Daily archives: December 23, 2018

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10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – 2011

The start of 2011 was a very busy period that left little time or capacity left for Djing. I did get a chance to assist tech writer KG Orphanidies with a trial run of some entry level Digital DJ kit (a sign of things to come) at a relatively sedate Sunday afternoon event, but that was merely a warm-up to what should have been my breakthrough set. Club Reptile were calling. Established in 2008, they had succeeded where many had failed in establishing a formula for a cross-genre alternative night. I’d been attending for a couple of years, and finally my DJ activity had caught their attention.

Meine Freunde, Tanz mit mir

The event fell around my birthday weekend, which should have made things even more special, but I’ve never had much luck (and more recently, enthusiasm) dragging out large groups of people to mark the passing of another year. More of a concern was that one of the club’s CD players was malfunctioning. I was still playing the things in 2011 and not-being-able-to-mix would be a significant issue.

In the end, we wired an iPod Classic into the left side of the PA and this Heath Robinson solution saw me through. And this remains the only use of an Apple-branded device in any Terminates Here DJ set, ever. Whilst the Classic was the only high-capacity MP3 player available at the time, I’ve never cared much for the ‘Apple way of doing things’.

My setlist selections that night were, in the circumstances, a “play it safe” affair. Darkwave and EBM standards made up the bulk of my set – I eventually played Project Pitchfork’s “Timekiller” as a birthday present to myself (I’d never heard said band played in there), enjoyed my birthday cake straight after, but there was no real feeling of having taken a “big step forward” in a DJ sense. The post-club mood was debates about whether to ‘go onto Slimelight’ – I wasn’t interested and hence the night just fizzled out.

One more set remained before an enforced break. The Dark 7 festival took place at the Camden Underworld – my friends in System:FX were headlining, the band Machine Rox were organising, and I’d also got to know the band Global Citizen quite well by then, so it wasn’t like my first attempt as ‘Band support DJ’ (at least under the Terminates Here name) was to be among strangers. Luckily, preparing for such things is pretty easy these days – listen to a stream of each band you don’t know and pick out four potential songs to play before each (you’ll usually only get two or three in).

I did get one of the strangest requests ever – System:FX wanted the old Inkpots track ‘I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire’ played before they came on. We were both fans of the game ‘Fallout 3’ and if you’ve played it too, that one will make sense to you. Perhaps more prophetically, I also played a track by Cubanate offshoot ‘Be My Enemy’ before they came on. Steve and Deb from FX would join the live line-up of this band a year later. The two projects aren’t that dissimilar so it all makes sense.

Now You’re One Of Us

However, these two relatively high-profile sets didn’t trigger anything. I soon got occupied with the process of buying a flat in the midst of the credit crunch and then filling it up with all the things that turn it into a home, so hunting down DJ sets proactively was a low priority for a while. I got back into the swing of things at the August ABBS, having had a pre-move sale at the spring event in lieu of actually Djing. Highlights here was opening with a 13-minute track (Fly and Collision of Comas Sola by TanDream, if you must know), and my first real old-school EBM set later in the day. Two more habits formed.

But things were finally moving again. A few days later, a few messages were exchanged, and I was support DJ at a four-band line-up at the Boston Music Rooms (underneath The Dome) headlined by New Zealander Jordan Reyne. Among the support bands were MaxDmyz (back as their support DJ after a full decade!) and Die Kur, Ays Kura’s band, who have a significant role to play in this story from here. Add Ventenner, and it was a varied billing that played to the strengths of my increasingly diverse style.

A couple more live support slots came in October. The first was a return to the Camden Underworld for Cybersonik, the follow-up to Dark 7 earlier in the year, calling upon various brands of EBM and electro-industrial throughout the day. A style that needs relatively precise mixing, yet with the event running late and no time to soundcheck the DJ booth, I didn’t discover until we’d opened and everyone was pouring in to catch Dreams Divide that the faders in the booth were broken. Ended up spending the whole day mixing by tweaking the AUX knobs. Not elegant, but by now I was used to substandard kit. It’s par for the course in our scene.

