DJ-ing and Me.

My journey behind the decks.

It’s been roughly thirty years since dance music went fully mainstream here in the UK. I belong to a generation of people who grew up with clubbing as part of their social evolution; as a bookmark to end the week and start the weekend, as a space to let loose and forget about their jobs and dance the week away. 

I’ve been DJ-ing in clubs for over twenty years. I don’t often look back at my DJ life; it feels like too much of a blur, and there are so many intense feelings attached to it that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m still a working DJ. I am still challenged and pushed and scared and rewarded by Dj-ing all the time. Since I started, dance music has become global entertainment and DJs can now be stadium filling rockstars. Dance music is big business, but nightclubbing in the last 10/15 years has diminished. There’s myriad reasons for this, from festival culture swooping in to offer instagram friendly raving experiences and a much wider choice of DJs, to the dreaded gentrification, where luxury flats come in to an area because of it’s reputation as edgy and arty and then force the late night venues out because of the noise disturbances. Most of all there’s a lack of policy from governments in the UK and Ireland to protect our clubs as cultural institutions. 

I really believe they are those things. Clubs can, when done properly, act as cultural crossing spaces, where we can experiment with our self expression and forge our identities away from societal constraints and boundaries. Most of all they are places where we can forget ourselves completely and feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Clubs give us collective euphoria. In clubs music is so loud that it is felt rather than heard. It’s primal. Humans have been dancing to repetitive beats since the beginning of time for a reason. 

And the DJ? Well, The DJ’s job is to keep the dance floor full. To make connections in music. To manipulate and sequence songs so as to create a soundscape that is transcendent for the dancer. DJs essentially are conduits for joy.

I bought my first set of decks and mixer when I was 19. I lived in Belfast at the time because I was studying English literature at Queens University. Any aspirations I had of being a writer had been swiftly eclipsed by the lights and noise of a nightclub called Shine. Shine was one of the best clubs in Ireland at the time, mainly dealing in techno, with residents including Stuart and Orde from Slam in Glasgow, Andrew Weatherall, Justin Robertson and Chicago legend Green Velvet. I started out as a punter.. religiously attending every week on both Friday and Saturday nights. I came from secondary school where I was essentially a good girl; I was in the choir, I was a prefect and I was on the hockey team. Over the course of my first year at University, the more committed I became to clubbing, the less able I was to maintain my hockey playing. I remember standing on the pitch at an away match early one Saturday morning after a particularly heavy night at Shine, and realising I was hallucinating. When I looked up at the sky, there were icicles hanging from the clouds. In that moment I thought,

I can’t do this anymore.

And by ‘this’ I meant hockey. 

I loved Shine so much.  There were never enough people to make friends with. Never enough tunes to soak up and feel. And when the club ended I was straight to the afterparties; squished close to strangers on sofas, techno bumping, whispering secrets, rolling joints as the morning light peaked through the blinds. My walls were covered in club fliers. My hair was short and peroxide. My jeans were wide and flappy. My eyes were big moons. 

playing model for a photographer student friend at Queens Uni

In second year of Uni I started to work for Shine. I would stand at the bottom of the stairs and stamp people’s wrists and wait my turn to go into the club. One of my other jobs was to sit outside the doors to the green room, making sure the wrong people didn’t go in. The doors were situated right underneath the DJ booth, giving me a perfect view of the DJ and the crowd. I remember getting to sit there and watch a whole set from the Chicago house DJ DJ Sneak. When he dropped Armand Van Helden’s U Don’t Know Me, which was new at the time, I watched as a surge of energy rippled through the crowd and transmuted into a huge roar of approval, arms in the air, the whole crowd as one, and I remember thinking, I want to do what he’s doing. 

I  spent my final Summer in Belfast learning how to mix in the tiny loft room of my flat. My friend who sold me the decks threw in a box of records, of which one was Handel’s Messiah. I remember quite clearly trying to run a techno record over under the Hallelujah Chorus for hours at a time. God help my neighbours. I brought the decks over to England with me when I went to do a Masters degree in radio in Farnborough in Hampshire. I felt dislocated in England and buried feelings of homesickness in my new hobby of buying old records from the car boot sale in the multi story carpark. I spent a lot of time in my room trying to scratch and singing along to old Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight albums. I moved to London as soon as I could, in with my brother’s band and got my first residency at a place in Camden called The Underworld. It was an event called Silver on Saturday nights, catering to a pick n mix crowd of skaters, punks, tourists and goths. It was a really good lesson in how to keep a dance floor full; how to mix up genres, how to sequence records according to their energy and feel as opposed to key or tempo. But it wasn’t until I got my BBC Radio 1 show at the age of twenty six that I was given the opportunity to DJ dance music in clubs and get paid for it. 

living in Southwark and working behind the scenes at Radio 1 in my early 20s

At the start I was petrified. One of my first professional gigs was in Newcastle. I arrived with my box of records and a hand written playlist of exactly what I was going to play. It was the early hours of the morning, the club was in full swing, hot and packed, sweat dripping from the rafters. Ali from the German techno duo Tiefschwarz was lying on the counter that the decks were on, seemingly asleep with his head in the bass bin. 

