Girls Know Nothing - S2 Ep28: Jamie Lisa | Award Winning DJ And Full Time Mum!

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

GKN is a female-focused podcast hosted by  @SharonNJGaffka GKN Social Channels: Https://linktr.ee/girlsknownothing  Instagram: @girlsknownothingpod  Tiktok: @girlsknownothingpod TikTok: @girlsknownothing

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like into the house and be like jamie mom please knock i could be you know masturbating but it's true though welcome back to another episode of girls know nothing today's guest shows us that you can be a dj as well as a mother jamie loves to create feel-good content that all parents can relate to but by night she is a world-class international dj and producer working with the lights of global dance phenomenon head candy mtv radio one and ministry of sound not to mention she is also class international DJ and producer working with the likes of Global Dance Phenomenon, Head Candy, MTV, Radio One and Ministry of Sound. Not to mention she is also featured in Forbes magazine. So welcome to the studio Jamie. I did see an Instagram reel that you created about typical questions you get as a mum as a DJ. Am I still DJing? I get a lot. Am I still DJing I get a lot am I still out there working as a DJ because I'm a mom that's one thing I wanted to mention is we are a society now where women work and beforehand we we didn't have

that we would stay at home and obviously the man would go to work and now we're a foundation of women that work like our our parents, my mom worked, but her parents, her mom didn't work. Her dad went out and worked. So the generation has changed. So people automatically assume, oh, wait, you still DJing? And I'm like, yeah, I'm still learning.

I'm still making, I have to make my money somehow. Like at the end of the day, it's not gonna stop just because I've pushed a baby out. So you get it a lot. I think it's really important that being a mom isn't your entire purpose. Because you are a whole human being, right? Oh my God, yeah. And you aren't here to just serve to your mom.

And it's an extension. It's what I said to every pregnant woman. I'm like, it's an extension of you. You are not changing. You're still the same person. And with friendships as well, friendships change. People don't call you anymore because they expect the fact that you're going to be busy I did it with my friends and then when I had a baby I had to make those phone calls

I'm so freaking sorry that I treated you differently because you were a mum yeah and I think even I had an argument with a friend the first three months of me having rocket my birthday was in April he was born end of Februarybruary and i didn't invite her because i didn't want to cause she's my best friend in the world i was i'm not gonna invite her because you're gonna have to get a babysitter it's gonna be shit for her um and too much so i didn't say anything and then she was like where why did you not invite me to your birthday i was like i really thought i didn't want to cause you any stress yeah I did it for to favor you not to pull you back and she was like an info even if I couldn't go I would have liked the invite yeah it's still

feel included and then I it just clicked everything clicked and I was like oh I'm so I felt like a horrendous person because I didn't realize even then when I was still postpartum yeah so I mean do you think what are the biggest like challenges you found in trying to maintain you know your personal life and friendships as well as being a mum and your work like your professional career um so we moved out of London after lockdown we were like we want to be near the beach we buy a dog and have that space white picket fence life that white picket fence life yeah and have yeah just have the space what you can get in kent and what you can get in south london we were in a tiny two-bed flat one of the rooms were was a studio an office and then our bedroom was attached to the kitchen you'd roll out of bed into the kitchen that's how small it was

and i said flip if we get pregnant the baby's gonna have to have the drawer as the cot that's gonna have to be the only space that we have so we had to we had to move moved out and that's when it hits that my friends not it's really hard to get them to come out to kent even though it's like 38 minutes on the train getting them to find time to come and see me and then when you have the baby everyone wants to see the baby yeah the first two months and you're like oh this is gonna be fine i'm gonna have and then it goes silent so being i say to people that have just had friends who who have just had babies please touch base with them three months into them having the baby because that's when it gets lonely that's when you notice your body has

changed you don't you don't get gifts through the door and the excitement of newborn anymore you're really living the parenting life and that's when it starts coming to realization so i do this thing now where i'll get a gift for somebody that's had a baby three months after they've had the baby oh that's really because they won't have anything they won't they they get inundated with gifts and we got so much stuff and i didn't know who what was from where who who got us what so when they were like did you get the gift i'm thinking to myself which one yeah so now i'm like get it later because then it's like a nice little surprise and something just to brighten their day because it can get really really hard I never know what

to do do you buy gift for parents or baby because surely eventually you're like it's always about the baby when is it going to be about me 100% so like buying them a nice candle or something that they can enjoy it in their spare time um i think i think that's just as important as buying a baby and also clothes everyone buys newborn clothes and it literally lasts three weeks and then they grow out of them i did that mistake oh i know it's hard so but you do before you look so cute right yeah one of my friends she bought me like a care package of like baby toothpaste baby swimming nappies things that you wouldn't think to get and I was like that's brilliant so how do you manage your job and like the emotional aspect of being away from your baby yeah so obviously I'll fly to different countries a lot and I'll go for a day and then come back.

