Heart of darkness: The Secret DJ on touring

There’s a quote from Francis Ford Coppola about the famously troubled making of Apocalypse Now: “There were too many of us,” he said. “We had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little… we went insane.” How else to explain some DJs’ behaviour when they go on tour?

“I can’t stay here! The wallpaper is too weird”. Someone really said this. In my time in dance music, whether behind the decks or putting on parties, I’ve heard a lot of DJ bad behaviour stories. In fact, I kind of collect them.

With my own long-abused ears I have heard “these ice cubes are too cloudy”, “the thermostat is too complicated”, “there’s not enough magazines in English” (in Malaysia) and someone needing an entirely new luxury room because “the pot-pourri smells funny.”

“The toilet is in a stupid place” is another and one of my faves, as is the nameless superstar who insists on a heated floor wherever they go, and yet somehow refuses to consider shoes.

There are major American DJs who feign injury when things aren’t to their liking, and try to get people fired. There are one or two who barely bother to turn up, after insisting on being paid in advance. I know DJs who seem very nice but will instruct their management to charge a venue their already colossal wage twice if they miss a flight, threatening to get on a plane home without playing if they aren’t paid again for the inconvenience of not being able to catch a plane properly. I’ve seen DJs who are working half as often start to charge twice as much to make up for it – which is about as concise a description you can get of the insane thinking of our agents and managers, who are pricing DJs right out of the game.

Top of my list for sheer waste is the EDM giant whose team spent months – and just under a million dollars – with boffins making a system that controlled the entire (stadium) show’s lights from a tablet – because a professional lighting guy knows nothing at all about lights, right? And when the mega-doofus got there and couldn’t immediately understand how it all worked he just threw the tablet away over his shoulder.

It cost.

One.

Million.

Dollars.

I’m no saint. Although in my defence, my own hissy-fit was a scam to get a hotel upgrade. My issue was with a massive horrible sofa. It was bright purple and over eight feet tall at the backrest. No that isn’t a cartoon ‘eight feet tall!’ it was actually an 8’-high, bright purple sofa. It looked like Barney the fucking Dinosaur was lurking in the corner silently watching you have a piss. As the words “can’t possibly co-exist with furniture that hideous” came out of my mouth I experienced something alcoholics call ‘a moment of clarity’. I was truly lost. I had passed a point of no return.

Why? There is isolation and there are drugs. There is also massive ego. But it is also about being in a bubble. It’s easy to laugh at DJs complaining, but the life can genuinely be stressful and exhausting. Which adds mental croutons to the demented soup.

The isolation of living in hotels is another aspect. Hotels are microcosms of the world, and just like everything else in the world, you get what you pay for. Hotel staff will literally deal with anything if it’s worth their while – but riding an incontinent goat down to reception is kind of uncool and inappropriate in a Swansea Travelodge. No-one there is paid enough – and certainly not enough by you – to deal with a wobbly wanker and goat shit when they arrive at work first thing. Some places offer shitty indoor goat rides (or whatever) as complementary, because not only are the staff all paid very well, more than likely it will be you paying them very well both before and after anyway. The difference between being a cunt and a rogue is that rogues tip well.

In the end it all boils down to plain rotten behaviour. Once you start abusing groupies, kicking people out of cars in the middle of the Ibiza heat or, most heinous sin of all, wearing sunglasses while you play… well. You’ve gone over to the dark side, never to return. It’s a small business, is the business of show, and everyone knows about you.

Of course, this doesn’t prevent bookings. No-one ever stops booking someone who sells tickets, no matter what they’ve done (Ten Walls aside). But when your star starts to fade, and you need a bit of good karma or good relationships until you come back into fashion again: that’s when bad behaviour comes back to kick you in the teeth.

One of the reasons DJs (and other public figures) lose the plot is that it starts to become less a job of work, and more an extended celebration of themselves. They start to party to the sound of their own fabulousness. They see each gig as a daily birthday party. It’s weird and lonely and unnatural, so what the hell? You may as well go cloven-hooved, great steaming googly-moogly on it all. Then one day it’s a job again, and people need you to do things that frankly aren’t nearly as awesome as making little food sculptures out of room service leftovers, and they’re all so boooooring, and suddenly you’ve forgotten what it is that you do. You are supposed to make other people happy. Not yourself.

Lying on his deathbed in a Paris hotel, Oscar Wilde is said to have looked around at the frightful decorations and said, “Either the wallpaper goes or I do”. He promptly died. That nasty paisley is probably still there, and it’s a lesson to every insane DJ, forever.