Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 7
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 7: Adventures on the Wheels of Steel
(Want to read previous chapters first? Links at the bottom)
We are giggling in the cubicle when the opening of the main door to the toilet briefly allows the distant sounds emanating from the wedding reception we have abandoned upstairs to filter through. We both look at each other.
“That’s not….?” says the Music Store Owner
“It fucking is!” I declare.
The chugging blues riff of Hawkwind’s Silver Machine is now in full flow above us.
“It’s an electric line, to your zodiac sign” sings Lemmy.
“Get that fucking thing off!” we both respond.
We bolt out of the door and hurtle up the stairs. The Keyboard Policeman, to whom we have entrusted temporary ownership of the decks, speakers, and lights which make up our latest business venture has magically introduced a new box of records into our carefully planned mix. Poking from the top of this selection is the sleeve for the aforementioned trip on a magical surfboard with Lemmy and his chums which is currently entertaining exactly one person out of the 300 invited wedding guests, that person being the Keyboard Policeman. As we rush towards the decks to remove it, we can already see that he has lined up his next crowd-pleaser.
“Do you want to ride, see yourself going by?” Lemmy asks. Judging by the looks on the faces of the Bride and Groom, they don’t seem keen.
Knowing that our attitude towards his sonic choices will be to replace his selection as quickly and efficiently as possible, the Keyboard Policeman has taken the precaution of moving various bits and pieces around him to create a protective barricade. Access to the decks is only possible via a tight entrance that he has created by placing booby-traps of leads, boxes and lighting towers in a circle around him. He has taken up occupancy of the remaining entrance alleyway and assumed a Bruce Lee style defensive pose. I try to get around this by ducking under the light tower, but trip over the stand. The Music Store Owner engages in hand to hand combat, but this fella has received personal defence training. As Hawkwind gently fade into the distance with their assurances that they are in possession of an intergalactic exploration device, The Keyboard Policeman places one firm foot on my head to hold me to the floor, twists the arm of the Music Store Owner up behind his back, then reaches his other hand around behind him to slide the fader from left to right as he leans into the microphone and announces “this one is for everyone that has been asking me for it all night, here’s a bit of Doris Day”.
A lot of books have been written about the art of being a DJ, an undoubtedly skilled profession practised by legendary figures like Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Tiesto and Armin Van Buren. However, none of these incredibly skilled and iconic figures would have lasted twenty minutes at The High Rocks Inn on a Saturday night for Sharon and Dave’s celebratory nuptials. The craft of the Wedding Reception DJ, a much under-rated skill, is in striking the right balance between people who are 100% confident that everyone will dance if you put The Smiths on and the demands from the Father of the Bride to spend most of the evening with Lady in Red on repeat so he can dance with each of the Bridesmaids in turn. We have become masters of this art.
Being in a band having completely failed to generate any sort of financial return, and his music store being a busted flush located in a lock up at the bottom of his garden, The Music Store Owner has struck upon the remarkable idea that we should become Wedding Reception DJs. As a skilled negotiator, and never one to turn away from the odd completely unfounded hyperbolic phrase, he has convinced the owner of the local hub of receptions, a man who we refer to as the Italian Stallion, that we are the cream of the crop of DJs in the local area. The Music Store Owner is a very persuasive figure so we consequently find ourselves the in-house providers of musical accompaniment to the exchange of vows, and the subsequent inter-family arguments and struggles, that are the essential elements of a British wedding. As our intention is to spend as much of the time we are employed to DJ as we possibly can at the bar obtaining free drinks, we have roped The Keyboard Policeman in as our technical back up and getaway driver.
As a Wedding Reception DJ you get to see just about every possible facet of human existence played out in front of you.
There was the one with the weird atmosphere from the moment we arrived, which eventually concluded when halfway through a first dance insisted upon by the Father of the Groom (soundtrack the weirdly prophetic Against All Odds) the already substantial distance between the Bride and Groom, who were only loosely clinging to each other like you might when forced to dance with your grandmother, was increased significantly when she stepped back, pivoted her body to draw her arm down behind her, then returned it to the chin of her newly betrothed, laying him flat out with the type of upper cut you normally see delivered by a Heavyweight Boxing Champion. His feet left the floor a good foot and a half behind as his body arched backwards in an attempt at a Fosbury Flop. He did not rise again for at least fifteen minutes, by which time she had long departed. We were reliably informed the divorce papers were filed on the following Tuesday. I blame Eric Clapton. Every time I had to sit through Wonderful Tonight I wanted to punch someone.
There was the one where the Music Store Owner’s regular habit of announcing in a mid-Atlantic accident that “this one is for Darren, it’s from Tracey, she said she really loves you” accidentally collided with a real life soap opera in which Darren, the groom, had dumped his childhood sweetheart, Tracey, to run off with her best friend Clare, the Bride. No amount of us confessing that this was the sort of thing we just said because it was funny, and that no one had actually made any requests at all, would persuade Clare to stop riding around on Tracey’s back pulling clumps out of her hair.
There was the one with the best man’s speech that took place while we were setting the decks up. Initially this appeared to be a highly amusing take down of the reputation of his friend the Groom and his various failings and misdeeds. But it took somewhat of a dark turn when it unexpectedly included the statement that the Groom was, in fact, and I’m quoting here “a deceitful cunt who only a fucking idiot like Alison would marry”. The Father of the Bride attempted a retaliatory punch whilst holding a chicken leg, which provoked an almost immediate spontaneous food fight from all sides. Despite this ending with trifle on the curtains and a sea of broken furniture acting as a barrier between two sides of the room, we nonetheless persisted with our pre-agreed opening dance of I Will Always Love You and the pre-prepared and approved remarks that ‘everyone here wishes you all the best’.
