the carlton club
Client: Ellen Cornelissen
Event: Catherines 18th Birthday
Venue: The Carlton Club, St James Street, London
Date: 15th December 2012
Package: Plug & Play
Upgades: Disco Photography, Creative Mood Lighting
Saturday night saw us up at the Conservative Club in St James Street near Trafalgar Square for Catherines 18th Birthday Party.
The club is the oldest, most elite, and most important of all Conservative clubs situated in St James Street, just a stones throw from Pall Mall. The party was attended by nearly 150 teenage revelers from Eton and Oxford with just a handful of older guests who stayed in the background throughout the party which kicked off just after 10pm.
Ellen had called us the day before the event to order in some last minute Creative Mood Lighting to give additional ambience to the Wellington room, which is usually the main dining room of the Club. The guests were treated to a sit down meal prior to the party, it was during this time that we arrived to set everything up around 730 after a bit of a trawl through London which was heaving with traffic on Saturday evening. If you are a DJ then directly outside the venue entrance there are zig zags, literally within a minute of of arriving a highly strung traffic warden appeared out of a dark side street and photographed my tax disc before instructing me to park on the opposite side of the street and unload from there, when I pointed out that I was unloading extremely heavy equipment he decided to be very kind and allow me to remain on the same side of the road (if I reversed about 20ft) …the joys of customer service in 2012 😀
uplit window shutters
Anyway …moving on to more important people, we made ourselves known to the very nice Selena who was running the event and eventually we managed to unload in about half an hour carefully navigating the doormen and smoking guests all gathered outside, once your in the venue its quite straight forward, it’s the first room you come to on the left after you have passed reception. Its a very grand room and has recently been refurbished to its former glory as a beautiful red Regency dining room. The disco sets up at one end, the opposite end is a large open fire with a discreet smart looking bar area in the corner, you wouldn’t know its there until they open up one of the wall cabinets to reveal the alcohol. The tall windows which look out onto St James Street are adorned with huge wooden shutters, which we uplit with red and purple creative mood lighting plus around the fireplace as well as the bar area. There’s a couple of huge stunning paintings in the room also which you have the option to turn off the spotlights on if you wish. The dance floor on this occasion was centered in the middle of the room giving a large space for the DJ set up. Given the space we set up 2 Scanners, 4 moving heads, a Martin Wizard and we projected club visuals via a projector onto the DJ booth to give the environment a club type feel to blend in with the age range. We did use haze machines early on as the client had paid for these but didn’t last long thanks to one of the over zealous censors going off.
“eton style”
With a large crowd of teenagers, mostly boarders at various colleges from out of town the music was centered around the best new charts and dance sounds. It was …shall we say quite an eventful evening a bit like an old skool disco …heaving dance floor, snogging everywhere you looked, intoxicated guests falling over my equipment …say no more ! During the evening we also got to experience the latest craze sweeping through Eton, England’s most famous college …it’s a dance called Eton Style …yep the South Korean hip hop producer is now being outdone all over the world with Gangnam replica versions.
The venue did actually call time on the event 15 mins early as a result of a few problems elsewhere in the building, apparantly an expensive piece of china had been knocked off its perch and the last time I visited the toilet there was a siege to get one drunk guest out of the locked toilet cubicle, oops …kids these days (i never did anything like it – and still don’t …of course), so another dull evening lol, the incidents didn’t detract from it being really a very good night, the majority were great and the birthday girl thanked me at the end and told me she had a great night …job done – it was certainly memorable !
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the client who paid a sizeable bill for replacement equipment on Monday afternoon which was very decent of her especially as she had just found out she wasn’t covered for intoxicated guest damage on her additional insurance. Thank you Ellen 🙂 and a special shout also to the doormen who kept an eye on the choice mobile parked over the road throughout the gig.
Here’s the set list from Saturday, if you were at the party how about leaving us a comment.
22:14 : Kelly Rowland – Work (Freemasons Arabic Mix)
22:17 : Calvin Harris – Sweet Nothing (feat. Florence Welch)
22:19 : Nicki Minaj – Starships
22:21 : Otto Knows – Million Voices
22:24 : David Guetta feat. Barbara Tucker – Its Allright
22:27 : Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand
22:29 : Rizzle Kicks – Down With the Trumpets
22:32 : Pitbull – Hey Baby (Drop It to the Floor) [feat. T-Pain]
22:33 : LMFAO – Sexy and I Know It
22:36 : Jennifer Lopez – On the Floor (Radio Edit)
22:42 : Wiley – Heatwave (feat Ms D)
22:43 : Azealia Banks – 212 (feat. Lazy Jay)
22:46 : Avicii – Levels (Radio Edit)
22:48 : Whitney Houston – Million Dollar Bill (Freemasons Club Mix)
22:55 : Justin Bieber – Baby (feat. Ludacris)
22:59 : Rita Ora – R.I.P.
23:02 : Skrillex – Bangarang (feat. Sirah)
23:03 : Pitbull – Don’t Stop the Party (feat. TJR)
23:07 : PSY – Gangnam Style
23:09 : Kid Cudi – Pursuit of Happiness (Steve Aoki Remix)
23:16 : D’Banj – Oliver Twist
23:17 : Swedish House Mafia & Tinie Tempah – Miami 2 Ibiza
23:20 : Pitbull – International Love (feat. Chris Brown)
23:23 : Kesha – Take It Off
23:26 : Chris Brown – Turn Up the Music
23:28 : Nicki Minaj – Starships
23:30 : Flo Rida – I Cry
23:31 : Alex Gaudino – Destination Calabria (feat. Crystal Waters)
23:33 : Eric Prydz – Call on Me (Radio Edit)
23:37 : Alexandra Stan – Mr Saxobeat (UK Radio Edit)
23:40 : Flo Rida – Good Feeling
23:44 : PSY – Eton Style
23:45 : LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem (feat. Lauren Bennet & GoonRock)
23:52 : Labrinth – Earthquake
23:56 : David Guetta & Snoop Dogg – Sweat (Snoop Dogg vs. David Guetta) [Remix]
23:59 : Rihanna – Diamonds
00:03 : Rudimental – Feel the Love
00:05 : DJ Fresh – Hot Right Now (Radio Edit)
00:09 : Katy Perry – Firework
00:09 : Redlight – Get Out My Head
00:16 : Skrillex – Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (Dirtyphonics Remix)
00:18 : One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful
00:21 : JLS – She Makes Me Wanna (feat. Dev)
00:22 : Rihanna – We Found Love (feat. Calvin Harris)
00:27 : Jessie J – Price Tag (feat. B.o.B)
00:31 : Flo Rida – Wild Ones (feat. Sia)
00:34 : Britney Spears – Till the World Ends
00:38 : MGMT – Kids
00:42 : Guru Josh Project – Infinity 2008 (Radio Edit)
00:45 : Fun. – We Are Young