On Djing...

lol at "get back on the decks," good work. sucks about the stylus :|

And then out of the blue today I got a call to do a coffee shop set on Thursday afternoon. It’s during work hours, but I don’t have any meetings so I’ll take the afternoon as a PTO and do it! Fifty bucks plus free lemonade, at least it’ll pay for half that stylus.

I love it when deeper cuts unexpectedly land. Tonight it was Azymuth “Jazz Carnival” into X-Press2 “Tranz Euro Xpress”. Frankly, I was trepidatious, but they got solid reaction and track ID requests for both. You just never know.

totally, it's so gratifying.

so far my sunday tea dance has been .. attended, lol. 10 people or fewer each sunday but that's ok. if a handful of people come and enjoy i have a reason to be there. last night we had a huge electrical storm roll in around 8:30, torrential downpour. bar owner had installed a tin roof over the patio before last winter and it held up pretty well. i got kind of emotional playing "together again" by janet jackson with lightning and pouring rain in the background.

my last bar has asked me to return on thursdays and i've said yes. it's going to be a busy summer. i've already spent a few weeks of the extra income on new outfits lol.

started back up at the other gay bar on thursday nights last night and it was great. i have this run of 10 or so tracks that i roll out at the right time and folks got a little delirious. the queen who i had issues with previously was not there. i had several compliments / people asking me what nights i'd be playing, and handed out business cards twice. couldn't have asked for a better return. also apparently the bar isn't even sold yet, i was huffing on rumors lol. but who even knows what they're telling bar staff.

Got a last-minute gig tonight at a brewery. “Don’t bring anything, just your records.” I brought 45 adapters, headphones & cartridges, all of which I ended up needing. One of the turntables had low, crackly output. Swapping carts revealed it wasn’t the cartridge; swapping channels revealed it wasn’t the mixer. I ended up cobbling together an aux cord from stuff I had in my car and stuff that was lying around, and “spinning” every second song from my phone. Not ideal, but it worked out and they asked me to do another night later in the summer. Success? Success.

nice work, love to troubleshoot sound when you were supposed to start 5 minutes ago

way to go hd, sounds hectic but awesome that you pulled it off. very professional.

one of my biggest challenges is not getting stressed when there are sound issues.

Same, map. I agonized over that for years and then finally just decided to relax and let house sound guys do their job. I'm just one aux cord nowadays so whatever.

I finally got an offer from a local dude to play something at something that isn't a house party, but I have to bring all my own equipment + I'd need to buy new stage monitors because they apparently don't have any (??) and my reference ones from home are underpowered for the space + carry those monitors four blocks to load em in and out. Also there's another DJ who has to have all their own equipment and we have to have two separate setups all night. Pay was laughable. I'm back to not playing locally, at least until my friend's art gallery opens and I'll be doing a downtempo social function there.

I DJ'd the wedding of an ex at the weekend. It was really well received, but I have a new found respect for wedding DJs. So many supposedly upbeat "good times" party anthems actually have meta-textual lyrics about heartbreak and how everything is going to go to shit. I'm sure no one who is drunk and dancing would care too much, but it's only when you're up there playing these songs, they suddenly develop a weird context

Weddings are hell to DJ. You have my infinite sympathies.

Yeah I don't enjoy doing those kinds of things, but it was a favour and I was playing mostly to old friends

man i'm grateful i have a busy pride weekend

last night was a good night, even though there was literally one shitty speaker on the floor that worked (something popped last saturday and they lost the rest).

i have an hour set tonight at a party with lots of other djs. going full gay-club-pop.

sunday, who knows what's in store, but i'm grateful i can go a little deeper in that venue without feeling like i'm letting down the floor or whatever.

hell yeah, get 'em

last night some cool girls gave me lots of compliments and followed my insta, and the bartender told me a dj i like was throwing my name around recently in a good way. i have to remember the good things.

xp :)

love to hear all this map (except for the blown speaker part) <3

i don't have another night until the end of the month but it's technically a pride gig so i guess i should have 'padam padam' at the ready lol

haha! <3

I’ve got a couple of Pride gigs coming up, the second one at a great venue in the nearest city, and I’ve got an 80s Hi-NRG night in Nottingham to look forward to as well (thanks to what turned out to be a most advantageous hook up in Manchester a couple of months ago, ahum).

any other way of landing a hi-nrg night would be lacking.