Picture the rookie girl DJ, struck with abject terror, unfolding her piece of paper and smoothing it down on the table next to the decks beside the prone body of a techno DJ and then proceeding to methodically mix through every record, stiff as a board, too petrified to look up and face the crowd for fear of seeing bored or disapproving faces. My boyfriend was behind me telling me to smile! look up! but I was too conscious of fucking up the mixes. For me everything rode on the mixes. I was a girl and everyone expected me to be shit. If I fucked up a mix then they would be right. Ali woke up at some point, and I did learn to relax in my attitude to mixing, but I never really learned to be comfortable in front of a crowd. It always felt absurd to be stared as whilst mixing music. I felt the expectation of the crowd for me to DO something, but I was just pressing buttons. I didn’t know how to perform so I drank vodka instead. I spent those first eight years of DJ-ing drunk on the decks; punching the air, jumping around the booth and throwing myself into the crowd.

For years I had an event called AMP, Annie Mac Presents, where I curated line ups of DJs and artists to DJ alongside me. It initially stemmed from feeling lonely on the road and wanting to have a sense of camaraderie and togetherness around being a DJ. It started in room three of Fabric and worked it’s way through larger venues, including regular nights at Warehouse Project in Manchester and a monthly residency at Koko in London, to stages at festivals all over the world from Coachella to Ultra Festival in Miami, and our very own festival in Malta called AMP Lost and Found, which ran for six years. Curation was a whole other creative buzz. I loved sequencing DJs in the way you could sequence records. I can’t even comprehend how many events myself and my amazing manager Lucy put on over the years but they really worked in giving me more of a sense of collaboration and kinship within the culture. I could write a bleeding book about our festival alone. 

AMP Stage at Bestival 2011

It’s hard not to bring your feelings with you into the booth when you DJ every weekend for years. I have cried on three occasions whilst DJ-ing. The first instance was during a set at Custard Factory in Birmingham after I had just split up with my boyfriend. The second was in Cardiff when someone threw a coin at my face. Suddenly the crowd was a malevolent force; somebody in there wanted to hurt me. It could have been a joke but in that moment the feeling of vulnerability and fear was all consuming. No one wants to dance to a set from a crying DJ. My friend DJ Mehdi came on early so I could come off.  

The third time was at Glastonbury on the Silver Hayes stage in 2016. I walked out and the surge of noise from the crowd completely overwhelmed me. I was surprised by how packed it was, and the set was one of those sets that feel like a dream looking back, everything fell into place perfectly. When a set is going well; when the tunes flow naturally and every selection choice is instinctual, when the time and the setting is right, when the crowd are loud and responsive and connected with each other...there is no better feeling. At the end I played Caribou - Can’t Do Without You (Tale Of Us and Mano Le Tough Mix) and standing there looking out over the sea of arms and faces with thousands of mouths singing the same words, I can’t do without you… I wept. 

 When I became pregnant at thirty three I didn’t want to stop. I remember googling pregnancy and exposure to loud noise, and finding information for factory workers but nothing for people who worked in music. I had no one to ask as I didn’t know any other female DJs who had been pregnant. Even now, you can count on two hands the successful DJs who are mothers. As I got bigger and started to show more, I became more protective of my body and more weary of the wasted punters who would want to scream in my face and hug me. I learnt how to DJ in my headphones so that I wouldn’t have to rely on the loud volume of my booth monitors as much. I remember DJ-ing a late set at a warehouse party in Leeds and feeling my baby kick in my stomach and wondering are you kicking because you like these vibrations or because you hate them? Am I hurting you? 

It was around this time that I had to get back to DJ-ing sober. I couldn’t get over the self consciousness I felt. Every second that I was on stage, the machinations of my brain were whirring and my thoughts spun wildly. If you saw me DJ-ing then and it looked like I was talking to myself, that’s because I was. I couldn’t shut the thoughts off and just feel. It would take the briefest sighting of a person looking bored to throw me into a spiral of self flagellation. And I didn’t know what to do with my body! Every movement felt stiff and awkward, I kept my eyes down way too much. I remember feeling so jealous of DJ duos or bands, being able to laugh off a mistake with each other or hide behind their partner or bandmate on the days when it all felt too much. 

I came back from maternity leave determined to not let my new status as a parent compromise my career. I carried on gigging and tried to be at home as much as possible in between. I had tour managers who would drive me to my shows and straight after my set, whisk me into the car and drive me home again. We would leave a city around 2.30am or 3am in the morning, sometimes later, I always brought my duvet and a pillow and curled up on the backseat to sleep through the journey home. I would be jolted awake by the car going over the speed ramps of suburban London, climb out of the car at dawn and fall into bed for a couple of hours before battling through the day with my kid. There was a feeling of jet lag all weekend. In the Winter months especially, this was how life was. I’d feel back to normal on Tuesday and then ready myself for the weekend again. 

