say, I was impressed to see the place so busy under the treacherous circumstances, and atmosphere-wise it was my best gig of the weekend. The crowd went absolutely nuts. I’ll definitely be back much sooner than it’s taken since the previous visit. Thankfully, by the following morning the weather had settled, and my 9.30am flight back to London left with no problems. I’d been told that because it’s a base for the oil industry and helicopters to drilling platforms, Aberdeen Airport stays open when snow clearance teams would give up at other airports. It was lucky, as I had only 24 hours back in London before setting off with Amanda to Dubai on Tuesday 2nd. It was my first Dubai gig since NYE 2008/2009, and we met promoter Ian Hadassi in the lounge at Heathrow Terminal 5, who was bringing me out for his Vegas Baby event. Our BA flight was delayed for over 2 hours, owing to a water leak that had soaked the rear quarter of the plane, drenching it in 2 inches of water. Luckily, the main cabin was sufficiently empty that all the passengers could be re-accommodated in the front portion of the Boeing 747, but it took a while to re-seat everyone. We landed into Dubai at 1.30am, and after clearing a huge immigration line, we were collected in a bling stretch Hummer with disco lights and plasma screens. It took us to the much written-about Atlantis Hotel, where we checked in around 3 in the morning. Atlantis has many positives- three huge pools, oversized bedrooms and some world class restaurants, but the décor looks like it was interior designed by someone who’s partially sighted. Not that a hotel’s interior is of much concern in a country with more sunny days than just about anywhere else in the world. Amanda and I spent three nights and two days getting some much needed sun, in the run up to Thursday’s gig for Vegas Baby in the Ballroom of the Grand Habtoor Hotel in Dubai Marina. It was more than just any old gig, with loads of mates in town, including Tall Paul and Alex P, plus Frankie Dettori, who rode my back during a couple of points in my set. Thankfully, he’s very light. Amanda was due to PA one of her tracks, but the microphone was feeding back too much, and it seemed unwise to let her performance get spoiled by grating feedback. After only 3 hours’ sleep, we flew back with BA at 10am on Friday morning, sleeping comfortably in a British Airways flat bed. Landing into Heathrow at 2pm, by 3 I was back at home putting together Friday night’s Radio 1 show, which takes at least half a day to program and generally think through. After my show finished at 1am, we raced down to Brighton to play for Dave Pearce at Concorde 2. For some reason I thought the venue was a commercial chain-owned place close to the Grand Hotel. However, I was thinking of somewhere different, and Concorde 2 is actually a seafront old school dirty underground venue that’s totally my kind of thing. I absolutely loved it, and the crowd stayed right til the end, when I dropped the last tune at 4am. The final night covered by this instalment was a UK double header in the Cheltenham and Gloucester region, firstly for a student ball at the Royal College of Agriculture in Cirencester. The theme was rave dayglo, a dress code that was adhered to by at least 90% of the 1000 strong crowd, which created a perfect backdrop for the more energetic tunes in my box. Although I play lots of student events, the vast majority take place in either Oct/Nov or May/June, when academic years start and finish. Over the course of my career, I’ve played more different colleges and Uni’s than I can remember, but it was my first time in this location, and the dress code made for great photo opportunities. The final stop-off was to one of my fairly regular haunts, Dakota in Cheltenham. I’m always at my most comfortable with the crowd very up-close. Generally speaking, I see no reason why venues need to segregate the crowd from the dj booth with physical barriers or security. Bearing this in mind, low-ceilinged Dakota is my perfect type of venue, and it was a cracking, atmospheric end to another good weekend in 2010. |
