Me and Music.

One of the many jobs I've had, and one of the ones I'm still actively doing is DJing.

I've been doing it a fair while now. Somewhere in the region of 7 or 8 years.
I started at Birmingham's Subculture and Subside when Subside opened and my school friend Rob, who'd DJed at Subculture for a while, asked if I'd be interested.

Since then I've DJed at Subculture in all its incarnations: Dale End Academy, O2 Academy, Vudu, The Ballroom (so... Dale End Academy again) and The Rooftop. I've DJed Scruffy Murphys, HMV Institute, Barracuda Club, Velvet Lounge, The Marrs Barr, The Doghouse tent at Download, and a fair few weddings and other private functions.

I enjoy it! I was a late started when it comes to listening to music. I didn't listen to music until I was 14. I remember my dad randomly giving me tapes he'd got off people at work because he wanted me to listen to something! I remember TFI Friday being one of the first influences on my current tastes. I distinctly remember Aerosmith being on the show and playing "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" and I loved it. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas record shop in Kings Heath, buying the CD single I ever bought. I'm still chuffed that my first single purchase was by Aerosmith! I did, then, go through a brief period of listening to some abysmal stuff: The Honeyz, Spice Girls, and The Tamperer amongst others.

Yeah... I own this.

But I also own this!

And this, actually, for the different B-Side

For a while, TFI Friday fed a lot of my music taste, and Goodfellas supplied a lot of my music collection. I remember Stereophonics being on the show and playing "The Bartender and the Thief" and I loved that too. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas, this time half-humming half-singing the song at them because I couldn't remember the name of it or most of the words. I ended up getting a reputation with the staff. I was "that humming kid". Remember, this was in the days before I had a mobile phone or even an internet connection at home. Shazam didn't exist, and Google was just around the corner.

I can't remember half the stuff that came out of this relationship between me, TFI Friday, and Goodfellas but I know Manic Street Preachers were involved at some point. And The Beautiful South.

The first album I bought was from my schoolmate Jamie, who I used to walk most of the way home with from school. I remember one time, he was catching a bus somewhere and had no bus fare. He pulled the Green Day album "Dookie" out of his bag and said, "I'm bored of this and I need bus fare. You can have it for a couple of quid." I'd heard of Green Day but never heard them and the album had cartoons on the cover so the deal was made. And I loved them. I'm still chuffed that my first album purchase was by Green Day!

Shortly after, I remember being in a rehearsal for a play, and another schoolmate, Jon-Paul, was playing the Metallica album "Garage Inc." in the rehearsal space while we were waiting for something. Up until then, I'd always been a little afraid of metal. I'd always thought it would be screamy and weird, and dark, and demonic but the track "Mercyful Fate", the 11 minute long medley of Mercyful Fate songs blew me away! It would be sometime before I realised that this track was actually a cover, not Metallica's own material, and sometime more before I listened to the lyrics enough to realise that of all the Metallica songs to convince me metal was not all about demons and satan, this Mercyful Fate medley, covering "Evil", "Curse of the Pharaohs", "Satan's Fall", "A Corpse Without a Soul", and Into the Coven" was an ironic one.

Metallica in 1998: Not singing about Satan... unless they were.

Jon shortly after introduced me to this new band, Slipknot, and their debut album and I never really looked back from there.

I still found the whole image amusing back then...

From then, I enjoyed metal. For a while it was almost exclusively rock, punk and metal. It was a little later I started listening to other stuff, just as I was exposed to it and liked it really. But more of that another time...

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