Friday May 8, 2013, Miami Music Conference
Welcome to Dave's world, Dave's 9-5, Dave's line of work. Not for Dave the stifled hell of a cocooned office job, not for Dave the laborious monotony of construction, or even the fact-or-fiction number crunching of a banker.
Dave conducts sweeping, synsape-popping electronic music in a room rammed full of weapon's grade narcotics and bowel-loosening bassbins. His office has nitrate-swollen sweat drips from the ceiling, his water cooler gossip is supplied by gurning punters who clamour like the living dead at the front of Dave's office (AKA the DJ Booth).
And Dave, stood stock still in his finest All Saints threads, index finger perfectly poised above the play button, is paralyzed by a potent mix of fear: fear of being found out, fear of being revealed like a bad magic gag by 'not a lot' Paul Daniels, but ultimately, the fear that inexorably rises inside every DJ that's been faced by an unruly hoard of beat-hungry clubbers, the fear that without this artificial environment, without the tinnitus-inducing sound system and without the toxic cocktail of booze and chemicals eviscerating the crowd, he's simply Dave. For 4 hours every weekend (and during grandstanding press interviews when Dave pretends he really does live the hedonistic life style, snorting a home-made mix of ants, Bolivia's finest and, inevitably, some crushed up toilet cleaner for Elevenses), he lives the dream at work.
He gives a worrying percentage of the population a reason to live as they countdown the 9,600 minutes from when they leave the club as a mangled, A&E ready corpse at 6am until they can re-enter a week later. He lets shadow-dwelling drug dealers hustle their way to a conscience-free fortune, he lets high rollers flash their cash (and cold-plated credit cards) in the VIP area, he lets students blow their bank loans as they embark on a 48 hour bender learning in the process that comedowns really aren't conducive to a degree and that home-made bongs really should be tidied away before the parents come round.
But the sad, inescapable truth is that Dave is ordinary - like off-white, beige kinda ordinary, like Saturday afternoon down at Ikea sort of ordinary. Dave is the most boring man he knows (and having become embroiled in more after-party chats that are a spectacular combination of narcissistic hot air fueled by after-party supplies), he knows all about stultifying degrees of boring.
He spends his time Googling his name, eager to find any relevant - and often non-relevant - reference to himself in the online world. And when he's not Googling himself, and sending his analytics into a self-propelled spin, he's selling his own distinct brand of hidden boredom via Facebook and Twitter, making sure his social media output is a direct reversal of his actual social output. He spends hours - sometimes days - locked away in his sweaty, socky study hunched over his laptop trying to decipher which of the 86 almost identical sounding tech-house tracks will detonate the dancefloor into a seething mess of clubbers. He spends his time looking wistfully at the party pictures taken during his set, the over-tanned and out-of-his-league club girls he never gets to meet leering at the camera while he's up in the DJ booth making the trainspotters froth with nervous excitement as he drops unreleased white label after unreleased white label.
The fact that Dave is even up on that raised podium, spreading his arms wide in a Jesus-was-never-this-good pose is a cosmic fuck up of biblical proportions, the likes of which haven't been seen since Jimmy Saville inadvertently spawned the birth of DJ culture. Dave makes progressive house sound like seismic, earth-titling dubstep in comparison, he's that dull.
Before Dave actually became a big DJ, he dreamed of becoming a big DJ, he dreamed of commanding per-hour fees that would put a small African's GDP to shame, he dreamed of controlling the every move of thousands of clubbers, he dreamed of touring the world playing his counter cultural, revolution stirring (in his wildest dreams at least) mix of house music.
And the thing is, Dave is not alone in having this dream, oh, far, far far from it. Rightly or wrongly, Dave is a very real, very tangible by-product of today's society Decks Factor society. For Dave is merely the tip of the DJing iceberg, one of quite literally millions who believe that playing other people's music - and if they're supremely talented, their own music - to other people is not only a worthy occupation that should be pursued, but one that should fulfill their every waking thought.
But right now, none of that self-importance, none of that hype matters, as Dave is blissfully unaware of man's greatest fear. Dave is about to experience quite what his success means to other people, quite how far DJ disciples will go to try and turn the tables and flip the script. Because Dave, or Dave Van Pyke as the rest of the world knows him, has a flickering red dot hovering just below his bespoke customised Dave by Beats By Dre headphones and above his vintage-but-not-vintage t-shirt, with a hidden sniper about to pull the trigger at the signal. How did drastically dull Dave end up here? Well, that's a story best told in Dave's own words…