I just ‘inherited’ a collection of a few hundred Hi-Nrg 12” singles. My partner’s best friend moved to Thailand and her husband was trying to find a good home for his collection and asked me if I’d be interested. Was I ever!

They are all in immaculate condition, so much so that it’s hard to believe they were ever played, yet he says he listened to them relentlessly in the mid to late 80s. It is the only music he ever bought and he was obsessed with Hi-Nrg for a few years. There is a handful of late period Italo 12”s in there too and oddly also two 12” singles by The Cult, but all the rest is pure Hi-Nrg. I’ve not had a chance to listen to much yet but from looking through probably know a third of it already and can tell that a fair chunk of the rest is going to be on the extreme cheesy end of the Nrg spectrum, but I am fairly sure I’ll find some gold in there. The “Male Stripper” picture disc I never knew existed looks awesome!

The guy who gave me the collection is autistic which I guess could be reflected by how well kept the records are but also in that he had this obsessive interest for a few years that very suddenly stops. He never bought music before he discovered Hi-Nrg and said when House music came along and more or less replaced it at the dance music record shop he frequented he lost interest and never bought another record again, ever. It’s also interesting to me that he is straight and seemed to have a particular penchant for the most suggestive of Hi-Nrg tracks. He had a lot of Recca 12” singles which rather than A-side and B-side designations, have a Top side and a Bottom side.

Hi-Nrg was of course huge in straight mainstream working class clubs in Scotland and a lot of England at the time. It was the dominant soundtrack for many years as demonstrated by the Saturday late night ”live from a nightclub” hit ITV programme “The Hitman & Her” hosted by Pete Waterman who made most of his millions with PWL’s diluted (but sometimes brilliant, and always brilliantly mixed and produced - shout out to Phil Harding) Hi-Nrg sound. I’ve long bored people to death going on about how the vast majority of Man 2 Man’s “Male Stripper” sales were in Scotland and if a Scottish chart had existed then it would have been number one for here months. It is firmly lodged in the psyche of almost all Scots of a certain age - an eternal favourite for so many people, the vast majority of whom, at the time at least, were somehow unaware of its gayness. Such a curious thing! The guy whose collection it was told this story about how he used to play his 12”s at home so much that they would get stuck in his dad’s head. His dad, a very working class Glaswegian worked in a factory and his work mates started giving him curious looks as he was constantly (unconsciously) singing the chorus of “I Need A Man” by Man 2 Man at work. So, I guess some people did notice.

I asked him what he liked so much about Hi-Nrg and he just said ‘“the energy”. Fair enough.

irl lol

The “Male Stripper” picture disc I never knew existed looks awesome!

oh my god

irl lol but also feeling a little called out w/r/t neurodivergency / owning the most suggestive of tracks

Aren’t we all neurodivergent here? That’s the only reason I hang out here.

Well jel of your haul there stirmonster (and also dying to know what cult records were in there)

“Resurrection Joe” and “She Sells Sanctuary”.

haha great choices! Resurrection Joe still bangs, was secretly hoping that would be one of them <3

i mean its no Floorshow but then what is?

Yup, it’s my favourite Cult 12” too.

I said hep cats…

I watched video for it for the first time today, amazing

Aren’t we all neurodivergent here? That’s the only reason I hang out here.

It's probably the reason I've always felt safe to post here, yeah, and why I'm still here so many years later. I take long lurker breaks, but yeah.

Good!