And we are in a very fortunate situation where my mum bought the house next door to us. I love that. Some people's worst nightmare, but I love that. Right? It is. I mean, we've had screaming matches down our street. It's been like an episode of Emmerdale or something.

But honestly, it's been a blessing in disguise having her live next door so it is handy but you still need to respect her boundaries i can't just be like mom can you take the baby now i have to respect her boundaries she actually doesn't respect mine because she'll just walk into my room and be like into the house and be like jamie mom please knock i could be you know masturbating but it's true though you know you just have those boundaries i don't want to walk in and see her having sex with her partner so i'm gonna knock at that freaking door um and juggling the whole parenting thing with dj is it's okay for me because I'm booked so far in advance okay my partner on the other

hand is a struggle because his is like oh you're going to Saudi Arabia for a month on Monday and then we're just like shit so it's getting all the family together doing the diary making sure that we have cover also we have a dog so that's an extra thing that he bless his heart he always gets forgotten about by the time it comes to the friday i'm like oh my god where's the dog gonna go so it's normally ringing neighbors being like get it it's honestly a hustle in itself parenting the dog and the baby so is your partner also a dj no he's a presenter for um gaming okay so i was gonna say how do you man like if that both of your books go away how do you

manage that yeah so that's literally we just bring in the family and have like a family meeting and go right this is what's going to happen so luckily all our parents live in this country I think it would be so much harder otherwise we would have had to get a nanny that would be the only way at the beginning when my mum lived up north when the baby was born my friend came and stayed and I taught her to dj during the time she was helping me with the baby and now she's like worldwide international dj she's now doing that so yeah but the thing is don't teach your nanny to do the thing that you do because you're going to lose her as the nanny well not that I need her

anymore but I was going to ask you what would be the advice you'd give to working mothers that are trying to manage their careers and their families but that's probably the piece of advice right don't teach the nanny to do what you do yeah exactly and also because of the stuff I couldn't do I would be like do you want to do this gig it's a really good experience and she's freaking smashed it so she's doing really freaking well I can put her under my gigs and yeah she's soaring which is nice but it is a struggle at times at times it's hard and that's why I started doing those tiktoks of holding the baby and making those Britney Spears one did youars one. Did you like it? I loved that one. It was really cute. I have a big, big love for Britney Spears.

She's my era. I'm old now. So she was my idol. And I thought, my friend said to me, why have you not done a Britney Spears one yet with the baby? I thought to myself, oh my God, why haven't I done a Britney one? That's when I went in and recorded it.

But the reason why I started that was because I couldn't rehearse my gigs and be a mother at the same time. So I strapped them in and then went and recorded it like that. And then started doing like little videos and then posting them on social media. Why do you think it was really important

for you to show that on social media? Because you can still DJ and be a mom. A lot of people, I had it the other day, I was in a club seeing my friend DJ and she came up and she was like, I haven't seen you in so long, how's the baby? Are you still DJing? And I was like, yeah, of course I'm still DJing.

Don't you ever see me on social media DJing? She was like, oh no, I don't really check it. I just thought because you're a mum now, you don't DJ. And I lost a lot of work when I said that I was pregnant when I did the announcement I was with I was headlining well not headlining but I was on the lineup for Foreverland and they they called me up one day and they I don't know if this was the reason but they were like we don't want you on the headline anymore and I was just heartbroken and I automatically went it's because i'm pregnant they don't want

to see a pregnant dj but people like alice in wonderland who's in the states and she does and stuff she was going right up until her nine months pregnancy and standing there and performing so it is changing the mentality of djs and being pregnant is changing but you can be a mother and dj at the same time it's like you wouldn't turn to any other a woman in any other profession and say oh you still are you still a lawyer or do you still teach or like you know you can't be seen in a courtroom or in a classroom if you're pregnant well exactly and the thing is is you automatically lose opportunities after that conversation i had with my friend in the club where I was like yeah I'm still DJing I got a call a week later being like hey we have um we have an opportunity for Formula One do you want to do it now I know you're DJing again now I wouldn't have got that

