The gift that keeps on giving.
So picture the scene. I’ve known this girl Elaine for about a month. She started teaching me to DJ about three weeks ago. And tonight, we’re going to be DJing, together, in front of a group of some of our closest friends. One hundred and fifty of our closest friends. One hundred and fifty of our closest friends who like trance music, techno music and breakbeat. And we’re going to be playing Prince, Madonna and Britney. We’ve already had a fair few people slagging us off on the bulletin board that’s organised the party, before anyone’s even heard us put our first record on. Because they saw the word ‘pop’, and their poor, closed little minds went into red alert. Oh, and did I mention that we’re headlining?
To say that we’re nervous is a weeny bit of an understatement. To be honest, I think we’re still at the stage where we’re nervous spending a whole night together, Elaine and I, as we’re both, despite loud and annoying appearances, crippling shy and terrified of running out of things to say. So to get up in front of all these people – a lot of whom are pretty successful DJs themselves – as a pair of pop playing girlies who barely even know what a mixer is, let alone how to work it, is fucking lunch-losingly scary, to say the least.
How had we got into this situation, into this kind of high-risk DJ exploit, you may ask? Well, the party was being held by a bulletin board we both posted on. Elaine had just started learning to mix on CDs, playing the kind of music I loved. And me? I was mates with the people running it. Nepotism, eh? There’s nothing like it! I had suggested to my friend Sophie – aka one of the organisers – when we were having dinner in MacDonald's one day that it would shake all the trance wimps up a bit if they were forced to listen to some proper music, music with tunes and words and that, and we’d laughed hysterically over the idea of it, and decided it had to happen. Elliot – aka the other organiser – had teamed Elaine and I up, and the rest was history. It had all seemed like such a huge, hilarious joke to begin with. But in the days coming up to the party, when the enormity of what we had done had started to set in, it didn’t seem so fucking funny any more. Especially when people on the bulletin board saw that we were headlining and started asking for their money back. You think I’m joking? I’m not joking. We were both having constant nightmares, practicing round at Elaine's house every night and, I suspect, praying for the sweet release of death at every spare moment we had. But there was one silver lining. At least we were both Calista Flockhart skinny from nerve-related lack of appetite.
Well. There was one obvious solution, at least to Elaine and myself, to all these pesky. nail wrecking nerves. I’m not proud to admit it, but the shiny, crystallised, sharp smelling solution to our problems comes in a neatly folded wrap for fifty of your English pounds. Ahh, cocaine. Is there nothing it can’t solve? (Well, yeah, probably… famine and debt and the Middle East and that. But I digress.)
So I procured a gram of the finest Bolivian marching powder I could find, and Elaine chipped in, and we figured that where our fragile egos failed us, cocaine would provide.
We had to go to the venue before the party started, to make sure we could work the mixer (that was a laugh! We couldn’t even work Elaine’s mixer, let alone the red lighted, multi-channelled, fandangled thing we were suddenly faced with at the party) and to make sure we, along with all the other DJs, knew what time we were going on and all.
So we go for this meeting, the good stuff hidden in my bra, and we try to concentrate when we're told what's going on, but our hearts aren't in it. I'm agitated. And I guess a bit fidgety. And obviously not paying attention to what's going on.
Because, when we get back to Elaine’s house (where we’re getting changed before heading back to the party) I reach into my bra for our good luck powder… and there’s nothing there.
- Now that’s odd, I think to myself. Very odd indeed.
- Oh well, I think… it must be in the other cup.
So I feel in the other cup. And it’s not there.
- It must be in the first cup, right?
But it’s not. It’s really, really not. So did I put it in my bag? No. My pants? No. It must be in my bra, it must be, I know that’s where I hid it…
But no matter how much I panic, and how much quicker and more frantically I look (always a sure-fire way of finding anything, I find) it really, really isn’t there. I have to face the dreadful truth. And I have to confess to Elaine, who I suddenly realise in a fresh, harsh shock, that I really do hardly know, that I’ve lost our debut DJ coke, and we’re going to have to face the blood-hungry masses with nothing more than our bravery and some second rate speed.