But Now You’re Worried That I Just Might Win

And then came Renaissance….The set I played for the Jordan Reyne gig a few month back clearly triggered something. A number of the bands returned the same venue play this eight-hour festival on the eve of Halloween, and the promoter NMTCG (Ays Kura – pulling double-duty as promoter and frontman of the headline act!) invited me back to DJ. I accepted without really considering what I was going to play, and researching the line-up gave me few clues about what direction to take. Every band seemed to have it’s own style. It was at this point that I decided that nothing in my collection was off-limits, and hence I came well-equipped for whatever the day may have thrown at me.

The early bands and link-ups went well, but things got interesting when I got talking to Anton, lead singer of Bleak. He requested “something relevant before we come on, like some blues”. Now, whilst all contemporary rock music is essentially blues-derived, my collection didn’t quite extend to the style in it’s purest form. So some lateral thinking was needed. What is blues, really? Miserable old men, right? Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. What can I say but “it worked”! I’ve been friends with Anton ever since.

Each band called upon a different aspect of my collection. Somehow I had them all covered. There was one moment when someone came up to me and begged me to play The Clash. Even though I’d played them earlier on and was now in the midst of my ‘metal set’ leading into old friends MaxDmyz. I’d then sussed out that the person doing the begging was actual from the band setting up at the time, and they’d come all the way from Spain. A compromise was reached and we went for The Sex Pistols instead.

A couple of the days after this set, I reflected on the extent of what’s I’d played. I looked at my ripped-to-MP3 collection in Winamp (remember that?) and wrote down the name of every artist I hadn’t yet played in a set, but had at least 20 songs by (thus excluding any artist where I’d bought one album and wished for no more). It covered 6 pages of an A5 notebook. The mission was on – could I play all of these bands in a set at some point? Because I didn’t see any point in repeating myself every time.

2011’s Djing ended at the ABBS once again. Opened up with the longest track I ever managed to play (Synphära by Klaus Schulze) but otherwise the day was only notable for me DJ wise for me playing more trad-goth than ever before, with Miss Jade back covering industrial this time. But arrangements had already been made for a set that would finally kick me up to the next level. Reptile wanted me back.  In 2012….

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – 2010

2010 had a surprisingly sedate opening, only woken up by a stag party (OK, ‘Gentleman’s Tour of Historic Public Houses’) at the end of January. Up until that point, I had no inkling it would be the most eventful year of my life so far. But then absolutely everything took off. Including the Djing. Finally I was ready to graduate from the ABBS and get some live sets in elsewhere. And that stag party was the precursor to one of them.

It Was Me, Waiting For Me, Hoping For Something More

A couple of weeks later and I was Djing at the wedding party, alongside Cowlin and scene veteran Martin Oldgoth. Being the token ‘not goth’ DJ essentially meant one darkwave set, one EBM set and one metal set. It all went down quite well until someone came up to me in the middle of SOAD’s “Chop Suey” and asks “Can you play MORE Crüxshadows please?” (having long since delivered the full length version of “Winterborn”).

My response was something like “Sorry, there’s no way I can fit that into what I’m doing right now”. This comment got passed on and mangled by the increasingly drunken attendees into “he told her to fuck off”. No long term ramifications, but it proves how utterly thankless the job of Djing can be sometimes, and how unfeasible some people’s expectations can be. At least the newlyweds were grateful.

As for my own ‘love life’, well, I won’t cover those details here, but it was around this time that I found myself in one of those ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ relationships that ultimately, well, wasn’t. Somewhere amidst the confusion, I found myself back at the Dome Djing at the March ABBS, this time alongside DJ Scott McMahon. We didn’t know it at the time, but this would be a DJ partnership that would last right through to the present day. For now though, I got my first go at Djing ‘proper goth’ (as some like to call it) on a ‘if I don’t, no-one will’ basis.

The events between this and my next “live set” four months later would be worth a chapter of their own if this was a conventional autobiography. But it isn’t, and even if it was, it’s not a story I really feel like telling in full, now or in the future. The only DJ Terminates Here action during this period was a pre-recorded hour of music for a Mittelalter night held at the Zeitgeist pub in Vauxhall. A good attendance for a style only of marginal interest in the UK, but how much of that was down to the popularity of the venue at the time, and how much of it was down to the music?

