Sundaze BXL (28/05/23)
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I accepted this gig knowing that it would be one of only a handful of occasions in my time as a DJ so far that I’ve agreed to obligations in different countries on the same night/day. I would be playing in Bristol on the Saturday night and Brussels on the Sunday afternoon, which implied getting no more than a few hours’ sleep and multiple train connections over Sunday morning and lunchtime. This kind of itinerary is par for the course for most regularly touring DJs, but at this stage I’m still a sporadically touring DJ only just beginning to double up gigs on my weekends. And while I have got much better over the past few years at coping with travelling and sleep deprivation in general, I know there are much tougher levels of touring — and the attendant bodily and mental punishment — left to be explored.
When I consider the schedules of some DJs I know, my own past weekend looks like a walk in the park. For all the memes it has generated, Lady Gaga’s “no sleep, bus, club, another club…” remains a basic reality for performers, especially during the festival season when big DJs — and the assortment of people around them presumably taking a cut — have their opportunity to really bring in the cash. Seeing friends arrive moments before they are due to go on and/or having to leave immediately after their last record fills me with a mixture of anxiety and admiration: anxiety because I know how difficult and dislocating it can feel to plug into an intense setting and somehow generate connection with a crowd at short notice; and admiration for the artistic chops and cojones most of them have to pull it off. I guess those that don’t have them fall by the wayside pretty quickly.
Anyway, although it wasn’t approaching that kind of scheduling nightmare, this weekend still looked like a bit of an adventure to me and I wasn’t sure how well I was going to come out of it. Ideally I would take it easy on the booze on Saturday night in Bristol and get as good a three-hour-sleep as I could in the hotel, before then napping on the train/tube/Eurostar/metro on the way to the party in Brussels. Even better would be to go straight to my accommodation in Brussels and take a 90-minute nap in the short window of time before my set was due to start. I could maybe even have a shower. That would probably put me in the best physical shape and frame of mind to do the Sundaze Bxl crowd justice.