Hello everyone, thanks for accepting me into your community. I stumbled across this group quite by accident, while searching for some secrets of the sorcery that is Freestyle.
As regards my full-time employment, I got an apprenticeship in telecommunications, and stayed with the company until I took early retirement in 2011.
I must have started my DJ dabbling around 1969/1970, while still at school. Initially, three of us used to get on stage at youth club, we had turntables mounted on tomato boxes sporting pressed steel pick-up arms. Lighting consisted of a theatrical dimmer with a 500W lamp in a wooden box at front of stage.
In the early 70s, I picked up a few bookings on my own as I gathered some better gear. Did a couple of residencies for a short time, but mostly the wedding / engagement / birthday circuit, mostly in the upstairs function room of pubs around the Birmingham (UK) area. I do not miss lugging all the gear and cases and cases and cases of records up and down stairs!
Many of those upstairs rooms had wooden floors and rickety stages. You had to be really careful how you shifted your weight to prevent the stylus from jumping a few tracks. I learned to sort of fake a dance - top part of body moving, but feet firmly planted in one place!
I moved to Wales in the 1980s and, although I bought my gear with me, didn't really bother with trying to pick up any DJ work except for the occasional party at the village pub. Somewhere in the early 1990s, I got involved with the local hospital radio, and joined forces with one of the guys doing more mobile discos. I have to say that 1993 / 1994 were fantastic years for that. By then, we had a stack of CD players, and the music library was getting lighter to carry around.
I joined up with a fantastic team of people who arranged a temporary local radio station. All official and legal. We broadcast once or twice a year for a couple of weeks. Greatly educational and enjoyable.
Nowadays, I have virtually all my music stored to hard drive, along with karaoke tracks, but I have to accept that I am nearly as old as a conker tree, so have been slimming down my gear. The power amps and speakers have gone, much of the lighting has followed, but I can still do a spot at the local pub by plugging into the house PA.