OK, this is completely off-topic, so if you’re looking for my usual public sector communications and marketing content you should probably not bother to read on.
Back in my student days in Nottingham in the late 90’s one of the things I got up to was a bit of DJing – anything from cheesy discos, student parties through to messing about on the decks at our house parties.
What reminded me of this was coming across a bag of old mixtapes this morning, and discovering a tape of my very first “real” live DJ gig. From memory it was a friend’s private party held at Nottingham’s Deluxe nightclub – scene of some of great clubbing nights out in Nottingham and where a lot of the big-name DJs played when they came to town. The tape’s dated August 1997 and I remember being dead chuffed being able to play in the same DJ booth as some of the UK’s best DJs (although obviously not at the same time).
I’ve just digitised the set on my laptop and cleaned up the tape hiss a bit – and then listened through the whole 90 or so minutes. The mixing varies from horrendous to passable.
The playlist seems to be mainly late 90’s house and garage with a fair chunk of uplifting piano and vocal house in there too. Oh, and of course a bit of cheese and for some reason a bizarre vocal segment with a tune from a singer called Horse (it starts about 50 minutes in – thinking back I have no idea how or why I played that, although I suspect a bit of dutch courage for my debut nerves may have affected my judgement just ever so slightly!).
I know a few of you that read my blog share my enthusiasm for old school house, so if you want it the full MP3 is available to download here (mp3 format, 85MB).
But the best news was that in the same bag of tapes were all my proper mixtapes from real DJs – so now I have hours of old school house, garage and hardcore from the likes of Sasha, Digweed, Carl Cox, Graeme Park, Slipmatt, Easygroove, DiY, Tom Wainwright, Chris and James and Jeremy Healey. Plenty to keep me company on the many long runs I’ll be doing over the next three months as I train for this year’s London Marathon!