Too many DJs - or saying no to the DJ-ification of modern life
I’m old enough to remember when DJing wasn’t a thing. Of course there were DJs in the 1970s, when I was born, who regularly lit up the best clubs in the world.
But the role of the DJ and the world of the DJ were nowhere near as present in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, to the extent that I remember being puzzled by the idea that people would go to rave just to listen to DJs; and I also have a vivid memory of hearing an Andrew Weatherall DJ set on Radio One in 1993 and wondering how the hell he managed to make the different songs flow into one continuous beat, a question that seems ridiculously naive now.
Later that year - I think - I was incredibly excited to go to my first ever club where I would hear a DJ mix techno records, as if this, somehow, was my entry into the gates of musical wisdom.
I mention all this so that when I say there are too many DJs in the modern world, you should be in no doubt that I love DJs and I love DJ sets.
Let me be quite clear: I am not saying that people shouldn’t DJ. DJing is a brilliant way to interact with music and learn about music; and it’s fun. So go for it. DJ all you like.
What I mean is that I am getting fed up with seeing DJs literally everywhere, at clothes shops, hairdressers, book launches, restaurants, cinemas, yoga retreats, Mount Everest Base Camp and the like.
(And I am aware I am being a total hypocrite here, having DJed both a restaurant and a cinema over the last five years. Sue me.)
This may seem like a strange belief for someone like me who firmly believes we should pay more attention to the music we put on in public spaces.
The music selection in many restaurants, for example, absolutely drives me distracted, as the infinite care and attention that has been put into a dish is undermined by an asinine Ed Sheeran playlist. Surely a dedicated DJ would help with this?
Well yes. And no. Having someone play music that is specifically thought out for that moment in that space is undoubtedly a positive thing. But when you invite a DJ and the DJ brings along all their equipment then that DJ is going to want to do something more than just put on tunes that suit the environment.
That DJ is going to want to DJ, in other words, to manipulate the music and mix it up; and this, in turn, will inevitably encourage them to play the kind of music that their DJ set up was designed for, the kind of music that lends itself to mixing and manipulation: banging dance music, in other words - no matter inappropriate it may be.
I don’t blame the DJs for this: it’s simple human nature that if you have all this awesome technological power at your fingertips, you’re going to want to use it, rather than simply putting on one song after another and going back to picking at your fingernails.
But there is little worse than banging techno in a restaurant, racing your heart and making you bolt down your food, while rendering conversation impossible. And the same applies to clothes shops, cinemas, hairdressers and the like.
My other argument against this - against the creeping DJ-ification of the world in general - is that, perversely, it diminishes the role of the DJ.
If you’re in a club and you’re there for music and dancing, then the DJ is all important. Ditto the right house party or certain bars. Sure, there will be moments when you’re talking to friends or ordering at the bar; but at a good club, at least 75% of the time will be spent dancing; will be spent, in other words, intensely concentrating on and reacting to the music.
What the DJ does in these situations is important; every selection, blend and mix counts; the right songs could make your night; the wrong song could break it.
But if you insert a DJ into every single random location just because then the DJ’s role there become secondary at best.
Sure, maybe you’ll tap a toe when your shoe shop DJ plays the right song; but no one in their right mind would buy shoes from a shop with a terrible selection of stock just because they like the DJ, or eat at a restaurant with awful food because they like the music.
And so the role of the DJ is diminished, the reputation of the DJ tarnished and no one benefits.
(OK, the DJs earn money; and that’s no bad thing.)
So how about this? How about we limit DJs and DJ sessions to places where the music really is the most important thing? So clubs, festivals, some bars and record shops. Period.
Anything else gets a playlist. And so the world is a better, quieter place and we never have to listen to greyscale techno while drinking our soup again.
