Nice Fade #2: Do the Robot; Be Lame

In the second part of our series on indie DJs, Sleeveful of Slight sets his sights on three more contenders for DJ Heinz's coveted crown: an Anglophile, a robot and an icy fan.

Dave and Robot Girl

Dave and Robot Girl host ‘Trigger’ upstairs every second Saturday. Dave’s tastes tend towards all things Oasis (he is rumored to have never refused a Kasabian request) while Robot Girl has a penchant for kitsch from the seventies and eighties. Their sets teeter on the brink of an inspired populism that draws people onto the dancefloor and an indie version of wedding DJing. When they’re on form, it’s very good. You’re amazed all over again by how good ‘Dancing in the Dark’ by the Boss is. However, too frequently it lapses into an exercise in Guilty Pleasures and you find yourself dancing vaguely to a song from the eighties you know from an ad and thinking sadly about the passage of time and whether most marriages are formed out of people settling for second best. At 3am you’re belting out ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ with the rest of the dancefloor but there is a nagging sense that the communal vibe has less to do with a loved-up coincidence of brilliant youth than it does with lowest-common denominator tribalism of football hooligans.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on these two. Trigger may lack the sense of infinite possibilities that comes with the very best of nights but there is a genuine positive side to its unique approach. All those friends who say they’ll meet up with you on Saturday night but disappear after fifteen minutes in search of “music that they know” are actually an each way bet at Trigger. They might stay and if they do they’ll dance all night - this is a good thing. Further, if a bunch of English slappers have stumbled off the Brunswick Street Mall into Ric's and you'd like to cop off with one of them, you'd want Dave and Robot Girl on the decks. Of course, this latter point poses the following consideration: with RGs next door, the Fringe bar down the street and the Down Under Bar but a two minute train ride away, do you really choose to come to Ric's so that you can spend your night trying to cop off with English slappers? The answer is yes.

Dave and Robot Girl are good sorts but I can’t help but feel that they could push themselves further – a little less ‘Let’s Dance’ and a little more ‘Sound and Vision’.

Penny Lame

I have a friend who is still telling the story of the first time he heard ‘Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand on a Thursday night when Heinz was DJing upstairs at Ric’s. He was dancing with a strange girl and both of them were desperately disappointed that the other couldn’t enlighten them as to the song’s identity, so knocked out they were by its brilliance. “It’s a great story” he assures me and to be fair, it’s not bad but there is always some distance between the sparkle in his eyes and the received tale. That said, I understand why he’s still telling it.

The first few times you hear and appreciate a really good song are always a special moment but when this happens on a crowded dancefloor the experience is intensified exponentially. The volume, the lights and the close proximity of cool people combine to create euphoric sense of the here and now - an ineffable moment. Dancing to new music as it comes out is the best way to enjoy music and the enjoyment of that experience is always reason enough to drag yourself of out of your house. I would go so far as to say that if you froze the clock at a point in either recent history or the near future, the fullest and most advanced expression of what is good about human civilization would be located on a dancefloor on which the best songs of the last 12 months were tumbling out while positive people danced joyously.

Penny Lame aka Fan Girl respects this more than any other DJ at Ric’s. She has a surly front. One time she refused a song request so coldly I felt like a rapist. Nevertheless, she has a surprisingly warm-hearted dedication to the celebration of the here and now. If you’re going to hear your new favourite song while out, chances are Penny Lame will be on the decks. She was playing Black Kids ‘I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance’ back when you could only download the EP from their myspace and she earns extra kudos for her embrace of the Teenagers' ‘Homecoming’. Of course, devotion to the cusp of the new doesn’t always come off. One time I witnessed the downright bizarre selection of ‘George Washington’ – an excellent youtube clip but hardly a floor filler. But fuck it, I’d rather hear an odd pick than hear ‘The Bucket’ being flayed to the marrow once more.

The most serious criticism I’d make of Penny Lame is that while she’s always good for a few threads of song selection, she never seems to draw the night into a cohesive whole. But even this, I suspect, might be on the wane. The other week I witnessed a half-hour that was pure Heinz. Indie flowed into Destiny’s Child and back into indie without a hint of irony or poor judgment. There were leaps from the best songs of the day to brilliantly appropriate classics ('Atomic'!) and I swear that despite the constant flow of people up the stairs not a soul left the dancefloor. Everyone was smiling (excepting Penny herself, naturally) and one could have almost plucked the euphoria from the air. All this lasted until the very first song that the next DJ played at which point half the dancefloor went to the bar or toilet. I don’t think Penny Lame is quite ready to claim the throne that is the upstairs DJ pen at Ric’s and rule the Brisbane indie scene as DJ Heinz did just yet. She lacks the Shakespearian breadth of vision and the inspiring flights of personality that defined Heinz at his very best. But pretty soon, she’s going to have her first complete night and everyone who is there for it is going to have blinding fun. I hope to be among them. Tick tock!