DANCE MTHRFCKR
Wednesday Nights
Broken City
Come, have fun, get drunk, make out.
That is the unofficial slogan that Derek McEwen (a.k.a. Gary Powers) has given to his Wednesday night DJ residency, Dance M*th*erf*ck*r. His partner, Andrew Wedderburn (a.k.a. Dwight Christmas), is no less nonchalant when he describes his contribution to the night.
"I turn up. I press play," Wedderburn says. "And then three minutes later I press play again."
Could it really be that simple? Over the past year these two men have taken their limited DJ experience and a healthy dose of guitar rock with a four-four beat and transformed a cozy hipster hangout into a mid-week dance-party destination. And to hear them talk, it’s apparent that they are just as surprised at the success of Dance Mthrfckr as anyone else.
The whole thing started innocently enough in February 2005, when Wedderburn was DJing on Monday nights at Broken City. A vacancy opened up on Wednesday and he was approached to play what he describes as, "that new dance rock that the kids like."
"I said, ‘sure,’ because I needed the money, even though I didn’t really know the new dance rock or particularly like it, but I knew that (Derek) did," he says. "So I called him and said, ‘Hey do you want to be a DJ?’"
They both agreed, figuring that the gig would be temporary. But before long, they were packing the dance floor with the help of the Bloc Party, LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture.
"When I first found out from someone that they and their group of friends had changed their work hours so that they could come in late on Thursdays, that’s when I went, ‘Holy shit. That’s ludicrous,’" says Powers. "It’s two dudes who don’t really know what they are doing, playing music."
He might be half-kidding, but it’s their collective inexperience that has made Dance Mthrfckr work. They may knock a needle out of a groove on occasion, open a CD player mid-song or, in the case of their first night, let a single line from the chorus of a Blondie track play for three minutes solid, but this only serves to endear them to their crowd. The fact that both men had more experience spinning indie rock at the campus radio station than beat-matching in the clubs only made them more fresh.
"Timing is everything, always. But we were fortunate that we came in at a time when people started dancing to rock music again and they were sick of ‘DJs,’" says McEwen. "People didn’t want to see a DJ on the stage and they didn’t want to hear a house track that started at 10 and ended at three, essentially."
So while you can dance to every song that gets played at Dance Mthrfckr (with the exception of a few choice cuts that Wedderburn plays when he’s feeling self-indulgent), it doesn’t have the feeling of your typical DJ night.
"The trick is, it’s easy to out-think yourself in a situation like that, especially when you come from a campus radio background like we do and think nobody wants to hear the Franz Ferdinand hit. They want to hear the obscure, slow, not-fun song," says Wedderburn.
"Except people really do want to hear the Franz Ferdinand hit because… to hear all those songs together, so you can dance to them with a kind of a modicum of deliberation in the arrangement, is something people weren’t getting."
From the outset, the night was labelled the indie rock dance party, and while McEwen says Dance Mthrfckr is still very much that in attitude, Wedderburn says it didn’t take long for the night to evolve.
"When we started playing the mainstream R&B songs at the end of the night when we were drunk, it was kind of our punk rock gesture for the night. Like ha-ha, take this snobby hipsters," says Wedderburn. "Although we were shocked to find out that we weren’t DJing to the snobby hipsters we thought we were. People went nuts when we played ‘Crazy in Love.’ We were like, ‘We have something in common with this crowd. This is fantastic.’"
"A lot of people who were coming, they wanted to hear Beyoncé, but there was no way they were going to Cowboys or Tequila to hear it," says McEwen. "They wanna dance to it and they will dance to it. And then they will go home and listen to some obscure indie rock thing and then post something in their live journal."
So, as the night became more open format, and the DJs shed their self-admitted "amateur hour" status, Dance Mthrfckr became one of the most successful club nights in Calgary. And while the consistently good music keeps the dance floor full, it’s the energy from the crowd that keeps the DJs committed.
"When you throw a good party and everybody has a wicked time and maybe they go home together and… they talk about it the next day," says McEwen, "how can you not enjoy that?"
"It’s fun when you look out and there’s 200 people having a blast and dancing to the songs you are picking," says Wedderburn. According to him, there is only one thing that could make it better.
"At least a $20 cover charge," he says. "I wanna buy a boat."
CELEB TOP SIX
The Top Six essential Dance Mthrfckr tracks according to Gary Powers:
1. "Golddigger" by Kanye West
2. "True Love is Blind" by Louis XIV
3. "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture
4. "Lies (Rebellion)" by the Arcade Fire
5. "1 Thing" by Amerie
6. "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" by LCD Soundsystem
The Top Six songs guaranteed to clear the Dance Mthrfckr floor, according to Dwight Christmas:
1. "Black is the Only Hour of Chaos" by Public Enemy ("I keep thinking people ought to love that, but they refuse to get it.")
2. Any of the Keroika stuff that Diplo loves.
3. Any grime ("A year later we finally made them love that one Dizzee Rascal tune, but we had to beat the shit out of them for 10 months.")
4. Gary ejecting a CD mid-song.
5. "I Rhyme the World in 80 Days" by Kish
6. "Young Americans" by David Bowie ("It’s an awesome tune that is just too slow for the youth of today.") |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.