Transcript (edited for ease of reading) 

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Hi, I'm Ginny Koppenhol. I'm a photographer and DJ and at the moment I'm doing a personal project, a portrait and interview series, speaking to people who are involved in the electronic music scene in and around Lancaster and Morecambe. I'm not DJing as much as I used to, but I still love to stay connected with the scene and attend events. I’m really keen to find out what is going on in the scene locally at the moment, because times are tough. Venues are closing and it's challenging to put on your own events, or find DJ gigs if you're starting out. I wanted to hear from people who are doing things in the scene at the moment.

This time I spoke to Garry Walker and Josh Allen from JuiceBox. They’re a trio. Nathan Bentley is also involved but couldn't make the interview sadly. But they all made the photographs, thank goodness. Josh and Garry spoke about loads of things. I've known Garry for over 10 years now, and it was brilliant to hear things from his perspective, but Josh got involved in the local electronic scene through the university through the uni’s dance music society, so that was a different perspective than we've had so far in the conversations. I asked about how we can make better links with students and vice versa in terms of collaboration and putting on events. They had some great ideas but also expressed the challenges.

What I love about their events is that they're eclectic and bring in all sorts of electronic music genres. They spoke about the importance of having really solid resident DJs to keep people coming back. They attempt to make their nights affordable but whilst creating a following so that they can bring in bigger names as well. They're so passionate about what they do, which is absolutely brilliant to hear. But like most DJs and promoters, they've fallen in and out of love with it. It's hard as I say, but at the moment they're feeling really positive and have loads of ideas, so I can't wait to see those ideas come to fruition.
So here's Josh and Garry from Juice Box.

Thank you so much for agreeing (to this interview). We've got a third member, Nathan, who couldn't make it sadly. But you've agreed to come in and tell me all about what you do, and that's always my first question. Can you tell me about your journeys as DJs, individually first, and then how the collective came about?

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JOSH (blue) 
Yeah, mine’s slightly shorter than Garry's because I think you've been doing it for a lot longer than I have, but my first exposure to DJing was seeing a clip of Grandmaster Flash from back in the day. It must have been a news thing or something like that. When I was 11, I asked my dad for a pair of belt driven Ministry of Sound turntables, and he said no.
It wasn't until I got to Lancaster Uni 7-8 years later, that my friend Josh (another Josh) got a NuMark Mixtrack Pro 2. It's terrible little £100 controller and we learned to DJ on that in his bedroom and then it just went from there. I didn't have a part time job in uni. I tended to just like find things that paid me a little bit of money once, so I ended up doing photography for lots of bars and clubs. Then Josh got into LUEDMS (the at Lancaster University electronic dance music society) and started playing opening slots there. He said “oh, they need a photographer, do you want to do the photos?”. So I said yes because they would pay me better than anyone else at the time, which is delightful.
You meet people, you start chatting, they go, “oh, you DJ? Do you want to do a little opener?”
In our third year of uni, me Josh and a few others were the exec that year, meaning we ran LUEDMS. This is when I really started to get into DJing because me and another one of the exec team (Tom) didn't love house music. Me and Tom were both into garage, dubstep, heavier drum and bass, the rowdier stuff. So we started a spin off night called Corrupted that was basically the sort of darker moodier after-party to all the LUEDMS nights. Because me and Tom were the only ones in the society that really liked those genres, we DJd a lot.

GARRY (Orange) 
It was upstairs at Generation, so it definitely felt like a dingy after-party as well.
 

Yeah it was 4 till 6am on a whatever night we used to do it.

We did LUEDMS for a year and then at that point there was a changing of the guard, where a lot of the LUEDMS people left, obviously finished uni, maybe stuck around for a year after do a masters or hang out or whatever. They all left and went on to live their real lives and then simultaneous to LUEDMS, which is Garry's and Nathan's half of the story, was Bass Race. That was the drum and bass night in Lancaster. That's around the time you start plotting Juice Box, isn't it? I was looking for something to do as well. I think Nathan might have asked me to come and take some photos and I went “Oh yeah. Alright. That'll be a laugh.” I'm not really sure what happened exactly.

Yeah, I remember what happened.