Johann Wald, a restaurant DJ, replies:
As a professional DJ who gets paid to play in a restaurant twice a week, I have to say I agree with you. A restaurant's ambience and vibe can be improved with a well curated playlist. No need for the fuss of investing in equipment or making some poor sod carry their equipment from home. As you point out, many a DJ is tempted to offer a performance and do what I consider is too much for the setting of a restaurant.
But since I've been doing this for a few years, I've come to appreciate my own role as a restaurant DJ. In my specific case, I must mention I have trained as a chef and I love being in restaurants, both as a worker or a customer, so being able to contribute to its service hours, getting paid better than a line cook and not having to stay late to clean and leave the next day's prep in order offers me a privileged position in the restaurant's clockwork.
Since I've overcome my existential crisis of doing something I thought wasn't totally right in a restaurant setting, I now take pride in doubling down and reinforcing that I am strictly a restaurant DJ. I believe it is my (fun) duty to find music that creates good energy but that has a softness to come out of speakers in ways that assuages the listener, rather than put them off their conversation while they dig into a quinoa salad.
I also revel in playing downtempo music, which has many subgenres that perfectly exist within the restaurant / shop setting and it's a challenge finding tracks that don't bore the socks off me or the line cooks, who often plead for me to make their shift go by a lot quicker. I distinctly remember overhearing one of the cooks groaning through the earpiece of a colleague who was next to me when I started my set with one of the more atmospheric tracks by Djrum.
I also find a certain pleasure in playing mid- or up-tempo disco tunes at a volume that is not intrusive, but sounds a bit more fleshy than a background hum. I can proudly say I am perfecting the low-volume DJ set. Like Samurai grasping the art of sharpening their own swords, I am paying plenty of attention to equalising each track, to help it be perceptible, yet unannounced.
Another great thing I love about restaurant DJing is that there is absolutely no pressure to make people dance or keep a floor busy. I can jump genres and follow a Kareem Ali track with Thelonious Monk, or even zag to a starky groove by The Fall, with no one coming up to my booth with a long face. That is not to say I haven't had many a - usually elder - customer frowning as they leave when I've disregarded my control of volume and felt a strong desire to play an Aphex Twin track off Syro.
The best (or worse) part about the DJ-ification of every space is that more restaurants may be open to including a DJ booth in its business plan, which creates more opportunities for those of us who aren't ready or willing to work our way into a club or festival booth. My personal pitch is that now open kitchens are the thing for modern restaurants, they should allow space for a mixing desk to sit alongside the partie froid. Because I like working in a kitchen, but prefer a DJ's salary.
Some listening
There’s a love story at the heart of BFTT’s new album Loving (Pullman Close): the producer started making the record in 2022, the year he met his fiancee, and finished writing the music in 2025, the year they got engaged. Love, then, features throughout, with many of the samples drawing on the theme.
Of course lots of dance music - and particularly the house and garage records that BFTT samples - is based around the idea of love, sometimes in a pretty superficial fashion. But, on the evidence of Too Late, the producer has made something that takes this idea and runs with it into some odd - but always danceable - places. The song rides a kind of a house / broken beat rhythm, with the smallest suspicion of steely, metallic rave and a bass line that strains at the sonic leash, in a way that reminds me of LFO’s classic debut album, mingling euphoric rush with the enigmatic mysteries of love.
Starcleaner Reunion - Pasillo Piso
If Springfield’s Starcleaner Reunion often get compared to Stereolab - and, yes, I have been guilty of this in the past - it’s not so much because they sound like everyone’s favourite Anglo-French experimentalists (although, to be far, singer Jo Roman’s voice does have something of Laetitia Sadier’s chilling nonchalance), more that they take an extreme care in the layering of their music.
Roman adds exquisite tiers of harmonies to her vocals, while the band pack extra production quirks, electronic tricks and sonic sidesteps to their mix, to create guitar music of fascinating nuance and depth, that borrows from Bossa Nova, jazz and IDM as much as it does from Cocteau Twins. Add to that some heart-breaking melodies - see, in particularly Pasillo Piso - and you have, with Umbrella, a debut album that can be chewed and digested into 2027 and beyond.