opportunity if I wasn't out there still networking yeah so you still have to hustle you still have to network um but you have to have balance with obviously being the mom as well i think balance is the main thing and it's with everything with fitness with work like with working doing social media it can be tough because we have a lot of avenues of income as well as freelancers uh and people automatically think you're gonna get a normal job now because you're a mom as well i couldn't work work a normal job i am not normal in myself i need to be the best people never are yeah but i was gonna ask you i mean how do you prioritize kind of like your self-care when you're talking about fitness how do you prioritize all of that with all of the like freelance work and so do you want to know the schedule yeah i actually do because it might help me with mine i don't have a baby but you know what it's really good we have a podcast shush don't tell mom yes and we started thinking about getting people that aren't parents on

to see how they're gonna adapt once they have babies and stuff because i think that's a big conversation to have because it pretty much will happen to all of us at some point we will have a partner and we have to juggle that as well it's about quality time with your partner and juggling work and if you want a baby my friend charlotte holmes she's decided to not have a baby so she's given her eggs to ivf um to she's had ivf to retract the eggs and donate them so i think that is just an amazing because she doesn't want babies herself so what is your schedule oh yeah i know sorry schedule so i wake up at about 5 5 30 in the morning i jump on my peloton we invested in a peloton greatest thing every parent needs a peloton

because you don't need to go anywhere to do the gym and if you have some weights as well they on the app they have everything on this app. So you've got yoga on there, weight training with just the weights that you have. And then obviously you can do Peloton tread now or the Peloton bike. So we have the Peloton bike, wake up early, jump on the bike. Then I do a try and do 20 minutes of meditation afterwards or journaling. But then he normally wakes up around 5.30, 6-ish. Most recently, he's been waking up about 6.30, which has been a godsend. So that's why I have to wake up at five. Otherwise I don't get to see that exercise in the morning.

So it can be tough. So he wakes up, I give him a bottle, change his nappy. We watch a little bit of TV and have just our time together. And then I come down, give him some food, a little little bit of play time and then put him back to bed again so when he goes down about nine he's asleep till about midday so that's when i can get ready and then do some work so the routine of like showering doing my makeup and hair i can do that all in about 20 minutes now. I'm like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You do learn to pick up some weird skills, don't you? And your life changes.

Oh my gosh, yeah. And then he wakes up at 12, we'll have lunch and a little bit of playtime. And then he goes down for his second nap. So you just have to juggle it around their schedule. We found a book called Sensational Sleeping Plan and that really cemented he's always slept through the night so he i'll put him down roughly about 6 45 i find if i put him down earlier he

wakes up later than if i put him down later he wakes up earlier the science is weird so bizarre so when he goes down i'll just work around him but he goes to nursery mondays and fridays he's at my mother's on tuesdays and he's at my other my mother-in-law's on thursdays and we have swimming lessons with him on wednesdays so i'm with him the weekend mondays and wednesdays you know and i always thought the whole like needing a village to raise a child was a myth but clearly in your case it's not it's not at all and then you juggle yeah and you have to juggle your social media and and obviously me djing but that but the thing is is we never thought social media was an avenue yeah until

so my partner he started doing these nappy changes on tiktok and it blew up and it was only he was doing it on instagram and somebody said why don't you just start posting it on TikTok? And he opened the app one day after posting his first video and he had 35 million views on one video. We were just like, what? This is mad. Snappy changing videos, just talking to your baby when you change them. And so we started doing that. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications

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On top of everything else. This is the thing where people forget like having a nine to five job, you don't have to juggle that as well. You literally go to your job, you do a job and then there's nothing else to deal with. You can forget about it. Instagram is a fun thing and not a work thing but i want to know about how you got started as a dj because i feel like everybody has such different stories right so how did you kind of like fall into that career or was it something you'd always wanted to do um i fell into it i was at theater school as a kid and I was in the western shows and performing

and then when I left school I went I started working at Abercrombie and Fitch nice every is it gen are we millennials or are we gens I don't know what generation we are. I have no idea. But I'm 35 now. So back then, that was the thing you did. I think if you were a performer, you were like, let's work at a store so I can be flexible for my castings. So we'd go to castings. And then I got into a band, a girl band. And I was doing that for about three years. We were recording the album with Black Eyed Peas in LA,

back and forth. And then we disbanded so we were on tour with n dubs and ed sheeran oh my god you literally had like any any of my like because i'm 27 so like anyone in my school's dream career basically and dubs black ips yeah exactly so that we were really in it and then we fell out on this tour and then we separated and I was working at that point I was juggling Abercrombie working as a waitress in clubs and I would just stand there watching the DJs and I needed to be able to perform still and I it had all stopped in an instant so I thought to myself how can I perform and I'd lost all the confidence in singing

I had no confidence anymore from being in the whirlwind with the label and they literally chew you up and spit you out that is the way of the industry it's horrendous still now to this day like get tearful about it um and I just would sit there and watch these DJs so we started burning CDs and writing the tracks on them and asking the DJs before they started playing if I could play for an hour they'd be like Jamie you have to wait to the tables it's like no no one hour just give me one hour they will love it and then I'll come off and then I'll waitress and I was a freaking awesome waitress I would get tips every I was just freaking hot hot on it so I think that they realized I could balance DJing for an hour or two hours and

then because it was always dead for the first two hours of the club opening it would start at 10 by 12 it would be round so I'd start properly working at 12. So what would you say kind of was your biggest challenge in terms of moving into being a DJ? So the one of the challenges I found was people thought I was great waitress and I wasn't a DJ and I was trying to say hey I'm a DJ now book me as your DJ not as your waitress because in nightlife in the industry it's all about who your clients are your clientele is so you'd get high-end clients and they'd be like hey i've just flown in can you get me a table tonight it rain now that's open um but i would work in it was a place called tonteria china whites and which is now libertine yeah uh whiskey mist these were the clubs i would work in so i had a

brilliant clientele of high-end clients and nobody would treat me seriously as a dj so i left the country and i was i went to australia and nobody knew that you was no and i i went in and i was like guys i'm a hot freaking dj in the uk at that point in time, I'd only ever opened for the DJs in London. So I was no idea what I was doing with my burnt CDs. Went into Cafe Del Mar on Darling Harbour in Australia and faked that I was a huge DJ in the UK. This was the time where people weren't really on Instagram. So they couldn't really research you

to see if you were actually talking shit. Instagram was around, but it wasn't as rife as it is now and then uh they got me a residency and i was earning a thousand pounds a week a thousand dollars a week which is nothing in australia by the way so like five hundred dollars a gig doing their day parties so i did that for three months and then I came back to the UK and I was like I'm a DJ now if you want if you want me book me as your DJ and that's how I got in because you've played at some really like amazing places so what was how did you get that big break hustling like literally talking to people messaging everybody hey if you're looking for a dj if you need somebody because somebody's cancelled it was literally networking networking networking

going out there and meeting people it was a little easier because i knew people in the nightclub industry already but the problem is is back then in like 2015 16 it was all hip-hop heavy it wasn't really house heavy and I loved at that time Kygo was just coming out with all his tracks I loved Tropical House I'd just come back from Australia so it was all beach vibes all house out there so when I came back I knew hip-hop but I didn't love it it wasn't my soul I found it hard of finding venues that did the music that I loved um which is insane to think about now because there must be so many venues that do house now yeah so many and so that's why I started my podcast Jagged Jungle because I thought right I'll have if they need to hear my mix they can go onto SoundCloud and listen to it um So I started doing the Tropical House, Headcandy kind of sound.

And then Headcandy called me and were like, we want you to be the face of Headcandy's Tropical House sector for Sony Music. And I was like, yeah, awesome. This is great. So it was all, the thing is, is the hustle is real because you're doing everything for free at the time. And then down the line, then you will reap reap the rewards but it's the first stage of you know going doing a radio show for free and just hustling hustling hustling you've just got to start somewhere but I was lucky enough earning my way with the little gigs that I was doing like I became the resident DJ for STK so when they started opening all the STKs around the world in Canada Washington I would go and play over there so that really opened doors for me as well what would you say would be like the most memorable