Never Say Never ‘Cause I’ll Do It Again

I returned to real Djing in July with a one-time ‘Sunday Afternoon’ event in the London Stone pub. I’d arranged to start relatively late, due to having moved house the previous day and also due to my plan to watch the British Grand Prix at the Haymarket Sports Bar first. And mid-race I get a phone call, barely audible amongst the background noise. Turns out that as the venue was opening especially for us, it was locked up until the scheduled start time, with the DJ kit not wired in. Why they rang me, when I was obviously distracted and over a mile away, is a mystery.

Still, I set off the moment Red Bull’s ‘Number 2 Driver’ had received his congratulatory face-full of chessboard. Two buses and thirty minutes and I was there. The event itself went quite well, despite the delayed start. The gothic-themed pub quiz was fun, whilst Scott, Robert, myself and guest DJX (from Tanz Macabre) covered all bases music-wise. I had a lot of fun with my final set in particular, ending with covers of the Pac-Man theme and Popcorn.

It was at this point that I caught the attention of another promoter (who, given the following paragraphs, is best left unnamed here), who ran a Depeche Mode night (‘Black Celebration’ the too-obvious name) at the Elixir bar, and was on the lookout for new DJs. I gave a verbal agreement there and then, before returning my far-too-exciting life away from the DJ booth. Which I’m not writing about, see?

Whatever You’ve Planned For Me – I’m Not The One

I was originally due to play said Mode night in September but my debut was brought forward by a month due to a lack of other available and willing DJs. That should have been a warning. The August event actually went quite well, though. With little guidance from the promoter (who was outside smoking most of the time), my early set combined early Mode material with various minimal synth and old-school EBM tracks, with a second set later packing in most of the hits. Bit surprised that Yazoo cleared the floor, given it was Vince in his immediate post-Mode phase, but felt like a good event, let down only by the fact that my partner at the time (and Mode fanatic) was visiting family in Germany and couldn’t attend.

I wasn’t too worried as we’d get to right that wrong a month later. Sure enough, we had a bigger crowd next time out, with Electric Dreams veteran Paul Alan joining me in the DJ booth. With both of us on hand, we shouldn’t have needed any assistance. But the promoter had other ideas – when not outside getting her nicotine fix, she was switching DJs, letting her friends play sets, taking over the booth whenever she pleased and taking over the music policy as it suited her, acting like it was her own private party (it wasn’t). Having got a 101-style singalong going to “Everything Counts”, I was aghast when she insisted playing her boyfriend’s sub-Rammstein-style metal band, not only clearing the floor but leaving me at least two mixes away from playing any more Mode.

The only upside to this was that I used Skinny Puppy’s ‘Smothered Hope’ as one of my ‘rescue tracks’, finally getting this critical band into a Terminates Here set. It was on the night bus home that I began to think that there must be quite a few other bands I’d never played in a DJ set but should do at some point, and doodled a list in a notebook that would later chart the course of my Djing directions (plural intended) from here. As for the event and the promoter, I never heard from either again, and I hope it doesn’t jeopardise my commitment to the health of scene events if I said “Good Riddance” in this case.

And I’m Not From Heaven Sent – I’m Not Holy Just Like You

Unfortunately, 2010 was all downhill from here. An increasingly busy time in the day job, second breakup of the year and I was just too emotionally exhausted to feel anything any more. A four DJ line-up at the October ABBS (with Ashleigh, aka “Miss Jade” joining Scott Robert and myself) made my life easy that day. Other than making my attempt to support local acts by getting System:FX into my ‘industrial’ set, I pretty much sleepwalked this one.

A second running of the pre-recorded ‘Mittelalter’ night in late October saw an expanded “pre-J” lineup, with me now able to focus on my speciality of synth-enhanced medieval (yes, that is a thing), but ultimately we focused too much on the technicalities of assembling the sets and not enough in making the event go with a bang. The night itself was well-attended and well-received, but some of the venue staff didn’t want us there and that was the end of that.

