Kickin In

“Maybe the important part was simply saying yes”

Journal Entry: Kicking In

I think this session started before I realised it had started.

A friend had asked me to DJ at their birthday and my first reaction was excitement. A proper, uncomplicated yes. Music, people, a room full of energy, making something that other people were going to hear. That's the bit of DJing I actually love, and I remember having that little spark of anticipation when I said yes, before I'd had time to turn it into anything else.

Because almost immediately, I did.

I wanted to get it right.

I wanted the right tracks and the right flow and the right journey and, ideally, I wanted to know exactly how the set was going to work before I even got there. I started imagining the room, what the energy might be like, where I could take it, where something might go wrong, whether I'd have enough time, whether I'd chosen the right things. Basically all the stuff you can think about when you don't yet have a room full of people in front of you and therefore have nothing better to do than invent problems.

I do this sometimes. Something I'm genuinely excited about becomes something I need to solve, and before long I'm no longer enjoying the thing I've been asked to do because I'm too busy trying to make sure I enjoy it properly when it eventually happens.

So I'd sit down and work on the set and move things around. Change a track, put it back. Try a transition, decide I didn't like it, change direction, listen again. I'd convince myself I'd found the problem and then realise I hadn't actually fixed anything. I could spend an extraordinary amount of time doing that.

And alongside all of this I had this other group of tracks sitting there.

They weren't really part of the set.

I hadn't planned them and they weren't on the master list and I wasn't looking at them thinking, right, these are definitely going in. They were just tracks I'd kept coming back to while I was working. Music that I liked listening to when I wasn't trying to build anything. Tracks that seemed to do something for me without me having to think about why.

I suppose they were the bits I was listening to for myself while I was spending all this time trying to build something for everyone else. That became harder to ignore.

The carefully constructed set was getting more and more complicated. In my head it was becoming cleverer, more considered, more intentional. I was thinking about how it would look as much as how it would sound, which is usually a good sign that I've started disappearing up my own arse a little bit.

And then I'd go back to this stupid pile of tracks that I'd never really intended to use and enjoy myself again.

There was something quite telling about that.

The music I had collected almost accidentally, because I liked how it made me feel, was starting to feel much more alive than the music I had deliberately chosen because I thought it belonged in the set.

I didn't have some big moment where I threw the master setlist in the bin and started again. It was much less dramatic than that. I just kept going back to those other tracks.

One would come on and I'd think, fuck, that's good.

Then another, and another. Eventually I stopped asking whether they fitted the set I'd been building and started asking whether I actually wanted to hear them.

That was a much easier question to answer.

Once I did that, the whole thing started becoming easier. Certain tracks just felt right together. I couldn't necessarily explain why, and actually trying to explain it would probably have ruined it. Something would finish and I'd know what I wanted next. I'd try it, listen, and it would either work or it wouldn't.

If it didn't, I'd change it.

If it did, I left it alone.

It sounds very obvious, but there was something quite freeing about not needing to justify every decision to myself. I spend a lot of time thinking things through, trying to understand why I've made a decision before I've even made it. With music, when I'm really in it, I can sometimes get past that.

You hear something and you just know.

By the time the birthday came around I still had nerves, obviously. You can spend as long as you like preparing and there's still that moment before you start when you suddenly become very aware that actual people are going to hear what you've been doing in a room on your own.

• What if it doesn't work?

• What if they don't like it?

• What if I completely misread the room?

Then you put the first track on. And someone reacts. And then someone else. And suddenly you're not imagining the room anymore because you're actually in it.

That was probably the bit I had forgotten while I was preparing. You can spend hours sitting on your own moving tracks around and trying to predict what something might feel like, but eventually you have to stop predicting and find out.

The room tells you. You listen. You respond.

A track changes the energy and suddenly the next track you thought you were going to play doesn't feel right anymore, so you change it. Someone reacts to something and you notice. The room gets quieter for a moment and then something pulls everyone back in. You don't control any of that. You can influence it, obviously, but you can't decide exactly what somebody else is going to feel when a record comes on.

And that's probably what I'd been missing.

I'd treated the set like something I had to get right when, once it started, there wasn't really a right version anymore. There was just what was happening in front of me.

I remember feeling that quite strongly as the night went on. The set I'd spent all that time worrying about had basically stopped being the set in my head. It had become this thing happening between me and the room, and I was having much more fun because I wasn't trying to hold onto it anymore.

At some point I realised I was just DJing, which is probably the whole point.

Eventually the room emptied and everything went quiet again. There were empty glasses around, equipment everywhere, and that slightly strange feeling you get when something has been full of people and noise for hours and then suddenly isn't.

I was knackered, but it was a good kind of knackered.

And I was really grateful, actually. Not because I'd played some perfect set because I don't think I did, and I don't think perfect sets really exist anyway. I was grateful because I'd made something and for a few hours it had become part of other people's night.

That's different when you're DJing for people.

When you're on your own, the music can stay completely inside your head. You can stop it, change it, start again, spend three hours deciding whether one track should come after another.

In a room you can't do that.

At some point you have to let it go.

People bring themselves into it. Their mood, whatever they've been doing that day, who they're with, what they remember when a particular track comes on. You have no idea what half of it means to them, and you don't really need to.

They're there. You're there. The music is happening.

And for a few hours all of those things are connected in a way that couldn't have happened anywhere else.

I think that's probably what I was excited about when I said yes in the first place, before I turned it into a project and a setlist and something I needed to perfect.

I wanted to play music to people.

That's it really.

And the funny thing is that the tracks I ended up wanting to play were the ones I'd been listening to when nobody else was there, the ones that hadn't been chosen for the room at all.

They were the ones that had kept me connected to why I wanted to do it in the first place.

So maybe Kicking In isn't really about becoming confident or finally stopping overthinking, because I still did all of that. It's more about the point where I stopped trying to decide what the night was supposed to be and actually let the night happen.

I think I needed to get out of my own way.

Once I did, I could hear it again.