OK, perfect. I'll let you tell that bit of the story. But that's my basic arc: told “no” at 11, learnt to DJ on a controller in a bedroom. Since then I've been doing Juice Box stuff and miscellaneous other bits.

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I started DJing when I was 12 or 13, playing donk and Scouse house on vinyl. I became obsessed with it. I used to go to More Music in Morecambe to get taught by actual DJ's like Graham (AKA Grum). He taught me to scratch a little bit and I think it was guy called Gaz who helped me refine beat matching and stuff. I got my first gig as well, which was in Rawtenstall. I ended up being a drummer in a band with a friend. I won't say his name because people who know me will know why, but yeah, we ended up moving to Manchester and studying music and I learned how to produce over there. I had some mental health issues back then, so I ended up dropping out and then starting my own record label.

In Lancaster before that, I think you were one of the first people to book me I think (talking to Ginny) - you and Miss Rahh from Scyence. You guys were the ones to sort of steam me up a little bit there. I’ll always remember that.
 

I moved back to Lancaster after being in Manchester studying and went out for a night out with my friend. There was a new night on called the Bass Race and we're like, “oh, drum and bass!”. There wasn’t much drum and bass in Lancaster then and we ended up going there (it was at Fibber McGees). I remember Luke coming out the side door. We didn't realise you had to pay. So he's chasing us down like, “excuse me, guys, you gotta pay to get in here”.

After that, I think I met a few of them through some of the students that I knew. Another one of the guys who was part of Bass Race had an issue with his turntables at home. It was just when Traktor Scratch 2 was out and he was having trouble setting up his sound card properly. I went back to his after the party and set it up for him. He told Luke about that and then they looked into what I was doing and they got a bit excited and offered me to come and do the record label side of Bass Race, which never actually ended up happening. But we all became a family, running events, around the same time that we met you (talking to Josh) and you were doing the original LUEDMS at that point I think. Every year it changed hands didn’t it?

Yeah, because it was a student thing, it changed every year. So when we met, I was doing the photos for LUEDMS. I got dragged along to Bass Race at Fibbers by some LUEDMS guys.

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Bass Race was privately owned so we could do what we wanted really. Luke was the leader but when he finished studying at Lancaster University, he moved to Manchester and so did the rest of them. Nathan was the only one that was left alongside me here so we did it. Then Luke decided that he couldn't let go of his baby so he asked if we could do our own thing instead.   So me and Nath got a few people involved, and I’d completely forgot that me and Josh had spoke in the past about doing events.

 

Yeah, I'm an eager beaver and love to get involved in what’s happening.

I felt guilty for it. We did two events and Josh was like “To be honest, I wish you would have asked me to join. I really wanna get involved and enjoy it. And we're all friends”.
I was like, “Oh my God. I'm so sorry! I should have thought”. Then yeah, you joined from that point.

What year was this?

I was in Leeds. When I was 23, so that will be in 2013 so a few years after that. Yeah probably around 2018.

So what is Juice Box? Can you define it?

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It started off as a multi-genre event. We started with venues that had two rooms, and we'd have drum and bass in the main room and lower tempo things in the second room, whether it be hip hop, breakbeat, ghetto funk, garage. Anything that any of us were interested in we carved out a space for it. So we had George do a bunch of stuff. He's a great scratch DJ and played hip hop, stuff like that. We both got a bit a bit sick of going to nights where there was only one thing going on. It was part of the reason you did Corrupted, because you were sick of just having one thing to hear (usually house music). It’s nice to be able to walk between rooms, like festival vibes.

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I remember playing garage at a LUEDMS after-party and people were like, “what's this?” And I was like, “it's garage, I don't know what to tell you” and people said they’d never heard it played out before because their whole musical experience in terms of club music and dance music was in Lancaster, was drum and bass or house. So for them, a broken beat and a slightly higher tempo was revolutionary.

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Where are you from?

Preston, not far away.

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It was Gary and Nathan that got me into garage, but before that there was no space to play it, so no one had heard it. I was like, this seems way cooler than the standard four-to-the-floor house. I always liked like a weird, syncopated beat.

Just to go back slightly, can you tell us more about LUEDMS?

I've not seen them do anything for a long time.

They had to disband from the uni and it became Lancaster Underground instead of Lancaster University.

