DJ, Chef, DJ. You choose.
I was a DJ once
Being a cook is a bit like being a DJ sometimes.
I’m listening to a Louisiana Cajun album from the 1920’s, ‘Ma Cherie Tite Fille’ to be precise by Soileau & Robin, released in 1929 . I guess you would call it a guilty pleasure, along with Madonna’s, ‘Borderline’. From there it’s a short step to inspiration for this week’s menu, a Cajun classic Jambalaya. It’s an old surf and turf, one pot dish from the Southern states of the good old USA, made with chicken, prawns, pork, sausage, peppers, whatever you have to hand really, bulked out with basmati rice and a really intense, home-made chicken stock.
I was a DJ once, in the mid-seventies. Twenty years old, studying textile design at Camberwell school of art and living with nine other art students from Central, Chelsea and Goldsmiths in Limesford road, Nunhead, opposite the cemetery. I teamed up with Dave Henderson from Carlisle, we were both Northern Soul boys, driving up to Wigan Casino on the last Friday of the month for their legendary all-nighters. We loaded old Schweppes crates with 7”, obscure, imported, black, American B sides and toured all the London art schools under the banner ‘Northern Soul on Southern soil’. Catchy we thought.
I took early retirement when I realised I had turned into a juke box and all people really wanted to do was push the buttons and select a tune. Select a record I should say, in those days they were records and records played songs. I bought my first pair of decks for four hundred pounds, second hand. Over the following fifteen years, they gave so many people, so much pleasure, I planned to have them framed and hung on the sitting room wall. That was my job, as a DJ, to give pleasure. I often think that’s my role in life, a ‘pleasure missile’, seeking out boredom, apathy and misery and destroying it with pleasure.
Expressions of joy, almost like pain, the next record comes in. The first few piano bars strain from the speakers and the girl in the far corner recognises it, Gerri Granger, ‘I go to pieces.’ She turns to the DJ with an expression of joy as feelings explode deep inside her. He has given her back a joy she thought she had lost, and it rushes into her as she turns to catch his eye and thank him. Then turns again and wraps her arms around her boyfriend, tears wetting his shoulder. The corner of the room erupts and the magic spills across the dancefloor. The crowd are deliriously drunk and happy. The DJ has done his job well.
I did that job well, often playing ten-hour straight sets. Filling the room with music, filling the crowd with memories and desire. Taking them back to a forgotten moment, showing them, briefly forgotten landscapes. Giving them all the pleasure I could give. The room, filled with desire. The next record thumping out of the fading beat of the last. The crowd pumping up and down, yelling, screaming and singing out the words, arms flailing, sweat pouring, bodies bouncing, faces smiling, begging for more. I gave them everything they wanted and songs they didn’t even know they wanted. And feelings inside of themselves they didn’t even know were there to want. I gave until they were all exhausted and asleep and wanted no more. Then, as they slept, I would turn the music and rhythm down and let the softest lullabies trickle into their dreams. Just to give them that little bit more.
We used to play ‘beat the intro’, Ali D, Georgina and I, taking on all comers, then, when we’d beaten them all, turn on each other in an intro beating frenzy. We would only need to hear one or two bars to know the next record, sometimes only one. Sometimes one of us would guess it from the scratches on the vinyl, even before the first bar. Two bars strike a chord within us, and we resonate as the thrill shoots up our spines and vibrates loose a memory in our heads. One perhaps planted there as we slept one night, many years ago, after the party had ended.
Of course by the time the nineties came along, things were different. Then, the DJ was there to take you on a journey into the future. Then we had ‘Tunes’ and nobody on the dancefloor knew what they were. They didn’t need, or didn’t want to know, because the journey was a magical mystery tour and the best bit was not knowing where you were going, how you were going to be taken there, or who you were going to meet on the way.
Tens of thousands of people turned up to the clubs and the illegal outdoor parties every week. They left their baggage behind. Techno, Trance, Ambient, Jungle, House, Progressive House, Epic House, Garage, Rare Groove, Hard Core, Happy Hardcore, Handbag, Hip Hop, Trip Hop and Balearic. And the DJ’s all waiting to take you by the hand and lead you to the secret places they’ve found for you.
Then the next tune creeps in, unnoticed at first. The thumping driving beat of the first, throbs out from the sub woofers. The crowd are fixed in a rhythmic, tribal motion. Something’s going on though. Something is lifting and building, coming up from the dance floor and entering you like a spirit. Something in the tune is changing and pulling you along, pulling you upwards. The next tune is working its way into the first, which is still belting along at a hundred and thirty-five beats per minute. Crisp piano breaks cascade across the room, as the barely perceivable strings of a violin suck you up and leave you crawling on the ceiling, begging for the drop. The DJ in his box watching you working your body, relentlessly inching ever closer to the undiscovered place he’s taking you.
That’s a very difficult job to do well and takes years of practice and dedication, actually it takes a lot more than that even. Taking people by the hand and leading them into tomorrow. Passing through the death of today before crossing into the dawn. Firstly, you have to go yourself, alone, so that you know where tomorrow is and how to get there. Sometimes it’s very hard to find. And it’s pretty difficult to leave what you know behind when you don’t know what waits for you, or who.
Being a cook is a bit like being a DJ sometimes, and the food journey since the 70’s has seen similar changes to the dancefloor. Now you have to be able to understand and be in tune with the diners, the crowd in the mosh pit, the leather souled soul boys gliding across a heavily talced dance floor. You know you’ve got some big guns packed away in your record box, some guaranteed floor fillers. But play them at the wrong time, or in the wrong order and you lose a few punters, get too cheesy and you empty the dance floor.
I’ve been lucky over time with a packed dining room and a queue outside, an excitement building as the courses keep coming, a prized escabeche, a booming salad of black squid and peppers, the crowd waiting, pleading for the drop. And the drop exploding with the heady aromas of rosewater, honey and saffron and for a brief moment I’m Fatboy Slim on Brighton beach.
