Sam GreenwoodThe Secret Promoter is a series where we find some of the stories you mightn’t usually read about when it comes to dance music. Thanks to the wonders of anonymity, we can bring you some of the weirdest and darkest stories from the realms of dance music that you’re likely to never hear anywhere outside of a green room.
This week sees an overeager cocaine user’s run in with the bouncer and an unfortunate case of mistaken identity.
Cue dark lighting, balaclavas and a voice changer:
“It was a Thursday night, we’d booked him to play for our night and he was very expensive. As soon as the DJ in question had arrived he’d been hassling us to get him cocaine. He was adamant that he wanted it before he started playing records.
As soon as we got to the club, we gave it to him and off he went to the toilet to start hoofing it up his nose (there was no green room in the club itself so the drug use was a lot less glamorous then). Unbeknownst to him the bouncer could hear him loud and clear and pulled him out of the cubicle. He threw him out of the club and told him he wouldn’t be allowed back in or play on the night.
This was two hours before he was supposed to DJ; he had his money and he wasn’t very apologetic about getting thrown out of his own headline show either. To us it seemed like he’d had his coke and wasn’t really bothered about playing or not.
We ended having to beg the manager of the club to let him back in because he’d cost a couple of grand! He had to be let back, there was a big crowd of people, it was sold out. The manager eventually allowed him back in given the circumstances and it seemed as though all was OK.
The manager had overruled the bouncer and let the headline DJ back in after he had been caught taking cocaine in the bathroom of his club. Understandably, the bouncer went absolutely mental and ended up quitting on the spot. He was screaming outside; ‘This is outrageous, I’ve caught him doing drugs and you’re just letting him straight back in!’. I didn’t care at that stage, my DJ was inside and order was restored. We got away with it.
He ended up playing a whopper set and the night was a massive success. At the end of the night said DJ had just left the club and was back at his hotel. Myself and one of the two lads that ran the night with me (who happened to have the same first name as our headline DJ) were walking down the stairs to leave.
The police showed up, traditionally as police do; two hours too late.
It had turned out that in his little hissy fit, the bouncer ended up calling the police explaining that some DJ got caught taking cocaine in the club. My partner was carrying out a bag of records and they asked him ‘Are you **** the DJ?’. Obviously, he said yes, which prompted them to put him in handcuffs.
They searched every centimetre of him, including all of the record sleeves looking for cocaine. He didn’t have any on him because he wasn’t the right guy.
Meanwhile, our headliner was at an after party, presumably knee deep in cocaine.”