By the time of the December ABBS, I was ready just to wind down to Christmas. Fate decreed that such a luxury would not be afforded at this time, with family members stranded overseas due to heavy snow and a major project starting up at work, but the DJ set here was quite a lot of fun, with Scott now established as ‘regular’ and James Black of ‘Black n Beard’ radio as today’s guest. I didn’t really get into the Christmas spirit as much as I could have done, but my closing-hour synthpop set was sufficiently rollicking to bring my DJ year to a close.

Onto 2011….

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – 2009

One swallow doesn’t make an orgy, and one setlist doesn’t make a DJ. A single set doesn’t allow you to attract much attention, so I needed to wait until the ABBS (as it’ll be called from now) rolled around again to DJ once more. The quarterly pattern of the event wasn’t established by then, so this didn’t happen until August 2009. It was otherwise a “dead time” for scene events, with Infest on their year off due to venue refurbishment and Eurofests unreachable due to exchange rate issues (as bad as it is under Brexit now), employment uncertainty and, dare I say, not many exciting new bands coming through. But no reason not to DJ.

I’ve Got Nothing To Lose and Everything To Win

With Andy having moved on to other things, a new DJ was brought in – Robert Cowlin, later known for Terminal Gods, but now as a trad-goth DJ with a penchant for playing tunes older than he was. With that side of thing sorted, I had every other scene genre at my disposal, and indeed kicked off the day with one of NON’s more ‘ambient’ compositions, which at least set the right atmosphere. I hovered around the dark-ambient and film soundtrack era for a while before moving onto a more conventional darkwave and electro-industrial style, with my first DJ plays of Leæther Strip and Front Line Assembly being relatively unknown but personally favoured album tracks.

Later sets saw my first of many explorations into old-school EBM (not a big thing in London at the time, indeed some would say it never was), gothic metal and industrial rock. Indeed, this was the set where I really got to grips with the concept of ‘genre bridging’, picking out the interim tracks that could get me from Style A to Style B without a jarring interlude. Though in one case I have to thank an Italian musician who passed me a CD of his latest album and asked me to play a track off it. It got me from Die Krupps to Lacuna Coil perfectly. His name is Ays Kura, the band Die Kur, both of whom would go on to form a major part of the story to come.

The is also where I first came up with the idea of tag-team (aka ‘versus’) Djing at the close of the event. Robert was playing The Human League, and I though it’d really cheer up the closure and cleanup to play some ‘fun’ tunes. On this occasion, pop-styles 80s tunes were enough of a deviation from what we were playing during the day. We would push this boat out quite a bit further in later years.

Two Sounds Are Better Than One

Robert and I later assembled some music for a London Gothic Meetup anniversary event, though I don’t class it as an official set as it was pre-recorded and played at relatively low volume in a pub that wasn’t really equipped for such things. Also, I had a job interview (two, actually) the following week and hence my mind was at least partially elsewhere. This diversion was at least successful, giving me financial stability at a time when such things were by no means guaranteed for anyone.

We were back for a full DJ set at the Christmas ABBS – my first time playing the closing hour. The celebratory atmosphere encouraged me to break from the goth/darkwave/industrial boundaries, introducing some borderline-mainstream hits (Editors ‘Papillon’ and Muse ‘Uprising’) and bringing some of the 80s throwback material into the main set. I wasn’t the only scene DJ doing this, of course – scene breakthrough hits were hard to come by in the late 00s and if we had to look to the charts to find something fresh to play, so be it. In any case, it might have only been my third live DJ set, but I certainly left the day having felt like I’d ‘arrived’ if not yet ‘established’ myself. 2010 would be my chance to build on all of that.

Of course, it’s never that simple – as we’ll find in 2010.

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – 2008

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.

Onto 2009….

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – The EOL-Era

My Djing didn’t begin under the Terminates Here name. I’d also managed a little bit under my former name ‘Jonny EOL’. All but one of these sets took place at Imperial College, where I studied (yes, really) for three years, though the Djing chances only came along towards the end of my time there.

It was only in my second year that we got our out rock’n’metal night ‘Whiplash’, and the Djing here was handled solely by our college radio DJ Steve (not a Steve any of you know now). No bad thing at the time – he really had a grip on the metal sound of the late 90s. Pity he didn’t care for Rammstein, but you can’t have everything.

