A 21st Birthday Party
This one came out of nowhere. With two weeks to go I received an email from Flo wondering if we might be available to play at her 21st birthday party. Happily for everyone the answer was yes.
The big day arrived and we pulled up to the remote venue just outside Hathersage. My first impression was that there’s going to be no complaints about the noise from the neighbours… they aren’t any. We were greeted by a spectacular 10 metre wide party pod with room for a band, a DJ booth and 100 guests.
We unloaded the car, and started setting the gear up. A DJ arrived and started hooking up his decks but it quickly became apparent that the Bluetooth connection to the house speaker was a bit flakey. Because I nice, I lent him a phono cable so he could hard wire into it. It should have occurred to me that this meant I was going to be stuck there until my cable was no longer needed.
We retired to the “green room”, or kitchen as it’s more commonly known, to await our start time. We were joined by Sofia and Sonia, who quickly helped herself to a suck on Ben’s vape. He didn’t seems to mind at all.
The party goers were well lubricated by 9:30 when we kicked of the first set with Song 2. It flew by and 50 minutes of live music passed in drunken revelry. We took ourselves back to the kitchen for a quick breather and a sandwich before kicking off the second set at 10:45. Again, time flew by in the disco dome and set two was done before you could say “pissed up melee”. The DJs took over and we started packing up.
I was chatting with Flo’s dad at midnight, whilst trying to figure out how I was going to get my phono lead back when the music went off. It seemed that the DJs had over indulged and were now struggling to connect to one of the speakers. I went in to help and point out the speaker they were trying to connect to was not plugged in. I passed one chap the power lead, he looked at it, dropped and went back to fiddling with desk. It was at this point justified complaints about the lack of music were being loudly voiced.
@toastsheffield We rocked the Party Pod for the 21st birthday party of @flo.t0 last weekend. What a lovely bunch of people. What night! Better tag in that @sonia_e2 ♬ original sound – toastsheffield
I put on my cape, grabbed my laptop, and my other phono lead, and plugged into the other speaker. I’d already had my DJ software loaded with an appropriate playlist that had tunes from Kylie, ABBA, Sophie EB, Dua Lipa, David Guetta and The Weeknd so it wasn’t long before the party pod was full again. I’d been playing for 20 minutes when the DJs signalled to say that they had got the speaker working. I deferred and let them take over.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that the women at a 21st birthday party want to dance to cheesy pop classics. What they don’t want to dance to is jungle and speed garage. This was made abundantly clear because the disco dome immediately emptied. We were left with a DJ and his mate having a lovely time, playing all their favourite drum ‘n bass tracks to an empty tent. After half and an hour of this nonsense the birthday girl had to put her foot down, and stuck me back on.
I still hadn’t worked out how I was going to extricate myself from this party when Flo asked if I could get her phone connected to the speaker. After a bit of hunting around we found the correct cable and the correct button on the speaker to push to make this work. With cables and laptop in hand I was able to pack up the lights and drift off into the night. It was 4am.