For what it’s worth - I really enjoy your radio shows and your productions and if I were promoting I would definitely book you!
Stick to your guns dude!
Any festivals lined up this summer joe?
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spot on sentiments. Do you have an agent or is it DIY? I’m sure you could get some Spanish gigs (at Nitsa, Casa Bonay, La Paloma, Laut or at Akasha across the water) but I guess you meant locally?
Thanks mate. Appreciate that
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Locally, nationally, internationally. In the immortal words of Nuttin Nyce: I’m Down 4 Whateva 
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It’s all about the camera now. It’s almost as if there isn’t a video it didn’t happen. I don’t mind the ones where it’s a DJ just going about their business but some, as you say, are beyond the pale. I did lose respect for a certain DJ who had a rant about DJs mugging it for the camera but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t grandiose the situations more than this particular chap. Had to unfollow as it was becoming insufferable. Day one.
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Line ups (rightly so) have become more diverse and inclusive and thats had a huge impact. As white males you / we have sort of had the run of the field for a long time and promoters are now aware they need to mix up line ups. This means 50% less gigs out there for people of a certain age and demographic, and as I need to repeat, rightly so.
I think with someone like Joe you just need to keep doing what you do what you do and keep doing it and it’ll resonate and then off you go… Nice things happen. Or start a small party yourself which seems a good route if you’ve got a bit of a name and know how.
With regards to the social thing I unfollowed a few DJs that play that game hard. It’s your choice whether or not you look at it I guess…
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Jesus I was doing that ten years ago 
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Same and also possibly the same person.
My thoughts about this remain the same despite my personal circumstances having changed considerably since last summer. As I mentioned back then, I got overwhelmed by ther stuff of life and made a few choices to simplify things and save myself. I pulled out of a couple of gigs, didn’t actively look for any more bookings and turned down any enquiries for parties.
I just wasn’ t feeling it at all and would’ve felt like a complete fraud playing music for people that I didn’t want to hear myself. I had hoped that given time I’d get my mojo back and that things would get back to ‘normal’.
It has been nine months now since I put a record on. Weirdly, I still look for records. I buy stuff I audition and like. I’m looking at them now and along with a few unopened mailers there are about 60 records that haven’t left their sleeves. I’m not sure what this means. Is it like stamp collecting now? I’m not a completist.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about the scene, the community, the party and my place in it. I’d started this latest iteration of parties, Lazy Susan, about nine years ago. I was 45. It started as an outlet to play my old records and I quickly got back into the record buying habit. With a pub gig every week, money to buy tunes and a fresh appreciative crowd each week it felt brand new to me.
That feeling of having even a small dancefloor reacting positively to your choices, down at your record box, frantically rifling through, lump in the throat, finding the next tune, f###ing come on!! That was what it was about.
As time went on the crew began to grow and we had five or six of us, all in our 50’s now, who collected records and wanted to play. We were ‘100% Vinyl’ though that makes me cringe a bit, I’ve never got my head round digital music, possibly only because I just wasn’t DJing at the time when things started to change over.
I did some work at Funktion-One which enabled a couple of us to invest in a decent sound system. The gigs became bigger, more regular and the reputation for great music on an amazing sound system grew. Incidentally, Tony Andrews, founder of Turbosound and F1 is still DJing in his 70s.
Things were going great. Until they weren’t. I’m being careful not to retrospectively revise how things changed but If I’m honest I hadn’t really enjoyed a gig since NYE 2022/23.
I spent a lot of time lugging gear, setting up the system, the lights, projectors. Hanging the mirrorball and then packing it all away into storage at the end. CDJs had sneaked in. It introduced another level of tech and setting up and didn’t feel as easy to play along with.
On one hand you had a DJ with 10000 tunes on a stick who could play anything for anyone, on the other you had someone who turned up with a few records in a carrier bag who was going to play them whatever. It had become a bit of a free for all. We did invite local guests to play. They almost exclusively wanted to play off a stick. I suppose gradually it turned into something else.
In the end I felt like I’d become a roadie to enable other people to have a party.
I had hoped that the friendships and community that had built up over the years would last once the music stopped and the parties finished but out of all the crew and the dozens of regular dancers, I’ve heard from three of them since I stopped going out and partying at the end of June.
