![]() The only time it didn’t work out was when I was flying to Amsterdam for the opening of a new club at the Volkshotel. I try to always take a morning flight so there’s backup flights later in the day, which has saved me a couple of times. That ended well, but it gets a bit hairy when you fly to smaller cities around Europe and have a connection, because often you’ll go from a big plane to a smaller plane, and if they’ve got a lot of people connecting onto that flight, not all the luggage will get on the next plane. I kicked up such a stink that they actually delivered them by hand from the airport to the nightclub in the middle of the night. Once when I flew to Melbourne-I think it was during my last tour-Qantas lost my records. It’s difficult for the baggage handlers to damage the records if they’re packed that way.īut my record bag has been lost quite a few times, and it’s horrible every single time. ![]() It weighs four kilos, so between that and the records, I have about 10 kilos left for my clothes and toiletries. For the long haul between Europe and Australia I put a shoulder bag inside a check-on lightweight hard case. I have to take CDs too, because sometimes the gigs I’m playing are all different so I’ll need to have eight or nine hours of music at my disposal. I try to take 15 kilos of records, which is about 75 records that’s about three to four hours’ worth of music. You get 30 kilograms in your checked luggage, but you can’t just fill it with 30 kilos of records or else you’d be touring naked and smelly. That can really kill your joy on 25+ hour trips with a heavy shoulder bag that you’re pretending is super-light. My knowledge of this extremely boring subject extends so far as to know which airlines have long walks at layover airports or no trolleys to help you haul your bag. I’ve developed a disturbingly in-depth knowledge of airlines’ baggage policies and how pedantic they are about weighing hand luggage at check-ins. I usually play in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, and I always cart my big-ass bag of records around with me. Now that I live in Berlin, I tour regularly around Europe and do one or two tours in Australia every year. There’s been a big resurgence of DJs playing records, new record stores have opened and clubs have much better vinyl setups as a result. Having said that, it’s coming full-circle in Australia, and vinyl is a thing again. Many clubs didn’t have turntables at all, and if they did, I knew the condition would be so poor that it wasn’t worth the hassle and I’d just end up looking like I couldn’t mix. There had been a landslide of dance music record store closures in Sydney, including Machinemusik, which is where I worked. When I lived in Australia I mostly played between Sydney and Melbourne, which is just a one-hour flight, but by the time I moved the places where I could play records were becoming limited, so I was playing a lot of digital gigs too. I’ve been touring with vinyl since about 2009, three years before I moved from Australia to Berlin.
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