The story of my first DJ set under the Terminates Here game actually dates back to December 2006, when an event called the Alternative Bring’n’Buy Sale was born in the function room of The Blue Posts pub. I got talking to the organiser Steph, suggesting that “a bit of music” would help add a bit of atmosphere. Sure enough, the next couple of events saw us move to venues with PA systems and veteran scene DJ Andy Ravensable was called in to provide the music.
I was a stallholder at the summer 2008 event, and observed that it did seem a little unfair that he was covering six hours on his own, missing out on both the commercial and social opportunities the event provided. Talking to Steph in the Reptile club (plenty more on them later), I offered to share the Djing with him. Despite not having played for six years, we quickly agreed to share the set on an ‘alternating hours’ pattern and I was at the races.
Don’t Be a Plague, a Spell to Kill, You Should be Grateful
I’d run off some CD-Rs and practised in software the previous week, laptop Djing still a few years away. Only to arrive at the venue to find the whole DJ booth not-wired-together. Took about half an hour to connect it all up and find someone to turn the PA system on. Little did I know at the time that this would become something of a trend….another lesson being “Learn where all the wires go and never expect everything to be wired in perfectly on arrival.”
Anyway, once the assembled in the Tufnell Park Dome had the early morning delight of Laibach’s version of ‘Mama Leone’ to enjoy in the later stages of setup, I found myself with a DJ booth, lots of music, and a low-pressure environment to find my way around the kit again after six years off. No pressure to fill a dancefloor, indeed at 11am one shouldn’t be thinking about that kind of thing anyway.
As for what I did play, it largely reflected my tastes of the time, for the most part taking the form of a WGT line-up distilled into setlist form. One side-effect of this was that I didn’t play an English-language song until I was half-an-hour into the set. There was a brief salute to the ‘mittelalter’ sound I’d discovered during my six-year Djing lay-off (someone even thanked me for playing ‘Vollmond’), tracks by both Solar Fake and Zeraphine (a Sven Friedrich double!) and a couple by Diary of Dreams, always a favourite and a frequent appearance in Terminates Here sets from now.
I went home from this event happy with the day’s work, hoping that I might get a few more chances to do something similar. As it happened, the results weren’t immediate, but the first seed was planted at least.
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