I DJ’d nearly 200 Saturdays at St Jerome’s, 198 or something like that. I also played six months of Wednesdays. I nearly celebrated my 200th, but St Jerome’s closed. We did manage to celebrate my 100th show. We put on an all–day party, starting at midday with a barbeque. It was the day of Good Vibrations. It was a massive day, the biggest figures they’d taken up to that point. There were DJs playing all day and I capped it off with the last three-hour set at the end. Ortiz, who used to DJ on Tuesday, came dressed up as Osama bin Laden eating his hamburgers.
I found the place by accident. It was a Saturday afternoon in winter and we were on a pub-crawl for a friend’s birthday. We had a ball. It was an oasis in the middle of the city. At the time I thought, ‘I would love to play in a place like this.’ But time went by, and I couldn’t find the place again. I went back to France, like I do every year, and when I returned I accidently stumbled across it again taking a short cut to get to work. I saw the little bar, went inside and out the back, and sure enough, it was it. This was two or three months later.
Straight away I asked to see the manager, and Jerome was there. I said to him, using my biggest French accent, ‘hey man, I know I’ve got the sound that will suit your bar and I would love to play here.’ I told him, ‘you’ve got to play the right music if you want it to last a long time.’ And he said, ‘I think the same. We’ve been open on Sundays for six weeks, and I’ve got nobody. Why don’t you come this Sunday and play for one hour?’ I said, ‘okay, I’ll play for one hour, if you don’t like it you kick me out at the 59th minute. If you do like it, keep me on and pay me.’ I played for about two hours before he came to talk to me. And he loved it. He said, ‘let’s make a deal, how much do you want?’ I told him, and he told me I was dreaming. We eventually came to an agreement. I saw an opportunity to play some records I’d collected that I couldn’t play anywhere else. In nightclubs, you could only play house music. There I could play disco and funk that I couldn’t play in the clubs. This was before the days of mash-ups, now you can play anything.
Every Saturday was like a house party.
The night design started to become the same. I would start out the tempo at 100bpm. Dancing, but slow and sexy to set the mood, for a good hour. Slowly I’d bring up the tempo, until eventually, an hour before midnight I would be up to 130bpm playing really energetic and full-on music. And it would be a good hour of full-on dance floor music up till midnight. At midnight, boom, I would drop it down to 100bpm, because at some stage the energy needs to climax, at that point you can’t go higher. If you keep on forcing it, you’re going to lose everybody. That’s when I would play hip-hop tracks, really slow but with strong messages, and then I’d bring it back up again to 120bpm to finish the night.
Almost every week, there was something not working with system. I even had a longneck of beer spilt in my computer I was using to record my sets. At one stage I almost quit. Because in the first two years, if something went wrong, we’d call someone to fix it. But in the last few years, nothing was fixed anymore. Towards the end I was bringing my own turntables, mixer, and 200 records. But there were not many gigs where it would rock every single week and at the end people were clapping their hands and asking for, ‘one more, one more’. I thought, ‘it’s always such a good party, and I get so much satisfaction, I should keep doing it. I’ll just keep bringing everything every night, and rocking it until it closes, because it’s going to close one day for sure.’ I wanted to finish it, because I didn’t know if I’d ever have something like that in my life again.
Fire, fire at St Jerome’s! That was probably in its last year. I parked my car just outside St Jerome’s in the delivery zone, right next to the big exit and the big sign that said not to park there. It was Saturday night, so of course I couldn’t find a park in the city. I was DJing, and at around midnight when it was well and truly packed, I started seeing some smoke. I was the only one that could see it, because everyone else was facing me. There was a lot of smoke, and more and more of it kept coming, then I could see the red light from the flames.
I turned to the nearest guy and said, ‘hey, there’s a fire!’ He turned around, looked at it and said, ‘yeah man! Yeah!’ And kept on dancing. I told someone else, ‘hey man, I think there’s a fire over there.’ And he agreed with me, ‘yeah, that’s a fire for sure.’ Nobody cared. I told a friend of mine to go to the front bar, because maybe it was so busy that nobody had realised. I started seeing the smoke coming over us, and I thought I’d better do something because I’d heard those stories of people dying from just inhaling the smoke, and my friend was taking ages to get there, because it was so busy. I thought, ‘this is not worth it, I don’t want to die here.’ So I turned the music down and said, ‘sorry guys, please don’t panic, but there’s a fire outside, so please just make your way out slowly.’ But nobody would move, and people were screaming out, ‘put the music back on dickhead.’ Then the smoke started to pour in, and there was so much we had to get down on the ground. The fire brigade came in and neutralised it, we found out later that someone had come along and lit the cardboard that was always piled up in the lane… right next to my car.
Everyone was evacuated, and it was about 12:30, so the manager called it a night. I grabbed my records, and headed outside ready for an early night. As I got outside I saw the fire brigade standing around my car. The Myer anti-fire system was on, and pissing down…on my car. If you went under it, you would get knocked out, it was that powerful. And they didn’t know how to stop it. They were trying to get in touch with the guy from Myer who had the keys, because they could only stop it from inside. So my poor white car was black from the flames, and then the water was pouring down on it. I asked the firemen if my car was going to be alright inside, and they said, ‘we doubt it man. It would be flooded.’ I had to wait 40 minutes. Once they stopped the sprinklers, I opened the boot of my Hyundai, and it was all dry inside. I looked at the firemen and knocked on the roof, ‘hey boys, Korean car, good shit huh?’ They were really impressed. It had no damage whatsoever.