Tom Harding

Anyway, I thought I would tell you all a bit about my weekend. For the first time in ages I had the whole weekend off and it was great. I didn’t go out, didn’t go to any nightclubs and pretty much spent the whole weekend hanging out around my house, doing DIY and gardening – marvellous, we all need to have quiet weekends now and then. Now I am well aware that this is hardly a ‘rock and roll’ thing to be telling you, and is also the sort of thing that you would find your parents doing at the weekend, but do all the top jocks do this sort of thing when they have a weekend off? I have no idea, but seeing that most of the top DJs in the world are at least 35 then it is quite likely.

And this unsurprisingly leads me on to my point. If most of the top DJs are above 30 then can they be truly in touch with an audience who are, for the sake of argument about 19? Well ‘yes and no’ I say. Obviously they can’t have the same mentality of a 19 year old, as that would be impossible, so in that sense they can’t be completely in tune with their audience. But it is the experience that you really can’t put a price on. A top DJ of 35 will, for example, have spent about 18 years devoting his entire life to dance music, tracks and clubs and, when it comes to translating all that knowledge in to a two or three hour set, this is invaluable. As with any job, experience is essential, and if you are a DJ then you can only expect to get better and better as you mature.

Yes, I concede that a 19 year old DJ will have all the enthusiasm, excitement, energy and passion that you would expect and may be more socially in touch with the core audience due to their age. But it is only with time that they will truly mature in to a world class DJ who, if they are ever going to be any good at it, will still have an overwhelming passion for what they do for the rest of their life.

So, what’s the conclusion? Start young, enjoy it for the bloody brilliant profession it is, but don’t expect to be number one overnight.