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Music

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Wedding DJ

Is soundtracking someone else's big day for the thirty years a job worth doing?

Not every DJ has the luxury of a club residency. Not every DJ's slept in every 4* hotel in the Western world. Not every DJ's met at Heathrow by a sullen European holding a flimsy laminated bit of A4 with their name on it. For some, it's a life of miles on the Mondeo, unheated Ginsters stuffed down in the driver's seat and trying to get sullen teenagers to dance with soft-hipped elders. These are the unsung heroes who our nation's small functions depend on. These are the quiet men of dance music. These are our mobile DJs.

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The innate sadness of the mobile DJ, the man prepared to turn up to any function you ask him to with a crate of grandparent friendly floorfillers and his own mini light show, is enough to bring a man skidding to his knees to the sound of "Dancing Queen" echoing round a musty community centre in the Midlands.

What is it though, that makes them seem like such untouchably lonely figures? Is it the distanced role they play in the day/night's proceedings that make us weep tears of sadness upon seeing them cue up "I'm in the Mood for Dancing" for the thirtieth time that week? Is it the on-mic exhortations to have a good time, bellowed in the clubhouses of small town football clubs that make us want to quietly pull the plug on their dry ice machine, buy them a few pints and let them get all the bitterness and regret out of their system? Perhaps it stems from the essential Zelig-like quality the profession lends its practitioner. They're there in the back of the photos your mum gets out at Christmas of her wedding, your christening and your cousin's 18th. But you don't know them, probably didn't communicate with them, didn't acknowledge them as anything more than the bloke pumping smoke over pissed dads and swaying uncles.

Chris, proprietor of Norwich's Abracadabra Disco, is a man steeped in disco mobility. Having lugged records, CDs and now hard drives around the club-starved flatlands of Norfolk for the last 46 years, he knows what he's talking about when it comes to negotiating the needs of families thrown together for celebratory throwdowns. It felt natural to roll back the years and see what made him enter the business in the first place. "I used to be in a band. It was a trio that expanded to a four piece, and then we argued so much about what to play and where to play it that I thought, sod it, so I went down my own path," he began, "I didn't have too many records back then, though. I think for my first gig I couldn't have had more than a hundred singles with me."

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After a spell in the Navy, during which he manned the decks at a Gibraltan club, he got serious about the mobile disco world. For Chris, the irreversible march of time means one thing. "I can't please everyone any more.That's why I'm retiring next year. There's just too much music out there. I used to be able to play ABBA and know that the crowd would  dance every time. That's not the case any more." Even if he can't get them electric boogalooing like he did in the glory days, it was still fun for Chris, right? There's still that buzz you must get from being a pretty important part of people's greatest days? "No. There isn't any more. I don't like to think I'm important or special. If they have fun great. Thing is, people in Norfolk are so far behind the rest of the world that they don't know how to enjoy themselves. It's awkward, just trying to make them dance. Hard work." Chris retires next year and one senses that he's not exactly dreading the proposition of Saturday nights spent nursing a bottle of Adnams in front of Casualty. Maybe a night down Mercy would change his mind.

That sense of resignation clung to the next person I spoke to, Andy Tugby, operator of the SoundONE Disco. Despite being, in his own words, "averagely successful in national terms," he's confident that his soundsystem is Cornwall's premier mobile disco. H's got thirty years experience under his belt and admitted that he'd now rather much play children's parties than weddings, because "the kids events only last two hours and the weddings drag and drag and drag." Surely experiencing a couple's special day occasionally brought a smile to his face? "Rarely. Weddings usually mean pissed up middle aged women who want you to play "Gimme Gimme Gimme" halfway through a hard dance set. They don't get it. You've got 60, 70 people loving it and someone wants Robson and Jermoe on. Then they fall over pissed into your equipment and don't even look back." It didn't seem like Andy's heart spilled over when he saw a couple take centre place for a soulmate-cementing first dance. He was a man tired of "Uptown Funk", sick of "All About that Bass", unhappy with repeated rinsings of "Happy".

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Chris and Andy painted a sad picture. They were the mobile DJs of the old school, the kind who bring to mind the image of a lonely man trying to bring a joy he does not possess to bowls clubs and Bar Mitzvah's alike. But is that unexpected? Anyone would tire of a job after thirty years slogging away, surely.

Hopping down the motorway to London, I caught up with Paul Linney, the selector behind Spectrum Disco. Despite his three decades of experience, and his encroachment on those ever so cosy 60s, he loves his job. Unlike Andy or Chris, he plays out in clubs, still dropping tech-house sets in Ibiza when he gets the chance. "The difference between myself and other mobile DJs is that when people book me they actually get a DJ, not just a bloke who brings some music. My prices reflect that: if people want a proper DJ, with proper experience they'll pay for it. Pay less and you'll get a piss poor performance from a bored old boy."

From speaking with Paul you get the impression that the kind of functions he plays at differ somewhat from those our other interviewees turn up to. "I recently played this proper Essex wedding and it was great. The couple had booked an X-Factor finalist from a few years back, me, and DJ Luck and MC Neat." I mentioned Chris' difficulty in getting crowds to hit the dancefloor with aplomb. "He's right. Everyone in the business faces that difficulty. I think of it as a kind of human chess. You've got to play with the pieces at your disposal. You've got to play "Vogue" or the Spice Girls before you can get into house. You learn to really study human reaction, how to read faces and body language in this job. Sometimes though, like when I play at the Audi Polo party, that's almost irrelevant. When you've got a half naked bird on your right and another eating fire on your left and DJ Fresh begging to get on the decks the work's nearly all done for you."

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I thought back to quiet, resigned Chris at this point. Had the parish halls of Earlham, Lakenham, Larkman, Milecross, Heartsease and Thorpe Hamlet experienced women chowing down on fire? Had Andy sent chills down the spines of Saturday afternoon sunloungers in San Antonio?

Obviously a sample of three souls out of the heaving hordes who fill our nation's laybys and Lions Clubs isn't enough to make any kind of formal conclusion but it seems that the hardy souls who endure long days in old barns and never ending nights in church halls attempting to bring disparate people together to enjoy the spirit-bolstering affects of dance are masochists. They go uncelebrated, unthanked, unpraised, unheralded - unknown. Still they trudge on, dropping "1999" from Aulderly Edge to Annerley. Like the rest of us, bills keep them doing it, keep them boredly watching a six-year-old sing along to Nicki Minaj. In that way, are they any different from the big room regulars of traditional clubs? Is Andy Tugby playing "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" night after night any different to Jeff Mills playing "The Bells" or Armand Van Helden clunkily shoehorning in "You Don't Know Me" into every set?

Part me thinks that it's the parochialism of it all that lends the profession it's perceptibly salty tang of out of season seaside resort sadness. And another, bigger, part of me, thinks that that small-towness is something to celebrate in an age when everything becomes more terrifyingly similar. He might not have a complete set of Nu Groove 12"s, and he might hate you for doing it, but why not book your local mobile DJ next time you've got a reason to gather your handful of friends together - he'll even bring his own mirror ball.

Follow Josh on Twitter: @bain3z