A delayed kick-off

Just back from doing a wedding at The Tithe Barn near Petersfield in Sussex, which is a nice venue but another place with a dreaded sound limiter. The wedding was for Emily & Paul and they’d decided not to have a first dance at all and considering that I didn’t see Paul on the dancefloor even once the whole night (even though I played the vast majority of tracks on his request list!), it wasn’t difficult to guess why he didn’t want a first dance!

After the meal and speeches finished most of the guests sat outside for a while as it was a nice evening while others watched the less than riveting France v Uruguay game in the world cup. This combination meant a very quiet dancefloor until around 9.30 and considering the music had to stop at 11.30pm there wasn’t gonna be a lot of time for dancing; mind you in a way that wasn’t a bad thing as the sound limiter there was making life pretty difficult for me. I’ve played at this venue before and I don’t remember the limiter causing me any problems previously but tonight it seemed to be going into the red with very little volume at all, to the point where the volume was so low that I could hear conversations on the dancefloor and so made it difficult to really create an atmosphere as no one could “feel the music! It also meant I had to constantly watch the limiter all night long to ensure that the red bars didn’t stay on for more than 3 seconds otherwise all the power would’ve been cut. So rather than watching the crowds reactions to each song I play like I usually do, I had to give as much attention to the limiter as to the crowd which was far from relaxing and I was actually quite relieved when the night ended. The groom asked me to finish on New York, but the cool version! i.e. Jay-Z & Alicia Keys – Empire State of Mind, rather than the overplayed Frank Sinatra-Theme from New York that far too many (unimaginative) DJs end with at every event!!

Thankfully Saturday night I’m in Stock Brook Manor near Billericay in Essex and there is no sound limiter there!

I know that you don’t like requests but…

Had a very good week last week which included some very positive meetings and events.

One meeting was with a top wedding planner, a lady by the name of Erika who runs Flutterfly Events. They organise upmarket weddings all around the south-east and Erika has a very good approach to the way she goes about organising weddings for brides.

Also had a great meeting with Jonathan Hughes from Wordzup who we’re gonna be working with on some ideas to bring more venues and event companies on board which is all pretty exciting.

Saturday we had a number of events on and the one I was doing was at The National Liberal Club which has “the most splendid terrace in London”, situated in Whitehall with a great view of the Thames and The London Eye etc.

It was a wedding for Joe & Jo! It was another very warm evening, so that, together with the amazing views from the terrace meant we didn’t really get going until pretty late. The first dance was Joe Cocker – You Are So Beautiful and from then it was predominantly music from the 90′s to current day. Although 3 of the grooms friends were keen to show of their breakdancing skills! so we had a brief Hip Hop session.

During the night I received a few requests which I’d played and then the best man came up to me and said “I know that you don’t like playing requests but would you play Journey- Don’t Stop Believing?” This was pretty puzzling as to that point I’d played almost every request that I’d received. I told him that it was no problem to play his song but why was it he was under the impression that I didn’t like requests? He replied that someone earlier had mentioned that the DJ didn’t like playing requests!? This baffled me as a couple of songs after the first dance I’d already said over the microphone that if anyone wanted any requests to just let me know. Then about 40 minutes later another guest said virtually the same thing; “I know you don’t like taking requests but…” when I asked him what made him think I didn’t take requests he also replied that someone has mentioned it earlier! I was beginning to wonder if I was giving off some strange vibe that I was unaware of!

Anyway, the night went really well and built to a steady crescendo and by the last half hour the crowd were going crazy on the dancefloor and it was a great ending to a really good night. After I’d got the crowd to give the bride and groom three cheers and said my goodbyes, the groom Joe came over to me to thank me for a great night. We got chatting about this and that and during the chat the best man came over to also thank me and said “I wanna apologise for offending you earlier”, Joe looked at him and said “why, what on earth did you do?”, the best man explained about him saying that he thought I didn’t like taking requests. I answered that I was really puzzled as someone else had said the same thing. Joe then looked a little sheepish and explained that the bride Jo, didn’t really want everyone asking for lots of strange songs and so she’d told a few people early in the day that the DJ doesn’t play requests! So the mystery was cleared up!