Leave me my name!

Some time back I said I would tell you why I use the name 'crowd-pleasers' (currently it's in my website URL, my blog URL and it's also now my 'publisher'...if blog URL is nonsense...sorry about that - Tech Support is at work...someone has to be...). So would you like to know why I use the name? Sit down comfortably and I'll begin...

In about 1992 I started DJing. It was a pretty bizarre series of events...it wasn't something I had ever thought about doing but I was deeply involved in Raveworld and at times like that (and in worlds like that) the strangest things can seem 'like a good idea'. Just ask Amy Winehouse...at least I never married a rubbish gangster. Anyway, a friend and I started DJing on the Leeds pirate radio station Dream FM - mainly because all the DJs were male and it was thought by someone (I can't quite remember who...might have been me!) that a few girls' voices would be a good idea too. We used the names Daisy & Havoc...guess which one I was...We had some records of our own, we borrowed some off my then boyfriend (hello Sean of Smith) and we spent a lot of time buying cheap records in charity shops and at car boot sales.

It was a lot of fun and we ended up getting quite a bit of paid work in nightclubs - particularly the quite trendy Leeds club - Vague. I've never been what you could ever call trendy so it was a new world...great...for a while. It was at Vague that I first came across the term 'crowd-pleaser' I suppose. To DJs it is just a big record, a safe bet, something you know will fill a dancefloor...it can also be a 'floorfiller' (clever, eh... no-one ever said DJs had to be inventive linguistically..).If you're a DJ you might want to 'educate' the crowd with new music some of the time but your job is to make people dance pretty much. They have paid for a good time and they come to dance...you have to play some big tunes (sorry, that's what they were called!) or your night is pretty painful and so is everyone else's. We were not the most crowd-pleasing of the DJs at Vague (far from it) but we tried to play an interesting mix and we did OK. We worked there for quite a while - had a lot of adventures. It was what was then called a mixed/gay club. It was fairly lively.

Eventually the club lifestyle took its toll on... everything really and I had to retire at the grand age of about 30. I had one or two braincells left. I still have them. I hid in a cupboard (OK, a very small flat) for a few years and then I met the Beloved (not the band!), had Small Girl, generally returned to planet Earth. About that time I started writing more seriously (up till then I'd just written as a small-time journalist) and one of the things I wrote was a collection of stories - 8 in all, some long, some short. I'll post a link to them some time...not this week. They were all about people who work as modern-day crowd-pleasers in some way - one was a club DJ, one a tabloid journalist, one a model, one a film studies lecturer, one a poet (appearing at a reading), one a chick-lit-type novelist, one a conference organiser, one a small-time music journalist going to a dance music convention (yes, they do exist!). They weren't bad stories I don't think - maybe they'll come into their own sometime - but after I'd worked on them for a while I discovered I was happier writing poetry and that I seemed to be able to finish a poem whereas with prose I can sometimes just ramble on..and on...and on...

The stories were up on-line for a while and it was then that I starting using www.crowd-pleasers.net as my website. When I started putting poems on-line a few years ago I decided to stick with the same name. I know 'crowd-pleaser' does get used as an insult sometimes in Poetryworld but that doesn't bother me a whole lot - in fact it makes the awkward bugger in me laugh. Plus after some of the craziness in Raveworld Poetryworld bitching is really nothing to get one's knickers in a twist about. Personally I find it interesting to think about the audience, the reader, the rest of the world...what do they think when they read or hear our poems...what do they like, what do they feel? That's not to say I write to please...I absolutely do not...but I do think about crowd-pleasing as a subject, as a whole. I think about what pleases me when I'm part of the crowd and then I go off and think about it from the other side too. That's why I've kept the name.

So now you know...and you can go back to Jim's and read that lovely review again.

p.s. Anyone know where the title for this post came from? Come on quotation spotters...