But In His Voice I Heard Decay

But eventually a chance would come for the rest of us. Our Whiplash event chose to upgrade to a live band event called ‘sICk night in’, people were invited from other Uni Unions from around London, and there were DJ slots between each band to fill. My own patronage of events like Full Tilt and various shorter-lived nights had given me access to various industrial and darkwave themed tunes that no-one else had in the days when file-sharing was only just starting up. And hence a set was secured….but first a little practice.

We had secured the used of the Back Room in our college bar the night before the big event to get used to mixers, PA systems and CD-Js, and hence my first tentative sets were delivered – three tracks to get used to the buttons and faders. Then a couple of skater-types had their practice session, and decided “We don’t like what anyone else is playing, so we’ll shut ourselves in the booth and refuse to come out”.

Typical of the IC attitude as a whole, where the ‘I’m better than you’ mindset ruled with toxic prevalence. I hadn’t really gotten to grips with the kit by now, so eventually we coaxed them out and I played a couple more tunes, just so I could work out what a crossfader was for, and that was it. Off to Full Tilt. The place I discovered many of the things I was actually playing at the time.

On the night itself, I got my chance to DJ to a crowd for the first time. On a sprung wooden floor, with DJ kit set up on a trestle table (and no light source), the CD players were prone to skipping and one gave up entirely on my third song. So two attempts in and still no chance to work up some set time. But a first lesson in learning about navigating sub-standard equipment. Many more would follow.

I made it back to the Back Room a few months later – a digital hardcore/breakbeat DJ wanted an opening slot filling with a different (but distantly related) style and he brought me in. Oddly, this was my only experience of Djing off vinyl, ever – the format was seriously out-of-fashion at the time amongst all but scratch-style DJs, so I could pick it up cheaply on a student budget – there was no ‘state of the ark’ retro-chic motivation here. Still had a limited setlist and not much ‘feel’ for how tracks go together, but at least it was my first go at playing a set uninterrupted.

What Will Become? What Will We Be?

I left Imperial College a month later, but but I remained on-call for the next year or so as their industrial/darkwave DJ, having built my social life around the style since departure. I returned five times in total, slowly expanding my range. By my third attempt, I was including things like PAL and local bands Killing Miranda and MaxDmyz. Which turned out to be somewhat fortuitous, as MaxDmyz themselves were booked to play the next ‘live bands’ event, taking place a week from the end of the academic year and chance to let hair of various lengths down.

I was back as DJ, this time to play support slot to the headline band. Unfortunately, the event was running severely over time due to the fact we’d “borrowed” our live room from another student society and they were playing control freaks. Add this to strict curfew limits and we only to play a couple of songs each. Another sad but true lesson – Steer clear of running events where the venue staff show any kind of reluctance over having you there.

We both returned in November, the event was moved to the ground floor club room – an area over which the organisers had total control on the night. It took place during a difficult time in my life (out of work with few prospects despite my academic achievements) but it was a chance to catch up with old friends and even make some new ones. Including Pete Valente, MaxDmyz lead singer and only constant member. The first of many people I regard as allies to the Terminates Here cause, a full seven years before I began my mission in earnest.

After this, my social life moved more towards the London goth & related club scene. Most of the key DJ slots were filled by an established core of DJs, but I did manage to get my foot in the door of one of the many short-lived “Thursday nights at Gossips” events – Metal Box.

I Think We Made It Better

This was an era when our scene could still call upon students and other people not against clubbing on a work night, but by the time I made it, it was a dying trend. Within a few years, no-one was running scene-oriented club nights on anything other than a Friday or Saturday, and only Slimelight were able to do so on a weekly rather than monthly basis. I played a couple of 45 minute sets to a small assortment of scene faithful and random drunks, trying to work requests for ‘old-school Metallica’ and The Sex Pistols into what was supposed to be a goth/industrial set.

I might have actually got said bands into a set that otherwise comprises of Rammstein/Apop style material, but the writing was on the wall. The Metal Box night was gone within a few months, Gossips itself would be gone soon after, and I returned to focusing on my EOL-Audio website, reviews, band profiles and genre definitions all broadly related to “the scene”. I made tentative enquiries into Djing elsewhere, but most promoters pretended not to hear, or made loose agreements never followed up.