So I confess all, and Elaine tells me it doesn’t matter and she makes us a big old line of speed instead, and we go back to the venue, practically eating our own hands in fear. And every now and then I would dive back into my underwear thinking it MUST be there, it MUST be, I must have just missed it… I’m making quite the impression on the bus, let me tell you. It's good a job we're in Brixon... I'm fitting right in with the other crazy people.
So we get to the venue, and we realise, as one, that people who are all high on ecstasies are really not that much fun when you’re a) horrifically sober (speed doesn’t count, it’s just a utility item) b) incredibly anxious and c) increasingly tired, in an irritable, that’s-really-not-very-funny kind of way. Because of course, being that we were headlining and all, we had to stay both awake and reasonably sober until 4.30am. I don’t know about you, but both Elaine and I are firmly in the camp that starts to get testy if we aren’t either asleep or drugged into some kind of alternate state by 2am. And nerves really don’t help.
Time ticks on, in the way that it inexorably does, and we spend the whole night sitting in a corner, trying to avoid sweaty hugs from people on pills and sweaty curses from people who think they don’t like pop music, with our longing for some sweet, awakeness enhancing, confidence boosting cocaine getting stronger with every moment that passes.
Whenever we do speak to people – which we do as infrequently as possible – we tell them our tale of woe, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.
Or does it?
Somehow, the time is 4.10am. We have twenty minutes until we go on, and we were having one last toilet stop, contemplating jumping out the window so as to avoid the communal boo-fest we feel sure is awaiting us. We leave the toilets together, and I see my friend Ali, another of the party organisers, heading up the stairs towards me. She catches my eye, smiles a knowing smile, and says
- How much do you love me?
I confess, my answer is probably somewhat terse. I don’t feel I love anyone very much at that moment in time, especially someone who had a part in organising this shindig and hence sending me and Elaine to our certain deaths.
- You’ll never guess, she says, what’s been handed in.
- What? I say.
And she holds out her hand. At first, I’m totally confused… I think she’s showing me a cloakroom ticket… it’s about that size, and a bit crumpled looking. I open my mouth to start telling her that I haven’t lost my cloakroom ticket and she must have the wrong girl when suddenly the truth comes crashing in and hits me over the head like a very heavy, but very welcome, saucepan.
- Oh my god! I say. Our coke! Where the fuck did you get that?
And it turns out that someone had found it during the rig… just after the meeting we had had to go to earlier…. and that person had handed it in. Handed it in! Like it was a set of keys! Apparently they had given it to Rob, the guy running the sound check, saying they had no idea what it was and someone might be missing it! (I always wonder - did they mean they had no idea if it was coke, k or speed? Or did they just have no idea what it was at all? Like, they really did think it was cloakroom ticket or something? I never found out who the mystery person was, so I never got to ask them.) Rob, like the decent guy he is, had hung onto it, and told Ali. And Ali was one of the people we had told our pitiful story to earlier in the night. And now… now it was back home!
And so. We go back into the toilet forthwith. And Ali, Elaine and I all have the biggest, fattest, shiniest line of coke you’ve ever seen in your life. And then we go and take the decks. And I hate to be immodest, but we ROCK the joint! Ok, so we made some of biggest DJ mistakes known the man – we mix the decks up and turned the wrong tune off midway through, we switch the mixer to phono and can't work out why there's nothing happening, we get the levels so all over the place that people have their hands over their ears – but they LOVE it. They fecking love it! And we can’t take the credit. Not even the coke can take the credit. It’s pop music, man… this is pop music. They call it pop for a reason. And it’s here to save your soul! |
Mate
And besides, it's not like they grow coke in fair trade farms, is it? 
