Is staring at the DJ while they play really that bad?

In the unlikely event that I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, an invisibility cloak, and the ability to fly, I know exactly where I’ll go. A studio in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1493 is where you’ll find me, hiding behind the easel as Albrecht Dürer puts the finishing touches to one of those masterworks that changed the direction of European art. It’s a daydream I’ve indulged in for hours and hours; I try not to gasp – I am, remember, invisible, not inaudible – as I watch his fingers work meticulously, each miniscule movement corresponding with another literal stroke of genius. In my version of the vision, Dürer steps back, exhales, mops his brow, and looks down at his hands. “How,” he says, in a soft voice, “how did they do this?”

It is a question I’ve found myself asking not just in galleries, standing slack-jawed in front of Dürer’s Christ As The Man Of Sorrows, but in nightclubs, too, standing slack-jawed in front of Jeff Mills’ six million fingers, hammering away at a TR-909, six sets of CDJs and three 1210s.

It feels strange, to this writer at least, that hands aren’t talked about more in club culture. They are, after all, the actual reason we’re participants in 21st century nightlife: hands put the records we’re dancing to together, and they put the dancefloors together too. It is for that reason that I’m not ashamed to say that my name is Josh, and I am obsessed with watching the hands and fingers of my favourite DJs.

It isn’t that I’m there just to intently watch fingers tap at cues and tweak EQs; I go to the bar sometimes, too. It is, in a way, a form of unsexual and entirely benign voyeurism. Positioning myself to avoid getting in either the DJ or the dancers’ way, I’ll happily stand just to the left or the right of the decks, my gaze firmly fixed on the mixer and the hands that are turning an inert lump of plastic and metal into an instrument of beauty, wonder, puzzlement, joy, anxiety, and freedom with all the deft precision of a philharmonic conductor and his baton.

To stay in the realm of the conservatoire, if you’d stumped the best part of a weekend city break to watch a world-class pianist tinkle their way through a particularly tricky Rachmaninoff piece, you’d be a fool not to watch their fingers intently, delighting in the combination of muscle memory, neurological transmission and sheer physical dexterity coming together to create something truly wonderful, and totally beyond your own capabilities. The same goes with a night on the tiles.

Find yourself in the company of hot-handed technical wizards like Jeff Mills or Teki Latex or Amy Becker or Manara or Total Freedom, DJs who refuse to accept that seamless linearity is the be-all-and-end-all of good DJing, and it feels like you’re seconds away from sparks literally flying. It provokes an almost infinitesimal but definite sensation of disorientation: their fingers working quicker than the speakers, the speed of light faster than that of sound. You see the blend before you hear it. So you keep watching and listening, trying to beat time and space. And dancing, too, if you’re doing it right.

It isn’t just the firebrands whose hands I feel compelled to peer longingly at, either. On a recent trip to Bloc, in Hackney Wick, I spent the best part of seven hours watching Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston slide faders up and down very, very slowly during a spellbindingly chuggy cosmic disco set as A Love From Outer Space. I’ve felt myself tingle as Michael Mayer’s spindly fingers hover over the cue button for seven minutes at a time under Moroccan moonlight, and quiver at the very sight of Moonboots quietly laying the needle down on a 35-minute-long Indian folk record at a swanky London listening bar while trying not to drop pastrami on my trendy new orthopaedic casual shoes.

There seems to be a disdain for people who intently watch the DJ, from both DJs and fans alike. But is taking an interest in what someone’s doing on stage really all that bad? Surely, taking pleasure in watching what someone is doing on stage is allowed? Perhaps the joy in simply watching a really good DJ at work, close up, goes someway to explaining the enduring appeal of DJ streaming.

There are a million things you can do in a nightclub. Some will leave you scratching your head as the Uber crawls through early-morning fog with your brain fugged with worry and your wallet fifty quid lighter than it was a few short hours ago, and all this – the cabs, the clubs, the queues, and the can-I-borrow-a-Rizla-mates – comes to seem like a grand and needless folly. Others – like the approach I’ve taken to clubbing – provide you with a new perspective on things, refreshing your understanding of the possibilities of what clubs and DJs and dance music can do.

And hey, if the music’s crap, there’s always something to look at.

Josh Baines is a freelance journalist, follow him on Twitter