music lessons

Last night, I learnt how to create the most awkward intimacy imaginable between six strangers in a small room. It sounds like it should have been difficult, but all it took was timing, and Patsy Cline.

'Crazy' is a work of art. In a quiet bar, with people alone or in couples, it should be an opportunity to look deep into your glass, and feel simultaneously alone and connected; to look in the face of hopelessness and inevitability, and kiss it. As Nietzsche beautifully expressed it: to love fate.

My mistake: playing 'Crazy' when four of the five bar patrons were waiting at the bar, sans drinks, backs to the walls and facing inwards because the barman was at the other end of the room, and able to see me in the corner of their eyes, blushing furiously like an adolescent forced to recite her poetry at a family birthday. What could have been a moment of beauty and reflection (and pure novelty for a dj; playing an original, totally tear-jerking Patsy Cline song in a bar, and not at five in the morning to alcoholics), was humiliating. Nobody knew where to look, and the brick walls seemed to push us closer to each other with every breath Patsy took; it was as if they saw me as I felt for choosing the song; naked. NEVER AGAIN. Is what most people would say. Why did I go on to play Nina Simone's 'Strange Fruit' later on, after a particularly depressing line of '80s nu-wave? I couldn't tell you.

If you're thinking I sound like the worst dj ever, let me assure you that Jimmy will never put you in the position those five people and I found ourselves in last night, and that tonight, when we play a two hour set at another bar, I will be sticking to 90s hip-hop and 80s pop, and leaving the ladies of fate for a grey afternoon at home, with a bottle of gin. And if you happen to be a cult leader, planning an afternoon with a morbid ending, and looking for a dj - my email is to the right.

Our Dunedin debut was slightly less noteworthy than the first (and last) time I played with Jimmy (he's been doing this much longer) in Auckland, to a crammed dancefloor (and with PNC and David Dallas in the lane outside - not a coincidence at all!). But at least I went out on a high, with this - one of my favourite NZ songs of all time. As Alanis said (when she wasn't misusing irony), "you live, you learn... you choke, you learn".