Tour Diary: A Day in the Life of Mr. C

Mr. C’s had a pretty full on level of existence for quite some time now. From his days leading rave pop group the Shamen to running London club, The End, he’s consistently kept his game up remaining active as a producer, label head and DJ - mainly under his Superfreq banner in recent years. His is quite an international affair and since the release of his latest LP, Smell the Coffee, this Spring his activities have ramped up another notch with a far reaching tour in place to support the release. Then, of course, he’ll be returning to Room One later this month bringing Kink and DJ T with him alongside his residents Luke vB and Tim Red. Seeing as he’s so busy and all we thought it timely to get an insight into just how much Mr. C packs into a given 24 hour weekend period and invited him to put pen to paper to produce a tour diary for us. Read on to find what airport tribulations and fancy dress quandaries the modern DJ can face. A day in the life of Mr. C. Saturday 29th June 2013. The world tour for my Smell The Coffee album on Superfreq is now well and truly under way. The album was released on the 22nd of April & the tour started shortly after with a show in Dublin. I then went on to do 13 tour dates in the UK in just 6 weeks, with a couple of non-tour dates thrown in for good measure. I departed the UK to fly home to Los Angles on the 20th of June, just in time for the first of the dates on part 1 of my North America tour at Sound in Hollywood Los Angeles the day after. So this brings me to the 24 hours in question for my tour diary for fabric. I woke up at 9am on Saturday the 29th of June to finish sorting out my record box and to decide what I'm going to wear that evening, as I was told that our party is an after hours for a Burning Man fund raiser, which means it's costume time. Our party’s set to start at 2am and I'm going to be spinning for about 6 hours. The party I'm playing at at is in Dallas, Texas with the wonderful Corey Spengler who's celebrating his 40th birthday and his lovely wife Bon from Proton Radio; both are super cool people and fun DJs who own their own warehouse space, which they bought just to throw monthly parties called The Express. This is where I'm heading. Of course I do my usual amount of faffing around before leaving my house at 10.20, even after giving myself a 10am absolute latest deadline. Thankfully, the L.A traffic has died down a little and we have fast track access on the motorway (that we pay for) so we whiz past the heavy traffic in the other 3 lanes and thankfully make it to the airport at 10:40 leaving me only 5 minutes before bag check closes for my flight, only to be met bu a huge queue inside the terminal building. Of course I'm a little concerned but I'm the airport ninja so, thinking fast on my feet, I see a Virgin America representative and ask if they can help me check my bag without queing. The guy isn't all that helpful but tells me to check curb side to see how it's looking there. There was a queue there outside too, all be it smaller, so in true ninja fashion I go straight to the front of the queue with my best 'extremely worried face look' and say to the lady in the front of the queue "Can you help me please madam, bag check for my flight closes in 3 minutes, can I go ahead of you". She smiles and says "of course you can" so I thank her kindly and go to the front. So, I'm checked in, record bag full of new vinyl gone & I head for the departure gate. Thankfully, all is well and I arrive at the gate in good time. I finally get to board, get to my seat and sit down on the plane. After a couple of minutes a gentleman informs me that I'm in his seat. D’OH! So I move, I have a middle seat and sitting by the window is a cute little girl, can't be much older than 5 years old and she's traveling alone. I love kids so I make friends with her, help her with the inflight entertainment system and we find her the Disney channel. So I pretty much keep an eye on her, helping her when she needs something, sharing my cookies, generally playing dad & I must say, this little girl was so brave and so well behaved, no crying, no moaning, just sitting watching cartoons & asking me to help her with the odd thing. I must’ve have made her feel comfortable & secure as this sweet little thing fell asleep on my arm shortly before landing in Dallas. We land at Dallas airport at 4:45pm (incidentally the airport is the same size as the whole of Manhattan NYC) where I'm met by Corey and his mate. As always, I’m very happy to see Corey as we have a laugh and a giggle while heading back to his place to drop off my bags. We then head to the venue for sound set up where I discover they've built a silver yurt as a DJ cabin, my very own spaceship which I called Starship Orgasmatron. After this I grab a bite at a cool vegan diner and then get dropped off to get ready to go to the first party which is the Burning Man fund raiser. I'm told the theme is Super Hero Villians, thank God my intuition told me to grab the pink glitter cape before I left home as with all those villains about, someone's going to need to keep them all in check. At 2am I fire up the sound system playing ambient music for the first half an hour then go into beautiful, melodic, slow deep house which welcomes everyone in gently and with love putting a smile on the faces of all who enter. I keep this deepness up for about 90 minutes before switching to party mode, but the crowd were feeling it so much, they already started having it to the deep stuff. By 4am the place is going nuts and I'm slowly get darker and more twisted until I see a slither of sunlight at about 6:30am which tells me it's time to start making things a little more uplifting. I played until about 7:30 or 8am when the birthday boy Corey took over until about 9:30. It was a great party, proper grass roots stuff, they had a right task kicking everyone out & when all done, they took my drunken arse home for a well deserved sleep. Now I'm looking forward to the next weekend of fun filled gigs when the Smell The Coffee tour hits the brand new Output Club in Brooklyn NYC, then down to Miami, Chicago, Europe and Asia before heading back to the USA for part 2 of my North American tour. In October the tour goes to Latin America & then in November to East Asia & Australia which wraps up the tour nicely. So come to Superfreq at fabric on the 27th, take a big deep sniff & Smell The Coffee.