When you build a dry-stone wall there’s a rhyme you follow to get the best results:
One on top of two
Two on top of One
Pin well
Fill well
Here a there a through
When walling, you use a piece of string to line up the stones, positioning them so that the wall defies odds by being firm and self standing, without cement. Whilst each stone is entirely unique, the string acts as a guide, drawing them together to neatly build a wall. If DJing is dry-stone walling and DJs are the stones, I think I’ve been thrown across the Yorkshire Moors, far from the string.
There are many different types of DJs. Commercial DJs, the wedding veterans that are so sick of hearing Come on Eileen but say “It's all worth it” for the 1k pay packet and weekly tupperware of too-dry fruit cake. The house DJs, who dominate a tiny island in Spain where you can buy ecstasy pills for 50p and later rub shoulders with million-dollar watch-wearers in a club owned by Gary Lineker’s brother. The hard techno nuts with their aversion to vocals but love of an ear blistering kick drum at a venue so full of smoke that the sound tech has developed asthma because of it. There’s the reggae and dub DJs, who rift off vinyl, spinning white label records from “way before your time”.
I fit into none of these categories, I guess you could call me a concept DJ.
When people ask me where I play I always reply with “quite exclusively in my parent's garden”. It’s a beautiful landscape, nestled in a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales. Population size 50, club quantity, zero, sheep? Lots. Our garden is home to a barn owl - Barney - who likes to swoop around in the background of my DJ sets, quietly listening to my mixing whilst hunting for mice. I like performing in my parent’s garden, I like performing to no one. Being away from the crowds means DJing for what it truly is - mixing two songs together. When DJing, your song choices become your arsenal, your trademark, your identity, so my concept is simple - I don’t choose music.
I developed Still in the Picture by accident. I had been DJing for around a year and wanted to get better and a great way to improve is to mix different genres. So I asked my friends and family for music, and I said the weirder the better. I received a small quantity of songs at first. Some friends tentatively mentioning they had no idea what I was looking for and others who were DJs and producers, hesitant to the idea, so threw a reliably well produced song into the mix and wished me luck along the way. The music I received was eclectic, and piecing it together was a challenge thatI hadn't quite comprehended to be so difficult.
'Cod Liver Oil And Orange Juice' was certainly the strangest track that was sent to me, a folk song that connotes the ramblings of a raspy Scotsman, swilling away his worries with citrus liquids and unpleasant medicine. I decided to create three vibes as the music was so varied: Winter, Autumn, and Summer, with each mix being shot at three different times of the year, becoming progressively more upbeat as each season turned. I sat for hours at my decks, looping strange phrases of songs from the 90s or scouring waveforms to find passable sections of Clean Bandit’s ‘Symphony’ to try to appease my Mum’s overly popular song choice.
And so Still in the Picture was born, a three-part mix series where I don’t choose the music but my friends and family do. I was set to record in my parent's garden with my newly purchased iPhone 14pro balanced on a log. It wasn’t the best setup but it was a setup all the same. The weather was great, the air was crisp, the sky was blue and then something amazing happened - I went for a coffee with TJ.
TJ is the kind of person who in his spare time will build his own computer. He knows about nodes, built a rig, and has a deep fascination for music that goes beyond sound into the visual realm, understanding that if you can make these two things work together, you can move from strength to strength. I sipped a decaf latte as he told me that he would love to shoot all my mixes. He sipped a full strength flat white as I told him that there’s nothing I’d love more. I was totally unaware of the fact that Still in the Picture would never have been the same if it weren’t for TJ.
And so we shot them, the mixes, waiting for the seasons to turn. For Winter, to use TJ’s words, we woke up at “dick o’clock” to capture a red sky, battling the cold with frost-bitten fingers and gone-cold tea. For Autumn, I watched the leaves of the old oak tree turn, snapping photos to TJ every so often, finally pairing a burnt orange image with the words “we are ready” in late October. Summer was shot with the bees buzzing around me, flowers in full bloom, and Spring? We don’t talk about Spring. We poured over graphics, lighting, and camera angles to master the perfect pastoral scene for each mix, and after 6 months of filming and editing, my mixes were ready to be unleashed.
I used a waterfall release strategy, studding the months of 2024 with a mix every so often to keep people entertained and I had a vibrant Instagram presence to go along with it, posting a reel everyday and counting. I’ve received over a million collective views on Instagram and I did this by doing something completely different. I involved people in my creative process, I deviated away from the norm and created three mixes that are genre diverse and at times a bit bonkers. But they are alsoa patchwork of my friend's music tastes, sewn together by my DJing capabilities.
To my knowledge, there aren’t many concept DJs out there. When I started Still in the Picture, people told me that song selection, for a DJ “is the whole point” challenging my idea, fearful of a break in the status quo. But isn’t the point having fun? Enjoying music, piecing songs together that you never thought would fit but after some hard work, somehow they do? Isn’t Djing establishing a theme, a vibe, a feeling and transposing this feeling onto people, whether they’re in the room or not?
Despite odds, dry-stone walls can withstand harsh winds, with each stone working with the next to foster a strong bond that defines any need for cement. Some stones however just exist, rolling in the wind, occasionally eroding from the hard ground, existing simply to just exist, alone but still beautiful. I DJ because I love it, and if my only fan is a barn owl, so be it.