or like craziest venue or gig you've ever done oh um I loved touring with ministry sound head candy because we were in a different city every single week which has just been great doing all the o2s has been fab um but actually my favorite is when i do yachts i love your life i love boating that would be my side hustle if i had a second job my side hustle would be um what do they call it when the people like wash the sides of the boats and they clean they freaking outside all day with their jet skis and driving them around okay i was gonna say i could not imagine you going from djing to cleaning a boat i know but i think it's it's more like when i would do it i'd meet so many people from all different cultures South Africa Australia New Zealand and they had such a great energy about them and a beautiful glowing tan and I thought this is the life guys you're having fun but it

is hard for them uh that was great and then that's where I played with David Guetta and Black Coffee and it was very intimate there was about 30 40 guests on on the boat so i'd be performing with these huge artists in this small selective area like i took mark ronson came up to me and gave me his number it's that was probably the most insane thing because when you do these big events these big festivals you don't really see the light of day you just shake hands and then off you go when you swap over but this was so intimate you couldn't go anywhere either they'd have to get helicopters to come and pick you up so you'd be waning around after your set so that that was the most insane gig i think i've ever done and i did that for three years lived your

best life then oh my god yeah this is before i had the baby i couldn't do that now really i could but not for every single because i would go for four days of the month every single month that's yeah it's a lot yeah it's a lot when you've got a little one so what would be the biggest piece of advice you would give to like aspiring djs oh uh don't shit where you eat a lot of people drink and do drugs on the gig okay don't do that because you will get a reputation very quickly people talk in this industry and respect your fee because a lot of new djs will come in and they'll be like, I know I've spoken about doing stuff for free, but it is important to know your worth and it loses the value of a good DJ as well.

Why is she that price, but you're that price? And it happens with photographers as well, I've noticed when they're breaking in, they'll undercut other DJs and they'll undercut other noticed when they're they're breaking in they'll do it they'll undercut other djs and undercut the photographers when they're coming in um respect your price and stick with it that was that's the is that good yeah i think because i was thinking like you know as someone who's been in the industry for a while obviously i like with tiktok and instagram reels loads of djs kind of breaking into the industry by putting sounds out onto social media platforms like is that a good way to do it or is that just

nowadays yeah yeah i would say i mean i have to do more of that as well you know making mashups and then people can use the sounds which is great i do love listening to them i can't lie great aren't they i think it's how i discover loads of random new people so like but I don't know if that gets you booked for things or if that's just like you just have to be careful with um the piracy side of things because they'll be like oh this belongs to universal and then they'll take the video down so it's always about tagging the sound and then muting the sound that you've tagged that's what you have to do with social media you have to always go around I get a lot of questions actually coming through my DMs being like, Jimmy, how have you released this mashup?

And it hasn't been taken down because I've actually credited the artist through the sound. So it's important to make sure that you credit. But other than that, I mean, back in the day, it was really hard. You'd release something, it'd take you all day to do it. And then they'd rip it off. They take it down.

SoundCloud was awful for that as well. Yeah. It's the thing about trying to break into that kind of industry, but you wouldn't want someone else to rip your work off, so. No, you wouldn't. But the going conversation is how are you going to be a big DJ

if you can't even release the remixes? Because you've got to go to the label and get the publishing rights for it. So that's the one thing I struggle with. I have so many remixes and mashups of tracks i've done and i can't release them because i have to go to the publisher and then they'll be like yeah it's gonna cost you a lot of 10 000 pounds to clear this and you're just like i'm a new artist i don't have 10 000 pounds floating around in my bank account to spend it on one song that might not even do very well so it's it can be hard so it is all about making those mashups and crediting the artist on social media and fingers crossed it doesn't get taken down yeah you just have to pray

basically yeah it's the same i feel i have loads of creative um industries but you know because of the things you've talked about about you know potentially like you're unsure but potentially losing work because you're pregnant or like how to juggle motherhood and being a dj is it really safe to assume that being a dj is so male dominated yeah i mean especially back in the day as well it really was and that was one of the conversations we had. I think I did an interview with Forbes and it was Women's International Month. And it was like 100 years of freedom that women have had where they haven't, because apparently we weren't even paying our own taxes until I think it was like 79 or something.

