My baby moves at midnight,
Goes right on ’til the dawn,
My woman, take me higher,
My woman, keep me warm
Ahhhh you cannae beat a bit of Bee Gees eh! What a tune!
Recently my wife and I attended a friend’s wedding, it was at a local hotel and the entertainment was one guy with a guitar and a nifty backing track system. Whilst I, personally, think he busted out some of the bigger reliable hits —Proud Mary— a little early, it was good enough to get us on the dance floor a couple of times.
I love dancing. My wife loves dancing. We need to dance more.
House music
I fell out of going to clubs a long long time ago, it was only ever something I really did through my college years, and Glasgow had such amazing clubs and DJs it felt like we didn’t need to go anywhere else; SubClub, Arches, The Tunnel.
Prior to that, my first club was Space in Ibiza. It was pure happenstance; I was 17 and on holiday with my best mate and his parents. The apartment they booked was a mere stumble along the (then) dusty road to the nightclub. It was amazing! Podium dancers, a superb, floor shaking, sound system, and my recently discovered love of house music was developed even further.
Picture the scene; a lightly intoxicated teenager hears Your Love by Frankie Knuckles, Love Can’t Turn Around by Farley Jackmaster Funk, Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters, track after track after track as I whirl and dance and completely lose myself in the thudding groove of the baselines.
Ok, I may have been more than lightly intoxicated.
Disco-tastic
Around about the same time I had started volunteering at the local Hospital Radio. As a way to raise funds you could hire us to do a disco; engagement parties, birthdays, and social events were the norm.
I loved doing them, loved learning the techniques of mixing tracks, and loved having a night of playing fun music as loud as we could. It didn’t take me long to get into the flow with these sorts of nights either as the format is pretty much the same.
You play well known pop tracks at the start of the night, people largely chat and drink, a few will dance to a song or two, and you’ll get a lot of requests. Then it’s time for the buffet, the music is dialled down (in volume and tempo) and, once everyone has eaten the fun starts. Buffet tables are cleared, plates are collected, the lights are dimmed.
Let’s go dancing!
We’d usually pick a classic disco track to get things going again, Bee Gees, Abba, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, and once you got people up and moving the fun part, the challenge, was to keep them there. Over the space of about a year we did several of these and honed the playlist down perfectly.
It was so much fun, blasting these amazing disco tracks, peppered with the latest pop/dance hits, all while dancing along myself. Impossible not to!
I don’t DJ any more, but still love a proper disco; a couple of the silent ones I’ve attended have hit the spot, including one at Glastonbury Festival which we joined at about 10pm and left at 3am!
I will be dancing
I love live music, and if you couple the joy of that shared experience with, say, The Chemical Brothers, and you have a dance-tastic evening! I always end up a sweaty happy mess at the end of such nights. It’s about as close as I get to clubbing these days, but the desire to dance remains.
Becca and I were chatting about this —our shared love of a good dance— after the wedding we’d attended. A while later I picked up my phone to check my email and, lo and behold, there was an email about AnnieMac’s BeforeMidnight gig that was coming to Glasgow.
Surely it was a sign!
It took me all of 3 minutes to book the tickets and I already can’t wait.
We will be dancing again! Roll on 19th September!!
What are your thoughts?