A couple got in touch to see if I was going to be putting on a party in the near future. No? End of chat.
I would echo what Apiento said. Start your own party and do what you do and stay true to why you started doing it. If it stops being fun and starts being work and that’s not what you wanted then call it a day.
Since I started DJing again nearly ten years ago I never got booked or invited to play at anyone else’s party and I wouldn’t have expected to have been really. I realised that if I wanted to share my records with folk I’d have to create the time and place to do it myself.
Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ve said too much, too little or if any of it makes sense but I’m taking a break from DJIng and it feels both OK and not OK at the same time. I’d love to feel the want/need to do it but I don’t. At the moment.
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I recently sold my record collection and there were easily 250 - 300 records in there that I had never broken the seal on. Reinforced why I needed to get rid of them really.
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I want to chip in here just to put it in a more provincial context. I’ve never really had a ‘crowd’ but did play local clubs 20+ years ago. I still want to play the music i buy and love out. Find a bar that is happy for you to play whatever you like (I don’t even care about being paid) and play. Someone will always come up to ask what something is or say how much they enjoyed it. I’d even say that the benefit of bars is you don’t expect people to dance so won’t get pulled in a direction that you don’t really want to go in.
You will get some reaction though which i’ve never really felt radio offers.
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I’ve toyed with the idea a couple of times over the last several months. Especially when the Discogs median value is £45 grand
I’ve got two teenagers who both love music and buy records too. That makes the decision harder but I guess at some point there’ll be a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
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100%. I started doing a small town local pub every friday night. My expectations were realistic in that I considered what I was doing as background music. The joy when someone would come up and ask about a tune or thank you for playing such and such.
Best one ever was a couple with a young child. They were in early doors and having food. I can’t remember what I played but it had a bit of swearing in it, or wasn’t appropriate for young ears. Anyway the evening continued and they eventually went to leave. The guy approached and I thought he was going to mention the sweary tune. But no, he thanked me for playing Jive Baby on a Saturday Night by the Jellies probably the most obscure record I’d played before or since.
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I’ve heard the same sort of thing that yourself, Joe and others have all alluded to on here. It seems around 2022 a lot of people started to feel different about DJing. I’ve heard it from people in the TP age demographic, but also from young DJ friends in their 30s and 20s.
With the massive increase in popularity in “underground electronic music” and the whole Berghain/Berlin Massif as a cultural trend, there has been a big influx of (mostly young) DJs that want to use Djing purely as a conduit to fame. The crowd pool is bigger, but the majority of people aren’t “digging” to find parties or DJs that they love, they just want to party with loud noise and take photos. DJs seem more competitive than supportive of each other. Lots of people are playing music they’re not passionate about to fit in and get booked. Some of the DJs that book the most gigs in the city I live in are terrible DJs by any metric, but they are aggressive on social media, image and power networking. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of very good but quiet DJs hang up their headphones in the last couple of years.
I feel like relying on your music to do the talking is a thing of the past. That sucks for people like Joe who’s mixes are top notch, but any DJ in this age is in a popularity competition whether they like it or not. Things are transactional, not supportive. I hope this doesn’t come across as too jaded, but it’s how I see it. Hell, a good portion of the current big-name touring DJs I’ve seen in the last few years have been pretty average. Some are still phenomenal, but they’re not getting any more bookings than the unskilled ones.
Good luck to all of you still DJing. I hope you hustle all the gigs you can and enjoy them while you do, I stick to the 3 or 4 fun gigs a year and then play at parties with friends, preferably on nice soundsystems. Plus DJing at home is always fun when all else fails 
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Easy to blame the kids but the cancer started way back in the ‘Sasha son of god years’ or when Oakenfold coopted Bono’s ‘god on stage’ complex on the same tour. Way before Nokias even existed.
Just the commercial crowd? Then why does Bernie insist on putting the djs on an elevated stage at convenanza for everyone to gawp at? Or every other supposedly underground event wedded to piling as many names on to a lineup as it can? Until we get back to the dj disappearing into the shadows, and long set times and dark rooms which encourage expressive or ‘lost in the moment’ dance, and minimal flyers that guarantee nothing other than a good time, then what hope have the kids?