When Covid struck, the nightclub industry fell off a cliff. DJ gig schedules completely dried up. For the first time in my DJ career I  experienced life without late nights and early morning finishes. I remember when the clubs opened up again and there was this sense of possibility of things going back to the way they were. There was so much hope and optimism but something had shifted in me. I had two kids now. I had other work in radio and podcasting and I was writing books. I didn’t want to go back to that way of working and living, where I felt upside down to the rest of the world at the weekends. I started to say no to club gig offers. I talked to my manager about a phase out over a couple of years. I wrote it off in my head.  

But there was lingering frustration behind these decisions. Why was I, even as an experienced DJ, feeling like nightclubbing wasn’t a place for me anymore? Since I had left radio 1 the year before, I had received so many messages from people saying how much they relied on my Friday night show to dance, how it was a moment of unity for their household, how clubbing wasn’t a place for them anymore but they still loved the music. I had lunch with my friend Lucy who is an avid footballer and better known as the DJ Monki. She was saying how hard she found it to DJ in clubs because of her football matches. She couldn’t sustain both and she didn’t want to have to choose. I told her I felt the same but because of being a parent. 

I left her feeling a glimmer of optimism. Maybe I could make DJ-ing work for me. I knew there was a generation of people who grew up with clubbing in their DNA but who weren’t being served by the industry. Yes there were and are brilliant day parties and festivals of course are all day, but I wanted to try and recreate the mood and atmosphere of a nightclub at a time that was accessible for me. It didn’t feel fair that you can go and see any band or play at an accessible times, but there were few opportunities to see your favourite DJ in a nightclub at 9pm. What about people who worked at the weekends, who had to study for exams, who couldn’t afford a babysitter to stay over, who felt self conscious in a typical nightclub, What about the parents of young kids, like me, who needed sleep to feel sane and to be able to function, who still wanted to dance? I wanted to cater to those people. 

I called my new club night Before Midnight. The first event happened on May 20th, 2022. I felt more nervous that I had in years about a club show.  I felt like so much was riding on it. I wanted the people there to feel a new kind of excitement about nightclubbing. And selfishly I wanted it to go well so that DJ-ing clubs could work for me moving forwards. I walked around the dance floor before my set and talked to people. There was a mother and son, two ladies in their 60s one of whom said ‘I must be the oldest person here’ and I said no my father in law is here and he’s 75. My friend Sara brought her 18 year old daughter. There were club kids, veteran ravers, mothers and sons, my support DJ Melle Brown brought her nan and grandad. The floor was full of all different shapes and sizes and colours of people. I played for 3.5 hours, ending the night with a full singalong of Robyn’s Dancing On My Own and a confetti drop. In the car home at 12.30 it felt like 5am. I was covered in dried sweat and confetti and absolutely buzzing.  

The night is a staple now and happens all over the country. It is frequented predominantly by women. It speaks to women especially of a certain age, who are busy and stressed trying to juggle mid life responsibilities and mental loads, and need release. Women who have grown up with the rise of acid house in their DNA and love dancing. Women who have the administrative abilities of a presidential PA and who have the night diarized for months beforehand. Women, who when they arrive are there with complete conviction to enjoy themselves to the max. There is no sense of me or the concept having to ‘prove’ ourselves, it is very much a feeling of solidarity and gratitude, of them having my back and me having theirs. I know I sound like I’m dreaming this all up, but that’s genuinely how it feels for me. 

And DJ-ing sober has got easier. There are very few instances of that panic and fear that I felt in my thirties. Still when I’m out of practise Dj-ing and I come back to it, I can feel acutely awkward for the first hour of my set, but the music inevitably does its work of luring me in, and after the first hour I feel something give way inside my head and I loosen up. I have learnt over the years to get out of my own way, to always move towards the music in my head, to use it as meditation.

Last year my youngest child, who was six at the time, came home with a piece of homework he did in school. It was a worksheet that asked him to fill in details about the jobs in his family. He wrote that his Mum was a DJ. And in the job definition he wrote; 

A DJ is when you listen to music in front of people and change it.

He drew an accompanying picture of me in front of a big crowd. I am smiling. And he drew a few tiny smiley faces in the crowd which he asked the viewer to locate. I love everything about it but I love the smiles the most.

 I think it will take me a lifetime to process the last twenty years of DJ-ing adventures. The places I’ve played; from Miami to Melbourne to Mali and everywhere in between. The spaces I’ve played; the beaches, the warehouses, the school halls, the bars, the festival stages, the Uni balls, the tiny basement sweat boxes, the opulent theatres, the converted churches, the mountain tops, fuck I even played in an igloo once. The people I’ve met. The faces I’ve seen. I’ve never tried to write about it until now. I’m excited to have the head space to process it all at last. There’s never been time before. 

I am so grateful that I still get to DJ. It is my first love, my comfort blanket, the place where I feel the most like me. The place where I feel the most free.