 

Yeah, in its original form I was part of the 3rd or 4th generation of LUEDMS’ exec. I think it was James Rush and Matt Blacker who started it. They basically started a society like any other university society, but just for DJs and electronic dance music. For a long time, it was quite varied. They used to play a lot of different interesting kinds of house, and techno was very celebrated there as well.

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And James used to play a lot of the same sort of electro-ey stuff that that me and you (Ginny) used to play (Zedd and stuff like that). I remember going to big house parties in town, and he'd just be slamming out these electro beats.

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I think they started playing upstairs in Mint, so very small space. By the time I got into Lancaster and started going, they were packing places, it was ridiculous. I remember being like maybe 30 people trying to stand on the stairs between the two floors of Mint, because the decks at the point used to be at the top of the stairs. It was wall-to-wall people, and then at that point I think they moved to Revs (Revolution) ‘rest in peace’ and started doing loads of stuff there.

I guess the fundamental idea of LUEDMS is: a bunch of DJs who want to put nights on, and the ‘society’ structure works really well for that because you've got the safety net of the uni. You can't spend more than the budget they give you, so you can't put stuff on credit cards. You can't take too many risks, which gives a lot of space for 18-year-olds who don’t know what they’re doing, to fail safely.

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And because you've got a lot of people who want to be involved, you've got a crowd already. If there's ten people who are part of the society, you can all bring one friend and you're halfway there.

After we left, it carried on for two or three more years, but eventually it was so associated with drug-taking that the uni said “you can’t be a society any more”. The same story happened with Bass Race. The people that were involved in it all moved on, got real jobs and started living the lives in other cities and it just petered out from there.
The society has had a lasting impact. Some of the people I was on my year’s exec with, are running nights in Manchester now.

Callum Harkin runs an event called Cut the Rug. He keeps it on the smaller end of things but it's popular.

Yeah, we've got producers. I think Josh got at least once one of the weekly Beatport charts, if not more than one.

The society was a really impactful thing and has definitely been responsible for the musical path I've taken from there. It was one of those formative moments where I met all these people that are really into music. People I went to school with weren't that into music. I found my people and it kick-started things from there.

You didn't go to Lancaster Uni did you?

No. I grew up around here.

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And where’s Nathan from?

Southport. We actually lived down the road from each other, but we didn’t know each other before uni.

I'm really keen to get your perspective on what it's like to be a student looking into Lancaster, because a lot of the people I interview, reflect on how we can involve more students in our nights. How can we have more collaboration? What's it like from your perspective Josh?

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Then it was easy. Now I don't think it is, because now we're one of the locals looking at the uni and asking “why aren’t they coming out and showing up”?

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I've got a big theory on this and it’s to do with the pandemic. I think there are two sides to the death of students being really involved in the electronic music scene especially. I got into LUEDMS through a guy I met at uni, because his Freshers rep was in LEUDMS. He’d got into it because of their freshers reps. There was a lineage. The pandemic cut that chain off because it was two years before uni life was back to ‘normal’, which means that all the second and third years that would have got some first years as freshers reps (and taking them out and showing the sites) had all left. There's now been like this siloing of students because they don't have a connection to any sort of scene in Lancaster. I think that's part of it, and the other part of it is that the pandemic cost us loads of money.

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Well, yeah there were a few things that happened there really. But before we get into that I just wanted to say… flyering at the uni used to work really well for the Bass Race. Me and Nath used to come up and plaster the place and stand there for a couple of hours, once or twice a week and people were keen. You could put flyers up in specific places.

 

And did you get quite a few students down?

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Yeah. The one I always remember… we've got a picture of Glow Rooms and it's so busy that the crowd is as dense at the front as it is going up the stairs at the back. Me and Nathan promoted that one. I think it was a jungle and garage special and that's what we did. We came up and flyered and got people hyped about it. But with Juice Box, just before the pandemic I think, I remember coming up and trying to do flyering on campus. People are more conscious, especially with things like the environment, especially at the uni and I got the impression that people didn't like that I was giving out flyers. That made me think “how do you promote to people these days?” When you're doing social media, it's kind of enclosed in these specific apps that you don't know about that are locally based or, in specific circles.

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You’re victims to the algorithm.