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The kids are all right. I was going through some old books and I happened upon my OG copy of Bill & Frank’s book. Straight sausagefest the whole way through (to their credit they acknowledge this). Echoing what @Hierbas says I couldn’t imagine going back to the male DJ hero worship years. At the local hipster spot I’ve been blessed to play at a few times the DJ gender ratio nearly approaches parity and I love that. The music is more diverse, too. Some people play juke/footwork-y things that aren’t quite my bag but there is a real passion for sharing music and I love that I can pull something out of my dusty record bag that they haven’t heard before and get turned on to…
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Echoing Joe and Simon’s well executed comments here, I feel the landscape has changed so much post COVID that it has eradicated the older generation of DJs who, despite keeping fresh and relevant with the endless search for the next amazing record to play, have been made somewhat redundant due to the way social media/instagram has shaped every aspect of going out.
There’s a new bar here in Sydney that has 10,000 records behind the bar with a rotating roster of DJs 7 nights a week playing for free until 4am each night. This is a great thing. However, a friend of mine who works at a nearby venue said there is always a line snaking down the street to get in, but that the line moves very fast and this is due to the crowd wanting to go inside, take a bunch of shots for the 'gram and then leave.
I’m sure this behaviour will die down once the initial hotspot novelty wears off, but it’s such a sign of the times that the way people behave, particularly the younger digital natives who started going out after lockdown ceased. They’ve got no point of reference with how it was all about connecting with people and choosing to follow the music and not always the DJ. Not their fault of course, how could they know?
I’ve noticed that there is a younger crew that have adopted the Balearic cause and that can only be a good thing. They have come up in a very short time frame with not only the digging knowledge done by those before them, but with access to thousands and thousands of tracks readily available at the click of a button.
For those of us with a few more pounds packed on, a few more wrinkles, and a lot less hair, it’s hard to compete for spots with good looking young bucks who have access to all the tracks we have collected for 40 years and 20,000 more, all on a USB. Yes, this sounds like a “poor me” sentiment, but it’s just how it is. You’re only as good as your grammable angles haha.
In the end I felt like I’d become a roadie to enable other people to have a party.
I had hoped that the friendships and community that had built up over the years would last once the music stopped and the parties finished but out of all the crew and the dozens of regular dancers, I’ve heard from three of them since I stopped going out and partying at the end of June.
A couple got in touch to see if I was going to be putting on a party in the near future. No? End of chat. - LazySimon
This sums up exactly what we experienced and why a great night that we built over 2 years has left us feeling deflated and a bit jaded. We will reemerge at some point, but will take it back to grass roots, small, intimate and invite only, aimed at the few who actually appreciated all the hard work we put in.
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The year is 2040
Tik Tok is banned by the few remaining democratically elected governments for melting kid’s brains. Facebook, Insta and X (formely known as Twitter) are shut down due to a number of insurrections they helped drive around the world, through the use of deep fake advertising/election campaigns and data harvesting.
Zuckerberg & Musk are both serving long prison sentences for their involvement in an elaborate fraud involving access to Trump and Putin in exchange for Bitcoin, as they desperately tried to prop up their imploding empires.
There is no social media. DJing is no longer cool. In fact, all that remains is one small site hidden away in the outer reaches of cyberspace where a bunch of geriatrics continue to champion this dying artform. Dedicating hours each day to finding rare and as yet undiscovered Balearic battle weapons, in the hope that one day, just one day, they’ll get to play them to an appreciative audience once more, at some care home in Margate. But not on stage, definitely not on a stage.
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I think the real test is tech. Will the clubbers of the future still connect to the dj experience if it is all automated? How would Ibiza market those clowns if there was no need for them? And would it generate a backlash? Seems to me people are fickle, the kids have no rules/baggage and one tv show, soundtrack could easily trigger a renaissance in something we took for granted. Similarly the novelty of a dancefloor where people connect with humanity ie each other might yet catch on?
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A friend of mine is a very good DJ who primarily does wedding here in Brazil. He says the first question couples ask him when they “interview” him for their wedding gig is “How many followers do you have?”.
That’s a sorry state of affairs…
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