Chastened by my first booking at the George in Penrith, when I was told in no uncertain terms to smarten myself up, I made extra efforts to impress for my second, five years later. It was a wedding reception in the handsome ballroom of the hotel and I wore a sober jacket and tie in an effort to pour oil on once troubled waters. If only the wedding guests had made the same effort.
Oh, they were well turned out: the George is an up-market venue. The women wore plenty of gold lamé meringue and the men were in ill-fitting suits of many pastel shades. It was a cross-border affair. The bride – let’s call her Juliet – was from Cumbria in northwest England, the groom – Romeo – from Northumbria in the northeast. Their families were, like their namesakes’, worlds apart.
The set up was hurried – I wasn’t allowed to set up before the wedding breakfast, and I was put not in the ballroom itself but on a tiny minstrel’s gallery overlooking it. There was only six feet of headroom (I am 6’3”) and it was about ten feet above the dance floor. I felt very detached from proceedings down below, which as it turned out was probably just as well.
The couple were of course a lot younger than I, and mercifully they were organised enough to have made up a CD of favourites. Although a DJ’s pride bristles at such interventions – surely he or she is the expert at sensing what a crowd want? – I was grateful for some pointers. It included the couple’s unconventional First Dance, a track by Ben Folds Five, and a rather touching Second Dance, a surprise from the bride to her father: Barry White’s You’re the First, the Last, my Everything.
Do DJs still play Barry White? The track was already an oldie by the time of my first stint as a DJ in the late 1970s, but still a popular request. Although it’s something of a soul-disco classic, the hit started life as a country and western song, You’re my First, my Last, my In-Between, written by Peter Radcliffe, a friend of Barry’s. It went unrecorded for two decades before White rewrote the lyrics, taking it to #1 in the UK and the US.
It had the advantage of working both as a dance track and as a more intimate declaration of love. White’s substantial girth, rich bass voice and luxuriant tusk-like moustache earned him the less-than-kind epithet “the walrus of love”. He died in 2003, two years before Juliet’s affectionate choice for a last dance with her father.
Juliet’s wedding disco began more or less as these things do. It was a little hard to gauge the mood from my eyrie but there was a steady flow of dancers on the floor. Two of the guests were from South America and asked me to play a track from a salsa CD they had brought. We were then treated to a thrilling, vibrant demonstration of Latin dancing by the pair. It made the usual plodding disco shuffle of the rest of the guests even duller by comparison.
As the evening wore on, I became aware of fewer and fewer people dancing. This happens at weddings: it’s a long day for the couple and their friends, some of whom have travelled quite long distances, even if not from Latin America. I played everything I could to entice people away from their tables or the bar, but as we approached midnight the ballroom was all but empty. The bar was in a neighbouring lounge.
Then one of the guests – let’s call him Mercurio – stumbled back into the room. His jacket was off, his tie loosened, his cuffs undone and his white shirt spattered with blood. I was playing the Scissor Sisters’ Filthy/Gorgeous at that moment, and in one of the breaks in the music before the chorus, I heard an angry voice bellowing from off-stage: “I didn’t drive two hundred miles to be insulted …” The rest was lost in the track’s triumphant “You’re filthy! and I’m gorgeous! You’re disgusting, and you’re nasty!”
I must have played a hundred weddings over the years and on behalf of romantics everywhere I’m happy to say that this is the only one which ended in rancour. I hope Romeo and Juliet had already left on their honeymoon by then. As I write they should be celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary.
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