There was an app called Yik Yak or something. Is that still a thing?

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It had its moment in the sun, but you know it was like live tweeting.
We can't really (especially being a bit older and being guys) start adding loads of students in order to promote to them.

I'm pretty sure that you still have to pay to flyer on campus officially. When you were a student, you could do it because you were a student. It’s not as if we’re even trying to profit, we're just trying to break even, but we have to pay to flyer. It silos students because most of what we do now, is trying to break even and have a laugh like when we're putting nights on. So if it costs X amount of money to flyer around campus to even get things off the ground, you’re making it harder for yourself to break even and have a laugh. It makes it complicated.

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Going back to how the pandemic affected us specifically… you were saying that there was a cut off with the with the students at that point because they weren't having the same experience as other students. The freshers’ experience wasn’t the same. So the culture immediately changed there. The pretence is completely different. It's bouncing back a little bit now, but for a few years there, even after the pandemic, the people who had turned 18 at that point, they weren't going out. They weren't that interested in it, which is fair enough, as they’re probably gonna grow up a bit healthier.

We had a few events that were quiet. We did one with Highest Point that was supposed to be at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe and that got pulled the week before, because someone else who did events there had complained. I think they'd been told they weren't allowed to do events there anymore because of the plasterwork. Obviously that is quite unfair and we don't blame anyone for complaining about that, but it was within two weeks before the event which meant contractually, we had to pay all our artists that we booked. Highest Point might not have taken as big of a hit as they might have had contracts set up that allow them to do that, but it was our risk that we took to change the date and do the event with them. So we didn't make it their issue either. We just took the hit, which was most of our budget (about 2 or 3 grand).

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We’d been saving up to do smaller events. Because we always save up to put the money back into book bigger artists because as Josh said before, it's about trying to build a scene.

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Although I've been getting a bit excited recently because the students are coming out again. We’ve just played at the Runner Duck, just doing the hip hop stuff, and you can see them all coming out in hoards again and it makes me smile. They're coming out into town again now, so if they see these little events that we're doing, some of them want to get involved. We played at Tipple and one of the students came up to us. He’s from Sweden I think. He was quite excited because we were playing drum and bass. I think he's involved with a big festival or something in Sweden. It just felt a little bit like it used to back in the day. You're meeting these random people from across the world or across the country. 

There’s a little bit of hope there and we might start doing some proper events again if we can.

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We’ve been chatting about ideas again in the Juice Box chat, whereas for a while, I think we were quite resigned to playing in pubs to provide a backing track. That’s great in its own right, don’t get me wrong but I enjoy seeing people vibing. I wanna see people have a good time and it's great at the Stonewell when 5 people get up and have a little bit of a boogie, but it's not the same as a 200 capacity rooms with 300 people in, making it an absolute sweat box.

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I always love the events that are half students and half locals. In seaside towns like this, there isn't much to do anymore. Either you become heavy on the drink, or you do something creative and you know you get a good mix of people. It's nice for them all to be in the same room and you can see the interactions happening. It creates this new network.

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Absolutely. It's common ground isn't it? We're all here to listen to this cool thing. It's just an easy win isn't it? You get to know people because you already have something in common. Whereas if you grabbed miscellaneous student X and miscellaneous local Y and sat them down in a pub, it might be uncomfortable. But if you're having a laugh already, to some drum bass, garage or house or whatever, you've already met in the middle and the rest is easy from there.

So can you tell me about a favourite event that you've done?

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Maybe one of the last ones that we did before Hustle shut down. No actually, I know what it is. It is a smaller one and it was the Herbarium!

Yeah, I was gonna say the Herbarium!

 

I was going to say that. It was chaos. We felt bad about it!

We did feel bad about.

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We tried not promoting it quite as much because they're only supposed to have 150 people in there.

For anyone who doesn't know, it’s a vegan café / restaurant with a yoga studio attached. A unique venue for something like this.

The yoga studio was the main room. We got Operation Sound System in, our go-to-guy from Preston. We booked Sparks from Manchester to play.  
 

Tom, that I did Corrupted with, came up from London to play.

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Upstairs we had a collection of crappy old speakers that I'd found from my house and just chucked it together as a second room. It was an art studio so we took all the art off the wall to make sure nothing bad happened. It was intended as a place to chill.