“How could you do this to me?” So starts Tony Montana, the third single from Zora Jones’ bombastic, cathartic second album 50 Bullets to the Heart which is released today. In a way, this is also the question that hangs over the album, which examines a dark period in the artist’s personal life, via 12 songs of emotional depth and razor-sharp production. Tony Montana is kind of Jones’ take on a ballad, with its gospel-esque synth chords and front-and-centre vocal, as if Jones is daring you to look away, punctuated by some of the heaviest club hits and gun shots because you can never forget the club.
PS you can watch my Line Noise interview with Zora here.
I was ABSOLUTELY convinced that we used to listen to Mike Nasty records on Relief back in the 90s. But we didn’t: his first record was released (as far as I can tell) in 2020 and he’s not even from Chicago, he’s from New York. You’ll be telling me he’s not even that nasty next.
Maybe it is just my thwarted memories but Infinite Jazz, taken from Nasty’s forthcoming Endless Groove EP, sounds like precisely the kind of track that would have fit like a mangled disco glove on 90s Relief, with an immaculately hard-not-hard swung beat, full-on bottom end and exquisite Rhodes chords underneath it all. The result is house music at its most vibrant and vibes-y.
Popol Vuh had a long history with Werner Herzog, recording soundtracks to classic films like Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Dream of Flight was recorded for Herzog’s 1974 documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, about Swiss Ski jumper / carpenter Walter Steiner, but is only now getting a release via the good people at Latency.
It’s a brief package: just four Popol Vuh tracks and remakes by James K, Lorenzo Senni and ML Buch. But the opening track, Dream of Flight, is among my favourite things Popol Vuh ever recorded, two and a half minutes of deeply evocative guitar suggestion, a series of jazzy notes flung into the void like Steiner taking the arctic leap, hopeful, cautious and fundamentally unresolved.
Stevie Wonder - I’m Into Livin’
Forget the Ark of the Covenant; call off the search for the missing Fabergé eggs: Stevie Wonder’s eternal classic Songs in the Key of Life celebrates its 50th birthday this week and, to celebrate, Wonder has dived into the archives to rescue four songs recorded in the album sessions and inexplicably shelved.
Inexplicably, because the four songs - It’s Easier, My Life Story of Love, I Can See The Sun in Late December and I’m Into Livin’ - are absolutely classic Stevie Wonder, all sunshine soul, driving funk and perfect songwriting? Or explicably because, well, what are you going to take off Songs in the Key of Life to make room? I don’t know. All four songs are fantastic - but the down-low synth squelch of I’m Into Livin’ gets the call because somebody please sample it NOW and make some classic G-Funk.
Real Farmer - The Pressure of Others (Live at the Dalby Café)
I’ve been listening to The Stooges Live at Goose Lake a lot recently, which inevitably ramps up the expectations for any guitar music, particularly live. Dutch punks Real Farmer aren’t 1970 Stooges - I mean who is? and who in their right mind would would want to be? - but they were fantastic last night in Barcelona, supporting the Sisters of Mercy, their melodically tough, whipsmart but rowdy guitar skronk bringing to mind prime Viagra Boys.
The band’s recent (ish) EP Live at the Dalby Café gives a taste of their live powers and The Pressure of Others, in particular, is a blast, 89 seconds of ramalama punk thrust that is still just about compos mentis enough to find its trousers in the morning.
Things I’ve Done
Line Noise podcast with Axel Boman
For the Line Noise podcast, I spoke to Axel Boman about glaciers, exhaustion, hiking and house music, as he looks forward to his excellent new album with Superpitcher, Tell It To The Mountain, the first to be released on his new label Blurry. There’s also talk of new music from Talaboman, his collaboration with Barcelona’s own John Talabot, and we wonder how the Swedes might be like the Spanish. (Answer: we’re not quite sure.)
The playlists
I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest
