I have a secret.
Promise not to laugh?
I’ve been learning how to DJ.
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I guess this story begins in 1993 or so. Each week, in my small, cold bedroom, I’d record Radio 1’s Essential Mix on cassette. I’d borrow mixtapes from pals’ older brothers, recordings of recordings of this music emerging from Detroit and Chicago – and now a whole subculture in the UK – called house. I loved it. I wanted in.
But I was just a kid in a hippy village, a tiny rural place with no buses, watched over by my menopausal single mother and now – at 46 – a grandmother. My much-older siblings took up our genetic mantles of religion on the one hand and alcoholism on the other, and with everyone looking elsewhere, I started going to nightclubs. I’d call my brother from the phone box, persuade him to stay sober so he could pick me up, whilst around me sailors in their civvies catcalled sex workers on their way to Warehouse on Plymouth’s Union Street.
Dancing, loud music, a 4/4 beat surrounded by hundreds of other sweaty dancers, hard, dark techno, sometimes dub nights with bass that rumbled through my bones, parties in fields and pub function rooms in the middle of Dartmoor – I went to them all. I got waitressing jobs to pay entry fees, made tips to pay for taxis or scrounged lifts off blokes with Ford Escorts, always with the desire to be in the dark and dancing.
Fast forward over two decades to having a baby – finally, eventually. Perhaps the losses, IVF, pregnancy and birth should have put me firmly in my body. After all, there’s nothing more animal than labour or mammalian than breastfeeding. But I disappeared into the deep, long corridors of my brain, each lined with intrusive thoughts, hyper-vigilance and insomnia. It has taken a long time to be in my body again. Now I can see that where reading and writing allowed me distance from (or a mirror to) my struggles with perinatal mental illness, dancing has reconnected me with my body, with pleasure and with joy.
Parenthood and midlife have also shown me – not through want of trying – that it’s hard to find people who want to dance, and nightclubs aren’t great spaces for a middle-aged woman. There’s still a weird thing where some guys put their hands on your waist as they move past you on the dance floor. Really? Yes, really. Sure, there’s Annie Mac’s Before Midnight, which is very parent-friendly and apparently a great night out – but once a year? I needed once a month. In the end, I went along to Good Clean Fun, an alcohol-free party run by people in recovery. I went along on my own; I’ve not been to a party or nightclub on my own for over 20 years, and even then, never clean and sober.
I still consider myself, all these years on, to be in recovery. In many ways, I am newly in recovery, a new kind of recovery, this time from perfectionism and control, and on a journey of artistic recovery too. I’m also in recovery from what it is like to have hormones, but one of the joys of having less oestrogen is also having fewer fucks to give. I arrived at GCF and immediately bumped into an old colleague there with her wife. I felt at home amongst the aging ravers, the Queer people, the kids from art school, all drinking tea or lemonade and moving together, some even barefoot. I took part in an hour-long somatic practice and shook my body. I pootled around at the back before moving right up to where the speaker stood and let the groove…
No. Writing about dancing seems impossible. It appeals to a part of me outside of thought or language.
That first night at GCF was a magical experience; to be sober and clean is not hard for me these days (I’m lucky that despite being from a long line of Welsh alcoholics, I can – and do – take or leave booze and drugs. Alcoholism doesn’t seem to have shown up in my genetic code. ‘Hey, there’s always time!’ a little part of my brain says, raising a glass of delicious Merlot and winking). GCF was incredibly freeing, and as anyone with children knows, feeling free can be very rare in early motherhood.
And then GCF founder, Amy Rodgers, posted online about some DJ workshops, and I put my name forward and – the universe doing what the universe does – I got selected. Across four Sundays since mid-February, I have met five others in recovery, at different stages and with a huge variety of stories behind them, and together, supported by some amazing and experienced artists, we have messed around with music.
I’ve played Frankie Knuckles and Al Green, Bee Gees and Prince, Madonna and Bicep. We’ve been shown the ropes by Johnnie Wilkes (Optimo), Rebecca Vasmant, Sean Murchie and Lewis Watson (Hot Towel) and looked at how to produce our own music by Aly (Bizzy) and Colin (Desert Storm) & Gary Lawson (Made In Glasgow Recordings).
We have been supported, encouraged and taught by Amy and Gemma Gracie and it has been absolutely incredible.
I see now that music is part of me, and an intrinsic part of my mothering. Music links me to my children. My son loves AC/DC and Michael Jackson. My daughter loves the Spice Girls and Taylor Swift. APT by ROSE and Bruno Mars is on repeat at home. Don’t you want me like I want you, baby? Don’t you need me like I need you now? It feels so good to let this almost dormant* part of myself awaken and be here, dancing in the kitchen with them, watching them fall in love with music too.
Even as I type this, my son is lying next to me listening to Can’t Stop Til You Get Enough. (Last weekend, I watched Sing with my wee girl. I adore that film. I even watched it waiting for her arrival, synthetic hormones doing their thing before labour began. I over-identify with mother-of-twenty-five-piglets Rosita, and I am the first to admit it). It is delicious to watch my kids’ love of music light up their brains and their bodies.