Sounds like a dream right now. Doesn't it? Can't lie. I mean, but the fact that they couldn't even earn their own money. Women couldn't even earn their own money yeah women couldn't even earn their own money uh it has been very male dominated people are getting more comfortable with females dj'ing there was an assumption right at the beginning of my career where

they saw you as a woman assumed you weren't going to be very good at your job so i would do a thing where i tie my hair back put it in low band put hoodie on and hope and wear baggy clothes and hope that they wouldn't think i was a girl because i didn't want the assumption that in a nightclub that i was going to be shit because i was a female and this is why there are freaking awesome female djs out there be good at your job like learn everything that you need to learn be the best dj that you can possibly be so we can break that stigma that women aren't good or technical because they're a girl or you know i mean have you noticed any massive improvements in terms of gender diversity when it comes to the industry even in the last year it's been incredible everybody's accepted now i did this amazing gig at wilderness recently called house of sublime and everybody's accepted in there um everybody's pronouns are accepted there's no judgment and

it's just be who you are the thing is is we're in a society talking about judgment everybody judges everyone at the moment especially on social media i i don't know about you but do you get scared to like release certain things on social media because of how people are going to react i do but then i mute every single app on my phone do you so i don't get no ignorance is bliss it's so true like i stopped watching the news when i had the baby so the 25th of feb he was born and that's when the russian war broke out yeah and i was like what's happening with ukraine what's happening and my partner went i'm turning all of these apps off bbc news daily mail is going off and i haven't re-downloaded i don't know what is happening in

the world and it it is ignorance is bliss as long as i do my best for the environment you don't need to watch all this negative shit on social media. I think it's changing a lot now. People aren't judging labels anymore. We can be anything that we want to be. Was that the kind of the biggest challenge that you faced? Like you personally being judged all the time? At the beginning, 100%. Now, not so much. I think now I've done enough years to be ever like, Jaylee, she's really good. She's good at her job. There's no judgment there now. But the older generation, I think they still struggle with seeing. I have that conversation with,

oh, you're a DJ and a mother. They can't put two and two together. So how do you overcome that? You just have to educate. You just have to have that conversation. No, it's possible you can make it work and they go oh are you rich do you have a nanny you get the odd comment like that like um no I have greatest support system it's always that stereotype isn't it like you were

saying about how DJ like there's in my head there's a stereotype that DJs are always party animals always doing this always doing that and they then always rich but it's probably it's completely flex i okay so i had a conversation with my tax man the other day and this i i don't know if i'm going to be leaving my tax man soon because of this conversation we had but he went why are you buying music i'm a dj i have to buy my music he was just because he was very confused about it he was like why can't you stream it i said you can't stream music on you can with certain equipment but you've got to download the music somehow yeah and a lot of the time the label hasn't sent me that track i have to buy the track i have to go to itunes and physically buy the track and people go what you buy tracks it might when my accountant said it he goes i'm not sure if we can tax this

i'm yeah because i wouldn't be able to play anything otherwise is it just the thing as well that you find it really hard to like manage as a as a business because of old-fashioned beliefs about in the kind of i think the only thing i find hard about this life is is yeah do my taxes no uh it's been I've found a balance with parenting and being a DJ 100% the lack of sleep is hard yeah when I worked till we'd on Saturday I did a gig until 1am drove back from Manchester to Kent and then had to parent all day so that was tough what do you think that the industry could do to make it a more positive place well it may make your life easier to be a mother and a DJ um I don't think this is just as relative to being a mother and a DJ but being a woman in this industry we work in nightlife aka we finish gigs at stupid o'clock

and it's very unsafe the world has gone a bit crazy recently this is how i feel and i've started to feel a little more unsafe i don't know whether that's being a mother it's like this heightened your yeah heightened scarce there's been times where men have approached me when i've been walking back to my car at night and i've just had to be like don't you come near me um getting the female dj home safely is a big thing female dj um and any any dj really it's really important because you just don't know who's gonna come up to you in the middle of the night when you're on your way home and even ordering a cab for them making sure they get the bouncer gets that dj into the car safely is really really important have you had apart from the one that you just mentioned like a really bad experience

of it yourself no just that that was a that was a horrible one because he literally came so close to me he was like following me, crossed the road, made me feel really uncomfortable. And I just had to like stop and do my starts. And then you have those horrific thoughts in your head, like the Sarah Everard situation where you go, oh my God, that was so close to home for me because she was in Clapham.

