Takin' it AAALLLL the way back to the 80s...

Evening all. So, me and the family Frod went on a bit of a jaunt for the last couple of weeks and it culminated in our attendance at a wedding in South Wales. It was a fabulous do - beautiful setting, lovely people, great weather, big marquee, Welshmen sculling red wine from pewter pint tankards. The lot, really. And also, of course, there was the wedding disco (mini-Frod is here shown enthusiastically and encouragingly welcoming his arrival, replete with coloured lights and - oh yes - lasers!!!), a tradition as solid and reliable as Swiss concrete.

Even before the disco arrived, a friend and I speculated that an unnecessarily large rig was a near certainty (it was), that Come on Eileen would be used early (it was), that his name would be Kev (it wasn't) and that most songs would be not so much mixed together, rather linked by a small bout of inane chatter - "Oh yeah, its Rob and Rachael's wedding, so lets keep the party going by taking it all the way back to 1976...." - in order to facilitate the changing of CD (pretty much always).

But, of course, this kind of larking was rather like shooting fish in a barrel or spotting Guardian readers at a farmer's market. Too easy. And so, as the evening wore on and the Brains' bitter took hold, an interesting theory slowly arose - namely that wedding DJing is a bloody difficult job. Very easy to get wrong (god knows, the fat get who did mine tried his best when my humble request for Superstition - I was THE GROOM, remember - was met with a blank face and a shrug) but yet incredibly hard to get right. You must cater to a vast range of tastes, after all, and can't really let the mood slip for any more than one song at a time - if at all. Slowly but surely, as we rocked the boat, danced the night away and finally did it our way, a grudging kind of respect emerged for the honest graft of the travelling cheese-peddler.

And so, I thought to myself, here's a nice little challenge for me and The 'Spill. Let's all DJ the last half hour or so of a wedding and see how it goes. Remember that EVERYONE is drunk, so keep the songs that people don't know to a minimum. Granny is up on her feet by now so doesn't want too much Gabba or Grindcore. There's a lot of palettes to appeal to, so try to keep everyone on their feet by mixing it up a little There will be some emotion in the air, so try to tug at a few heartstrings but, most importantly of all, lets see if we can find some of those songs that just make you smile, make you happy and make you want to get up and dance. NOT because they involve some gash routine, NOT because they have been done to death elsewhere but, well, maybe because you'd forgotten just how good a song it was in the first place. Oh, and because you're lashed.

To kick us off, then, here is my hastily assembled effort which, I fully accept, is far from perfect. Its probably even far from my own rubric, but what the hey. Imagine them all seamlessly mixed together with consumate skill or, if you prefer, imagine me garbling some nonsense about rocking and rolling and all getting down and boogying til dawn in all the gaps. Whichever you prefer.

Its all good.

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