Angry Bridesmaids was another recurring theme. I suppose you’d be reasonably livid if you’d been made to dress up like a psychedelic Christmas tree on steroids, but a surprising number of our weekends were spent being chased through car parks by mobs of them screaming alternative versions of either “I told you to play that record” or “I told you not to play that record”. They seemed to be armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of what emotional trauma or ecstatic reaction might be occasioned by the playing, or not, of a highly specific track by a very specific artist, and would regard this gate-keeping of the evening’s soundtrack as an inherent part of their duties. One night we are almost beaten to a pulp for not having to hand a copy of that well known international chart topper Naima by John Coltrane, apparently the only song the happy couple wanted to hear on their special day. Another time we are forced to play Especially For You by Kylie & Jason no less than seven times after the head Bridesmaid magically produces a copy from her handbag. This repeated play is achieved by her standing next to us for a full fifteen minutes holding a bouquet as a weapon and instructing us that, yes, it is time to play it again.
These days, of course, you can service pretty much any request, however obscure or oddly mainstream, in an instant via your mobile and a streaming service, racking up a playlist that is bespoke to the point of making little or no sense. Attendance at a modern wedding most likely consists of everybody getting to hear exactly what they want immediately as soon as they suggest it, which intuition tells me is going to make for a lot worse evening then we used to produce with our much more limited selection of sounds. Back then, we had one box of records. By which I mean we had exactly one box of records that we used every weekend for about two years.
Records that you could play at late 1980s/early 1990s Wedding Receptions and escape without being assaulted by an angry mob were so generic we had come up with the splendid idea of actually putting them in order in the box. The opening salvo of this largely exclusively 12 inch versions playlist - extended versions because that gives you more time to go to the bar - goes as follows: The Only Way is Up, Ride on Time, Pump Up the Jam, Unbelievable, Back to Life. After a bit of mucking about with the biggest hits from whatever copy of Now That’s What I Call Music had just been released, it would then move into a flurry of Love Shack, Everybody Needs Somebody, The Twist, She Loves You and Jailhouse Rock (for the Mums and Dads) before we would stop by the obligatory Lady in Red and Wonderful Tonight for some smooching. We then quickly proceed to climax the proceedings with a finale section for which we have designed dance moves - You’re the One That I Want, Greased Lightning, YMCA and Boogie Wonderland. I was always trying to get September into this sequence but these efforts were resisted on the grounds it was ‘too obscure’.
This one box of records plan is almost foolproof and carries on for months without a hitch until the Italian Stallion announces “you a boys are a fantastic, I’m a gonna put a you on a in both a rooms” - he was called the Italian Stallion for a reason. As we don’t wish to splash out on a second box of exactly the same records, from this point on we decide that the downstairs reception should start twenty minutes later than the upstairs one, which we justify by claiming it is to do with sound leakage and power demands. In reality, it is to enable us to run records up and down the back stairs of the building thereby doubling our money for a night without doubling our expenditure. This only gets questioned when a groom attending the upstairs event makes their way downstairs one night to catch us re-enacting, to the same precise moves and exact same call outs to the same fictional people, the entire routine we have just performed twenty minutes ago for their own party.
The only way The Music Store Owner and I are able to deliver this sprinting between two floors to commit an offence to all that is good and holy in music twice a week is that we have become quite interested in a health supplement known colloquially as Pink Champagne. This powder cannot be obtained from your local Boots, but luckily there is a nearby biker gang who have a plentiful supply of the stuff. It is made by crushing up some sort of red tablet with whatever available baking soda, washing powder or dust from a hoover bag the bikers have lying around.
Disclaimer: It is not only the time limitations of criminal law that allows me to reveal this potentially nefarious adolescent activity to you. It’s also the more salient point that while we greatly enjoyed acquiring it, sneaking it into places, taking ourselves off to dark corners and chopping it out, whilst imagining ourselves to be minor bit part players in the re-enactment of Scarface the movie, the reality is that with the benefit of hindsight I think I can fairly confidently state that about 0.0001% of it actually contained anything that had been within 5 miles of real illegal or prescription drugs. There was probably more uppers in a throat lozenge. This did not, however, stop us from getting a real buzz out of the ritual of doing it. Plus, of course, our heart rates are sky high anyway as we are now covering about five miles of stairs a night running records up and down between two events.
This obsession with the Pink Champagne ritual is the factor that had led us to us finding ourselves ensconced together, giggling, in the toilet cubicle downstairs. In turn, this creates the opportunity for our non-partaking, designated driver friend The Keyboard Policeman to seize control of the wheels of steel, remove the designated box of carefully arranged records, and replace it with his own selection. No matter how many times we insisted that we would only be three minutes and he was simply to press play on the next turntable and fade from one to the other, he seemed to genuinely believe that Wedding Receptions were greatly enhanced by the occasional Van Der Graaf Generator or Peter Hamill track. No amount of us pointing towards angry and bewildered wedding guests would dissuade him from this notion. Any visit to the bathroom to load up on hoover dust was therefore a high risk activity which might see you return to a deserted dance-floor. And several hundred people trying to work out who had requested track 2 side 1 of Selling England by the Pound.
With my head pinned to the floor by his boot, the dulcet tones of his beloved Doris Day wafting across the abandoned dance-floor, and the promise of an unlikely outing for Hocus Pocus by Focus to look forward to unless we could somehow take back control of the stylus, I couldn’t help but conclude that now might be a good time for me to consider my career choices.
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