I watched video for it for the first time today, amazing

proto-Peaky Blinders!

Any plans for a Hi-NRG mix from that collection Stirmonster?

Living in Brighton has meant I’ve built up quite a good selection of second-hand Hi-NRG from the charity shops… the condition of them is usually less than pristine to say the least though!

I bought a portable Tascam to record gigs out and about quite recently, mainly these days our monthly italo/Hi-NRG/general 80s vocal dance music night Flex. Anyone interested in hearing any of them?

We even managed to get ILX board royalty NickB make his first public DJing appearance a few months back… he might be too shy for me to share that one though.

Any plans for a Hi-NRG mix from that collection Stirmonster?

perhaps!

and yes, interested!

also, i've lomg toyed with the idea of putting together a Hi-NRG comp, though these things are an enormous amount of work and i reckon it would be a big licensing headache, but maybe...and maybe some ILX hive mind input would be good?

i for one am VERY interested in hearing live hi NRG mixes/a hi NRG compilation - i have long been hoping some boutique reissue label would release a high-quality comp of this stuff with liner notes and the whole shebang (and i have a few ideas for stuff i’d like to see on said comp :))

i was a little burned out on disco comps when this series started so i never looked that closely into it, but i think that was sort of the idea here?

https://www.discogs.com/label/391234-Disco-Discharge

"pink pounder" should be someone's new dj name

I've got some hi nrg suggestions, but this is the main thing that springs to mind, just great sounds and sassy vibes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxjjPhcdads

I love those Disco Discharge compilations so much

Great series.

I can't find it but I coulda sworn there was an old ILX post stirmonster where you made fun of me for saying the hi-nrg revival was coming. Or at least disagreed. Regardless I'd love it, although my hi-nrg interest is, like my interest in most genres, limited to a small sliver that strikes a particular chord with me and as noted before my hi-nrg mix was like 75% "italo". Although I'd like to share this one again which even though it's a Tony Carrasco production and released by Klein and MBO is from 1987 and is more hi-nrg than italo, if there really is a difference at times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ush-Yl2rTxs

Last time I followed EDM, about a decade ago, I was particularly interested in DJs like John Digweed and Joris Voorn who, though deft computer mixing, were often keeping 3-4 tracks going in their sets at any one time. Anyone have recommendations from among younger generations of house and techno DJs who have so much going on in their sets?

yeah those DD comps are terrific

that klein & mbo track is new to me - ace!

i posted some recent faves on the hi-nrg thread but here's another one, think this one got a lot of play at LA parties back then

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teVG7I3fSg4

I've posted this before on the Hi-NRG and DJ mixes for download threads, but this is an Eighties Hi-NRG/Boystown/Eurobeat/queer pop mix that I recently put together as a "proof of concept" experiment for the night that I've managed to bag in Nottingham. Putting it together was an absolute revelation for me, and I'm forever replaying it and thinking Big Thoughts about the genre as a whole. https://www.mixcloud.com/miketd/the-boys-come-to-town/

Hi Mike, I don't know if you caught this or not, but James Hamilton was mentioned a few times on the latest episode of Bill Brewster's DJ History podcast - a long chat with Simon Dunmore of Defected records:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/54Et1YCnvzFTczV14kyNOo?si=yUIHi3zLStCdE84vMCdUGw

Dan, I think that thread you are thinking of was me pontificating that the mix you mentioned was more Italo than Hi-NRG, but I could be wrong. Apologies If I was indeed making fun of you.

Anyway, I don’t think a revival is coming particularly but I do think it’s a misunderstood and underrated genre that more people might love if they heard the good stuff.

Thanks Nick - I’ve been in contact with Bill Brewster several times and he interviewed me about James Hamilton a while ago, with a view to doing something substantial about him; I also pointed him towards a few other people that I thought he should talk to, and he took the leads. I’ll give that podcast episode a listen soon.

Oh cool, look forward to hearing the fruits of that!