But that ended up being the main room. There were so many people up there jumping up and down. I think we had 250 people in the venue, so at that point, we're like, “oh,crap, what's going on here? I knew we should have got a bouncer.”

The café area was underneath that room, and you could see the ceiling bending and hear the most insane, gnarliest jungle I’ve ever heard in my life, pouring out of it!

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What time of the day was it?

About midnight by this point.

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We were feeling bad for the girls that ran the café and we’re saying “we're so sorry. This has got way out of control. We don't know how to how to rein it in.” But she was jumping up and down, buzzing. She was loving it. We went in the next day, and Nath took some chocolates to apologise but again, she was reiterating how happy she was just.

 

But loads of people were there and buying loads of drinks, so it did work out but at the time it was just chaos. The fire alarm was going off in the downstairs, but you couldn't hear it because the stack was so loud. The glass was shaking in the window. There was lots of telling everybody from upstairs come downstairs cause you're gonna fall through the ceiling, then trying to move people from downstairs to upstairs because it was too crazy.

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We stopped letting people in after 150 people, but the smoking area around the back is not fenced off. Because it was a fire exit, they couldn't lock it, so everyone was just going down the alley around the back and coming in through the smoking area. That's why we ended up with 100 more than we should have. That event was roughly mid 2019.

There were all sorts of shenanigans that night. Tom had come up with only vinyl and hadn’t brought a USB. We were building isolators out of Jenga blocks and half tennis balls, and bread (which worked incredibly well – Garry had seen it online somewhere). I think two of us were holding the turntable and slab up at one point to isolate it from the ground because there was so much feedback, ‘cause of how powerful the sound system was. It's incredible but it was just feeding straight back through the needle. We literally had this floating turntable. Tom's trying to beat match and we're like, “Keep it steady, boys. Keep it steady.”

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It was like a house party. Yeah, it felt like the parties I had when I was like 13 or 14 when our mates’ parents would go out.

We were dealing with one thing after another! At the time I was having a constant panic attack. But looking back, that perfect storm of chaos just could not happen now. You could not get that many people in the room. There couldn't be that many shenanigans. It was just chaos. Beautiful chaos. It was such a laugh and reminded us why we do what we do.

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We also hosted a stage at Highest Point for a few years. The first one was literally just us and we played for 8 hours. Then we’ve done it where we’ve played between every booking. So just playing genres and being there all day. We didn’t manage the stage as such, but we made all the bookings and played in between. It was cool.

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For those guys to just tell us what we were getting paid, was great. We won't say the amount that they paid us, but it was an OK amount for what we did and we didn't have to ask for that. They were more than willing to do what they could for the area. They put a lot of effort in with the local guys to help. Respect to them.

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If we did all these things in bigger cities, we’d probably be making it our jobs and that would be nice. But I don't think it's possible in Lancaster unless you're doing more commercial stuff and have a lot of money to put into big events.

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You’ve talked about a few, but what other challenges are there for DJs and event organisers in an area like ours?

 

It’s hard getting people to come to an event in the first place. We try to keep our events at a fiver entry for that reason. Some promoters want to charge more, and they should do if they want to make it sustainable, but the affordable entry is one way we try to become a trusted brand. We used to give away free T-shirts every now and then, we only charge a fiver in, and we'd always try and make sure that the money went towards booking a decent headliner to get people in.

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Once people trust you, you can do residence nights where you're still charging just a fiver in, but you don't have any of those costs with the headliner. So you can do a few of those and then pay for bigger headliner like with the Bass Race, one of the biggest ones we've booked was SpectraSoul and that was a fiver entry.

In Manchester, that'd be an expensive night when you think about it. It’s mad that we just charge a fiver for these things but I'm in favour of it.

But I think that's the way you gotta do it around here.

I've heard it said in the past, that a lot of the success with events is how good the resident DJs are. If your resident DJs can keep a crowd and keep people coming back, it allows you to expand a little bit.

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It's where you cut your teeth as well as DJs playing the crap slot as a warm-up. You learn so much more about crowd dynamics and how things are. There's nothing quite so depressing as playing your first ever set and it's 10pm and you watch 5 people walk in and go “no I'm alright actually” and walk out again. But it's humbling and you learn from there.

