When I Used To Be Cool
Most people who read this blog, or know me through work or through the user groups, probably place me as your stereotypical techy. I'm the one who takes a Tom Kyte book on holiday, whips out the laptop on train journeys to try out his new linux VMWare Oracle install, and has a phone with an RSS reader so that he can read Orablogs and the latest OTN Forum postings. Yet once upon a time I was rather cool actually (although not quite cool enough to wear a lilac suit) and in fact I was actually a hip-hop and house music DJ in Brighton.
I started off DJing at parties and club nights in Brighton back in the late 80's, typically playing hip-hop, house and dance music sets with a mate of mine down at the Art College. Later on, whilst I was at Brighton University, I used to DJ at all the Student Union events and I ran a club night called the "Happy Monday" (this was now 1990/1991, middle of "Madchester") where we played balearic beats, italian house, indie dance such as the Mondays, Stone Roses, Charlatans and the Beloved plus the old student faves such as New Order and The Smiths. Funny enough, when I left University I had the chance of taking up DJing full time or starting on the graduate scheme for the Woolwich Building Society (guess which Rock n' Roll choice I took) but I carried on DJing at pubs and parties during the early 90's, pretty much every weekend until I moved up to head office.
Probably the peak of my DJing career was holding down a Saturday night residency one summer at the Gloucester, our local Student Union-run club in the centre of town, and DJing at clubs such as the Zap Club, the Escape Club and other ones in town that have now closed down or changed hands. Whilst at the start I was your typical student DJ, by the end I was beatmixing and working the crowd like the best of them (although I never used to talk over the records, too cool for that) and used to get quite a good turnout. I got rid of my decks around 2000 but occaisionally put together a mix tape using software such as Traktor DJ Studio. Funny enough, we did a "comeback gig" at a local pub where we did all the music and mixing using a laptop on the bar and some mixing software, but in the end it looked like two blokes from the brewery doing an audit and we haven't done it since - I think part of the appeal of having DJs in a pub is the spectacle of someone mixing vinyl, using a laptop or iPods isn't quite the same.
In a way I've often thought about the parallels between DJing and running a blog/speaking at user group events. Blogging is like broadcasting, but with the immediate feedback that I used to get when playing a track and getting a good or bad response (bear with me here...) Speaking at a user group event, where you walk up to the front of the room, spend the best part of an hour with the audience all looking at you and expecting you to entertain them; even down to one mistake (playing the wrong record / knocking the needle off the record vs. your demo crashing, forgetting what you were going to say) being the difference between a good "set" and one that you look back at as being a disaster. Although of course as a DJ you get to have a drink before you go on which of course is not all that advisable if you're going to present at Open World, and you get girls hanging around the DJ booth which you don't tend to get whilst you're doing a presentation on Oracle OLAP Best Practices.
Anyway, that's enough of the personal anecdotes, back to regular Oracle stuff tomorrow.