Scoville Units Unite

Friday was an eventful night – I was a DJ.

Years ago at Coalesce I would occasionally step in for a couple of songs if I was blethering to one of the DJs and they had to nip off to the loo or whatever but never actually DJ’d.

Around Christmas Sean asked if I’d be interested in doing a night with him at Kage. We sat and worked out some ideas for playlists etc then asked if we could get a night. 31st May was penciled in. The idea was to be something like Get the Funk Out and have funk and everything inspired by it – hip hop, rap, rap-metal, ska, some dance etc.

A few months avoiding doing anything was had, before I started hunting out old singles and similar to try and rip as much music as possible. he then got a new job which meant he would be regularly djing on that night. I had a think – never done it, don’t have a laptop/software, crap. Then it donned on my that Neil who DJs Entropy/Coalesce/Big Muff might be up for it. Gave him a shout and he agreed to step in too. He raided library and his already ripped stuff whilst I started trawling my music collection for stuff that might work.

I decided to donate the money I would get from it to Rusty Hip and Neil said he would do likewise which was pretty awesome of him too. Having done so we then thought it would be good to try and make a conscious effort to include hip hop with positive lyrics. Lots of people see rap as being poor quality tunes and guys ranting about bitches, hos and busting caps in asses etc. Having tracks like Contribution by Jurassic 5 and Keep Ya Head Up by 2Pac was pretty necessary

A few days before the night I thought it might be worthwhile installing the DJ software and mucking around with it.

The one minor issue was that we had styled it as Funk and stuff inspired by it but apart from some Funkadelic and Parliament the only funk stuff I listen to is p-funk and g-funk. As the night approached and we got panicky Kage was getting into full refit mode and we didn’t know what was happening with it. On the night itself the sky opened and it started pissing down and kept pissing down.

Our paranoid it could work or be a total disaster thoughts started to lean towards the second.

We arrived early (me leaving another awesome event to do so) and set up the hard drive of tunage and so on. As well as transporting back in time to play some old music I also had to do a task I hadn’t done in years. Kenny’s ball was disgusting and covered in congealed rubber, it also wasn’t very pliable. Once the mouse was working we could test levels and stuff.

Neil showed me how he sets things up, testing queued tracks and so on and I hope I picked it up enough to be passable.

The place was quiet at first but slowly filled up. Some welcome faces included my wee sister who hadn’t been to a club with me in about 10 years and Morag who came from Glasgow for it. Initially the dance floor was a bit barren with some well kent faces shy to go up and me not really able to. We tried to break things into chunks of 20-30 minutes of similarish styles and it seemed to work. The first hour being awesome stuff which no one would no/dance to like Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros by Flight of the Conchords, Greydon Square and Afro Reggae.

Sean also stopped by and did a short set which both gave Neil and I a chance to go socialise/dance for a few minutes but let Sean take part in the night he had planned which was awesome.

We did get a bit of hassle from people who were confused as to why Metallica wasn’t being played or planning to be played at the night for funk and stuff inspired by funk. On the whole though the feedback was pretty good and once the dance floor filled it stayed pretty busy. By the end of the night we were panicking about what to cut down for the last half hour slightly contrasting to the panicking beforehand that we didn’t have enough stuff.

We both really enjoyed it, got a chunk of cash to support Rusty Hip and hope we can do it again at some point. For no other reason than there’s a big pile of stuff we wanted to play and couldn’t squeeze in!