The DJ workshops have also helped me be okay with being crap. I am truly awful at DJing. It’s so fucking hard. At one point I could hear two unmixed, different-tempo disco and house tracks in my headphones, and I thought, ‘wow, this is a sonic rendition of how it feels to be me so much of the time.’ Galloping horses. Seven thoughts at once.
Learning to DJ (or at least know the basics of working CDJs) has collided at full speed with several other factors in my life. It has been extremely hard, extremely gratifying and sometimes very beautiful. The start of 2025 has been pretty wild.
In January I began reading/doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron again (I tried initially five years ago but that was 2020, it was lockdown, my baby was 10 months old, I had a two-year old toddler, can you IMAGINE?!? I lost my mind – again. Anyway, anyway)…
The first three or four weeks of The Artist’s Way were glorious, joyous. Oh, if this is all it takes to get sober for my perfectionism, I’ll be fine! Weird things, things like the book said would happen, began to happen – including going to GCF, putting myself forward to DJ and being invited. This is what is referred to in The Artist’s Way as synchronicity. The universe shows you or gifts you something, sometimes without you even asking.
(FYI I’m now at week nine. I messaged my pal last week and we agreed that The Artist’s Way is – like so many worthwhile things in our short lives – so HARD, so GOOD. It is helping me to lean into my curiosity and to do it the way I like to do it, whatever it is).
I also started a weekly in-person session with a new therapist. It’s “parts work” as Miranda July calls it. It feels so timely that music – and performance more generally – have started to reemerge for me (from me?) as I gently coax out the artist-child: My baby-writer, my baby-DJ.
I hate to say it, I really do, and you may be bored of hearing about it (I’m bored too), but HOLYMOTHEROFJESUSANDGOD, hormones, my hormones, fucking hell. My perimenopause symptoms have absolutely floored me these past 4 months. What I thought I understood as anxiety I did not. This anxiety has a whole new texture, a whole new colour. I cannot handle any alcohol. I can barely hack one coffee (and you know how much I live for coffee). Sometimes I’m dizzy, sometimes I have palpitations, I have a dry mouth and a new sensitivity to light. I can’t sleep for nights on end. It’s hell. Some days I wonder if I’m actually going mad, wonder what the fuck is wrong with me, but put on a brave face and just grit through the days. Then things shift. My oestrogen or something picks back up and I can function again. No wonder women drop out of the workforce at this stage of life. (I think there are other things at play too. I’ll write about that another time).
The whole DJing thing has been such an amazing exercise, an exercise in just being myself, loving what the soft animal of my body loves. My body loves techno. It loves house, it loves soul. And pop music and reggae and and and… It has also been incredibly refreshing to spend time with people without children, to be CAT or CATRIN rather than MUM, and to challenge myself to do something really fucking hard whilst turning 46.
And like so much of motherhood (and life?), DJing is better when less controlled; more fun when coming from a place of genuine love; more connecting when I show up as I really am.
And re-opening my iTunes library has been like stepping back in time: To Devon and London and Brighton, to parties and festivals; to Womad in 94, Glastonbury in 96, seeing David Bowie in 2000 and Bjork in 2001; to bike rides with exes, being told “I love you” on sticky dance floors; to dancing on a podium in Ibiza at midday and being dumped on a railway platform in Derby; to making hundreds of playlists and burning CDs for mates; to my early love story with Ned, when I found a tenner on the floor of Nice ‘n’ Sleazy’s and spent the night drinking sambucas and trying to convince him why The Streets’ Original Pirate Material was so ace (he remains unconvinced).
Music is time travel. I’ve been travelling back to when my children didn’t exist. This woman I am now didn’t exist. Music has taken me to so many places since I started these workshops and it has been a transformative experience for me. (I’m used to hearing that said of the work I do with The New Mothers’ Writing Circle, I’m less used to actually feeling it).
It has impacted my writing too. I recently wrote a short story and performed / read part of it at an open mic night. Could 2025 be the year I begin performing again? The girl who was crushed at drama school (aka ‘Trauma School’) is slowly peeking out from behind her thick black fringe.
And to be shown the ropes by people who’ve been making music since the start of rave culture, who’ve played to crowds of over 50,000, who bought their first decks with their student loan in 2003, who have encouraged us every step of the way to make and play what we want, how we want: Thank you Johnnie, Rebecca, Lewis and Sean, Gary, Aly and Colin. Thank you, Sophia, for the food. Thank you, Gemma. Thank you Amy.
And to the other Baby-DJs; Baz, Paula, Yasmin, Erhan and Seth, may this be the start of something beautiful for us all.
There wasn’t much dancing from 2008 until 2024. I intend to make up for lost time. Find me down the front.
Catrin.
*I only realise now that running took the place of dancing for many years. I wrote a piece about running and music during the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown – But We Survived – here. I also wrote a fictional piece called The Brighter the Lipstick, The Madder the Mum, which is about two mothers who go out dancing all night. The universe is doing something, I swear…
P.S I want to start *some sort of night* for parents and carers in Glasgow. Follow me on my other Instagram account if you want to be in the loop… @catrin_kemp_
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Catrin Kemp is an award-winning creative producer & writer, and Founder & Director of The New Mothers’ Writing Circle. @newmumswriting