In many respect, I wasn’t ready. The scene was at its most political in the mid-00s, and I never had the skills nor contacts to manoeuvre my way through all that shit. Watching a member of venue staff playing a major scene club with a carrier bag full of CD-Rs, barely able to string together two tracks in the same style, was beyond the pale however. The individual was popular enough to avoid en masse criticism, which was a lesson that having friends in the right places was more important than any knowledge or ability, at least when getting started. As for EOL-Audio, it was going nowhere and I closed it early in 2007.

After a year-and-a-half essentially ‘out’ of the scene barring the occasional gig attendance, I began rebuilding my online profile in mid-2008 under the new title of ‘Terminates Here’. It was a term I’d originally developed an obsession with when I lived at the end of the Piccadilly line for a couple of years – that automated recording was the voice that welcomed me home each night. I used it as part of an April Fools joke, titled my new website under the name and originally was going to a form a band with said moniker. But when my first DJ chance in six years emerged, Terminates Here instead became my DJ name and now the main story begins – in 2008.

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

10 Years of DJ Terminates Here – The Intro

I’ve been writing ever since I was literate. Even when I was a kid, my mum would spot me scribbling inside an exercise book and say “Are you writing your memoirs?”. At the time, I wasn’t, but now I am. It’s actually the second volume I’ve written. The first was “Too Loud In ‘Ere”, my memories of 20 years of watching live music. But that story was a man-in-the-crowd perspective. It wasn’t strictly ‘my’ story, rather my view of someone else’s story. My epic-length festival write-ups, available to Facebook friends only as Notes, said more of my personal experiences, but I was still writing as an audience member.

Still, that and a rather lengthy blog relating to my day job sparked something inside of me. Long-form writing was my thing after all, and in an era when most people have the attention span of a Tweet when browsing online, or constantly re-used the same passages of text via syndication, I though it was time to revive it as a regular activity. I began with my series of “Listener’s Guide”, a step-by-step walkthrough the careers of various bands that I felt worthy of more attention than the regular music biographers would give them. These will still be written as and when I get round to them

But I took a break from those when my 10th anniversary as a DJ approached. I’d briefly mentioned the idea of doing a DJ memoir after I released my live music piece, but didn’t really get down to it until recently. Was there a story to tell? It’s not like I’ve got Wikipedia notability criteria. But then I realised that it’s all about spinning a tale, not about the worldwide significance of events. Picking out the key moments, and explaining why they mattered. There are people who have questioned my motivation for Djing with no hope of financial gain – it’s time to answer those questions – and then some.

In writing this story, I have chosen not to personally identify anyone who has had a negative impact on this story. I hope it does not ruin the impact of the piece – I simply have no wish to raise old arguments once more. However, I doubt any of those people will even discover that this story even exists. This story is for those of you have been part of the journey, and for those of who followed said journey from afar. They are people who click ‘Like’ on my DJ activity on Facebook despite never having visited of my sets, either due to geographical separation or just due to being into different things these days.

Every set I’ve played is mentioned at least in passing, though obviously I’ve picked out keynote sets to describe in more detail. Some of the events I played were a story in their own right, but I’ve told as much of the tale as I believe is worth telling. There are aspects of mixing technicalities and PA setup that I’ve skipped as they won’t be of interest to anyone but other DJs and sound engineers, but I’ve covered included enough details to make it count where it matters. Every story has it’s friends and foes, and a malfunctioning soundsystem is as much a problem as DJ politics or non-existent crowds!

So, let’s get on with it then….first my EOL-Era.

Intro / The EOL-Era / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / The Last Word / The Facts / The Credits

From Tufnell to Treffen – 10 Years of DJ Terminates Here

I celebrated 10 years of DJ Terminates Here a few weeks ago.  The actual event didn’t come together until late in the day, but one thing I have been working on for some time is a a complete start-to-end story of the adventure that took me this far.  And here is is – a long read, so it’s in PDF form.

From Tufnell to Treffen PDF

If you want to read this story in inline blog format, start here.