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You learn how to keep these people in. Some of the first events that we did, some people were upset that it was mainly me and Nathan were doing the main slots for the resident events. But that's because mine and Nath's background was doing the set as everyone was walking in, as the students were arriving, so we had the experience and knowledge of how to read the crowd and what to play when the crowd was dying off a bit.

So that was the reason that we put ourselves on at that time. We wouldn't have learned how to do that if we hadn't been doing half-full or empty rooms and trying to learn how to keep these people in before playing what you actually wanted to play. Again, that comes back down to building up the trust with the crowd as resident DJs should.

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Beat-matching, especially on CDJs where you slide the thing so it's the right number and you press play at the right time – that’s trivial. The art of DJing is selecting your music and having a broad range of music so you can read and control a crowd. You listen to interviews with the old Hacienda guys and girls. They all talk about the crowd as like a living organism that responds in different ways and the give and take of that performance, how it influences people and the night, and how it makes you as the performer feel. That's completely gone by the wayside because everyone gets good at DJing in their bedrooms, posts a few mixes on Mixcloud, and then gets booked somewhere. I don't think that's necessarily bad, and I like how equitable that is, but there’s something to be said for playing the rubbish 9pm slot in a tiny little bar.

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Then there’s the social media aspect. When you first getting into it, the way that you promote now, is to do little clips of mixes. That's essentially like a 5-minute performance where you smash a lot of tracks together (like the Radio 1 mini mixes) but that doesn't translate that well over hours in a club. Having a few minutes of that might be brilliant if the crowd's there and you've got people focusing on what you're doing, but too much is exhausting as a listener.

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A club night is supposed to be a journey. Dance music is supposed to give your brain a space to relax into itself and to have thoughts come up that you wouldn't have if you were focused on something that was too energetic.

That's the thing I miss the most about LEUDMS. You’d park up somewhere, close your eyes and it’d be 4-hours later. Obviously, there's little pockets of interaction but everyone is there to have a big experience over a long space of time. I used to love that journey from the opener playing low key, 120 BPM, very spacey house, all the way through to someone bumping out techno in the 130s, everyone’s tops off and having a wild time! You’ve captured their emotions and then made them feel this euphoria.

That’s something I really value in a DJ and I don't think you get an opportunity in the same way anymore, to take people on a journey.

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People used to listen to your full mixes and you could promote them online. You'd get feedback on how people felt at the end of the mix. You can't do that on Instagram. You can't post a full mix up. Even on SoundCloud posted a full mix now it gets flagged and gets taken down.

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Mixcloud lets you upload 10 and then you have to start deleting them, so there's not even space for a portfolio on there really. We were obsessed with doing that in uni. Every week someone was posting a mix and everyone listened to it.

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To be fair, some of the young guys that we chat to now, like Ziggy and Zion, have the same attitude. They're 18 or 19 and they view it the same way that we did at that age. They're into the exact same aspects of it that even people twice our age used to bang on about at warehouse raves and stuff, so that's quite nice. When you’re that age, the online stuff is all you've experienced, so you can get sick of it. We obviously just assume that we're the ones who notice it because we saw what life was like before social media, but I think it’s human nature to get bored of the quick fixes.

I think it's all cyclical. I guarantee there's like punks in the early 2000s when we were growing up who thought “punk's gone, and no one's interested anymore”, but now it's having a huge resurgence. We're just in that bit of the cycle where, hopefully things start to come back to events. I don't actually care if they come to our nights or not, as long as they're going to someone’s night, and as long as someone's doing something.

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Yeah, ‘cause I want more stuff to go to as well. I'm sick of hearing us DJ! haha

Yeah, I'm sick of putting money I don’t have, towards events!

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What other opportunities are there in a place this size, for either DJs or people wanting to put on their own events. What are the positives?

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I mean, there's not many venues around here. I don't really see that there's much of a plus there, but I will say that Kanteena put on a lot of stuff and they allow people to run stuff in that small room quite often. And places like Forty Five Records. Martin’s just moved to a bigger venue. He’s putting on events for DJs to meet up and chat, play music at each other instead of just at the general public.

