Seriously - I've DJ'd for over 10 years, hundreds of gigs and this was the worst by far.
Not even any drama or stuff I can tell a war story about, just a really rubbish night with next to no dancing due to a really obtuse client.
Anytime I played stuff that was actually getting people up, one of the birthday girls [who up until this point had taken nothing to do with any of the music planning or programming and had left it to her friend] would shoot over and tell me to get back to her playlist of early to mid 90s techno and house music - which obviously went down a storm with all 50ish mums and dads and the Irish pensioner family members who made up the majority of the crowd.
The girl wasn't even dancing to any of this shit herself!
I did my best given the circumstances but sometimes you just have to accept that a client would rather cut off their nose to spite their face.
At the end I always check that my client is happy and, because I'd went off piste and actually got a bit of a vibe going later on, she was clearly less pissed off than before but she did say: "I mean I don't know what it was, my crowd are all dancers but none of them were dancing..." translation - It's your fault Mr DJ.
To which I responded:
"Don't let it bother you ( ) I do this week in week out and I wouldn't change a thing about how I approached tonight. Your tunes were all great - look at the highlighted songs here (hands sheet of paper), that's all your stuff and you can see 90% of what I played was from your songlist but sometimes people just don't want to dance and we can't physically force them to can we?"
Not even any drama or stuff I can tell a war story about, just a really rubbish night with next to no dancing due to a really obtuse client.
Anytime I played stuff that was actually getting people up, one of the birthday girls [who up until this point had taken nothing to do with any of the music planning or programming and had left it to her friend] would shoot over and tell me to get back to her playlist of early to mid 90s techno and house music - which obviously went down a storm with all 50ish mums and dads and the Irish pensioner family members who made up the majority of the crowd.
The girl wasn't even dancing to any of this shit herself!
I did my best given the circumstances but sometimes you just have to accept that a client would rather cut off their nose to spite their face.
At the end I always check that my client is happy and, because I'd went off piste and actually got a bit of a vibe going later on, she was clearly less pissed off than before but she did say: "I mean I don't know what it was, my crowd are all dancers but none of them were dancing..." translation - It's your fault Mr DJ.
To which I responded:
"Don't let it bother you ( ) I do this week in week out and I wouldn't change a thing about how I approached tonight. Your tunes were all great - look at the highlighted songs here (hands sheet of paper), that's all your stuff and you can see 90% of what I played was from your songlist but sometimes people just don't want to dance and we can't physically force them to can we?"