I was living so close to Clapham at the time when that happened and he then dropped her body in Ashford where I ended up moving to so I was like oh my god this is so close and she was just wearing her gym clothes and I'm wearing no leather fucking dressed up to the nines and I'm walking with so i'll always take my heels off and put my trainers on but at the same time that's still not just safe there's you can get alarms and when i worked in properties it was the same thing like i'd always get scared to like show men around houses so we had those uh what are they called oh it's like a rape alarm yeah yeah like a rape alarm we had a rape alarm but the problem is it would always go off because if you press the button even just lightly it just yeah and they're they're loud things but like yeah do has being a woman do you think it's

changed the way you've interacted with promoters other colleagues even the way you dress and things like that what do you mean like like do you think you have to behave a certain way when you're talking to people in the industry because you're a woman um no I don't think so anymore I say anymore because at the beginning I do feel it but also I didn't have the confidence I have now from being years and years of doing this and reading the crowd and for instance taking requests and how to come across you can't come across rudely to a customer who's asking for a song but now i don't take any requests i'm like enjoy the music yeah i've seen so many people trying to get requests and i was that girl i was the one that would go up to the dj and be like play britney spears yeah my friend would do that she'd write something on the notes on her phone and just hold it up for ages that's a new one the phone thing whereas

before you had to write another little piece i'm really showing my age by going back in the day oh god i'm not that old i mean i would never have guessed you're in your 30s until you said so really yeah okay that's good yes um but i changed the final question so you're like my guinea pig for it okay but um I asked I asked the guests a similar final question and um I want to know what piece of advice you would offer your younger self um and what it would be based on your life and your career journey so far oh wow um I would say don't care about what anybody thinks in your industry so for instance i spent two days working on a track and yesterday my partner's in saudi arabia so there's only so much you can listen to you have no bass over a phone but he listened to the track in his face

was like i don't like it and my heart was crushed so I still even do it to this day but my advice would be to me my future self is release every single thing you make regardless of what you think about if it comes from your heart release it because it's not going to do anything in the record folder just sitting there you know just keep plowing on and making creating putting it out and hustling hustling hustling because I have found myself creating things and then just putting it into the closet and then it never sees the live day again and then I'll revisit it down the line all right that was really good it's not on trend anymore but why the hell didn't I release that so release absolutely all those young DJs start making music they're so you're so lucky you're in a time where you can

go on YouTube or there's a program called Fader Pro which I use a lot and it big DJs go on there and teach you how to make a wicked house track you can learn how to make a track in 24 hours consistency is key with that and giving yourself the break as well um doing 90 minute stints of working turn your phone off because that's one of the biggest challenges is the phone social media the notifications and popping i've had to turn them all off as well but i'll still check the comments and stuff and it drives me mad and i get really my love language is words of affirmation so that comes on both terms so if somebody says something bad to me it really affects me but if there's something great to me I'm like oh my god that's but that's

my love language yeah so you need to just but the worst thing I think the thing to take with that is the worst thing that can happen if someone says no exactly but the thing is if somebody's giving you bad of like bad negative negativity on social media that means you're doing something right because you're making that impact which is pretty cool um so that's where my brain goes for that but yeah put everything out you make okay that's my advice that's amazing i think i think you know what that's something you can transfer to any industry oh absolutely so i i really like that and um i think that's something that i'm going to take and apply to my own life but thank you so much for coming on thanks for having me on and i know you're releasing new music soon yeah so next next year's big one we are i don't know whether i'm going to do an ep i haven't really decided once i've got all the music

there in front of me i can then work out how i'm going to do an EP. I haven't really decided. Once I've got all the music there in front of me, I can then work out how I'm going to release it one by one. Because normally it would be single bass at a time. But it's getting them to the right labels as well, shopping them around. There's so much more about you have to make the music and then afterwards you've got to shop them to the labels and see who's going to pick them up

or whether you have your self-release. I have my own record label as well which I created in lockdown so I can release my own tracks so that's always fun so I'm definitely going to be releasing stuff on Jaggy Jungle Records as well okay well that's something to keep out for next year and then we'll be playing it for my summer parties oh my god please I'll come and DJ yeah sorted yeah yeah I'm down. Thank you. your McFlurry. Your dip is your business. McCrispy Strips at McDonald's. Hi, I'm Richard Karn, and you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one

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