There was a lady that came in the other day for the Open Decks event who hadn't mixed anything in 20 years. She came and played a lot of cool 90s breaks and electro. She said  “I never would have done this if this wasn't on” and we never would have heard some really, really good music. She was lovely as well. I'm hoping more things like that start to happen now.

As long as we've got two or three small venues that people can run little events in, I think it should build up again. Now that the students are coming back out and drinking more, the bigger clubs might have a bit more money to allow these nights to be given a bigger space once they've grown to that point.

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I think there's opportunity out there, but I don't know what the answer is. It’s about getting people to come out. I guess the opportunity is in finding what people like now. It's a good time to figure out how to do a small night on a shoestring budget and see if it works because there's no one to compete with.

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My advice to someone someone's just getting into it would be to take small risks in a town like this until you've got your name established, in the small venues. Once you've got used to it and  got a crowd of at least 50 loyal followers, they'll cover your costs. You can then go into a bigger venue. It’s being smart about it. Years ago we could do whatever we wanted because we had about an extra ten venues in town. Bass Race used to do a different venue every time.

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There's an opportunity to see what people want now, because I don't think it's the same as they did 10 years ago. I think that's quite cool and interesting. Hopefully we'll find some new stuff out as well.

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And what are your plans for Juice Box?

 

I've got plans. I've been trying to coax Nathan and Josh into some stuff for a while. I think Nathan just want to do the pub things. I wanna do some slightly bigger events, but we've not got anything planned yet. I mean, we were talking to the Love Music, Hate Racism people, but I think they're doing something with Kanteena, so I think we’re just gonna play there. But it'd be nice to do something else with them.

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I wanna put a night on in Forty Five Records for my 30th birthday. I was 30 last year but was really ill with what turned out to be Crohn's disease and were diagnosed a couple months later and it was just a nightmare last year. So I’m doing it right this time. We're gonna stick some decks in there, a couple of disco lights, glitter ball, and play a lot of tunes and drink some punch.

I want to do a Juice Box at the Golden Lion. Playing there recently was the most fun I've had for years DJing honestly.

Have you ever fallen out of love with DJing or putting on events?

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I think you've caught us at a good time because I was feeling jaded with the whole thing. I definitely fell out of love with it because it became work. We were just playing stuff we liked, but not stuff we loved.

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We were just playing backing tracks in pubs. It's good fun for a bit and I tried to have the attitude that I get to drink free beers with two of my best mates and that's great. But then when you're doing it once or twice a month every month, you get a bit tired of it.

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For their launch party, Martin at Forty Five Records said “lads play some vinyl” and I was like “ohh, I've never played vinyl out before. I’d better practise”. I’d bought loads of records ‘cause a lot of what I have is stuff that never gets released digitally. I did one practice mix. It was awful -nothing but clangers. But I was like, “that was a lot of fun”. I did another one which was a bit better - still good fun. I ended up having five 2-hour mixes at home in a week and a half. I've never mixed at home before in any serious way. I had a good time and then played at Forty Five and had a good time. Since then I've bought 15 or 16 records and I’ve found this thing that I love doing again that isn't a job anymore. Then seeing videos of Gaz playing at the Lion and the people really getting into it and who just want to have a laugh. I feel that now's the time. I'm really excited for the future.

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I'm always in and out of love with it all.  I've not produced music for a year and a couple of months, and I've been thinking about getting back into it again. Every time that happens, when I get back into it, it's a step up from what it was. I've learned over the years to just take it as it comes. I’ll eventually get to a point where I release some stuff and then if that gets gains traction, I’ll know I’m on the right track and hopefully focus on that for a bit.

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I really appreciate your time. There are so many useful points and reflections in there, about the scene, and I think a lot of people will learn a lot from it as well. I love your attitude to the events and to your own journeys. It's been really interesting. Thank you very much.

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Thanks for having me. It’s been cool to talk about it in a semi structured way because I think about this stuff almost all the time, every day. There's a lot of wittering that goes on in my head, so it's nice to get some constructive thoughts out. We all talk about it a lot as well, mostly complaining about how hard it is, so it's nice to talk about it and reflect and be like, “you know what? It's all part of the journey”.

Hopefully it reminds you of why you do it.

 

So yeah, it's lovely.