There is the idea of a DJ being in the zone. An absorption of mind and body on the task of making people dance and keeping them on the floor. There's that—and then there's what Sunil Sharpe does each time he steps up to a pair of decks. Anyone who's watched him at work won't have failed to notice the utter focus, dedication and intensity with which he plays. It's earned him a reputation as a master of vinyl mixing—with a style of dizzying speed and precision—and he's long been known as perhaps Ireland's leading techno DJ. The vibe of Sharpe's sets is mirrored in the way he discusses DJing. He might use boxing analogies, and talk about his love of being the underdog, showing a crowd who don't know him exactly what he's capable of. He'll discuss giving as much as he possibly physically can, and say that he is (in a positive sense) attacking a dance floor. I mentioned at one point during our interview that he DJs like his life depends on it, and the idea seemed to resonate with him literally rather than figuratively. "Live by the sword, die by the sword," was how he described his way of mixing.

All of which stands in contrast to his personality away from the DJ booth. Sharpe is generous in conversation, seems to adore talking shop, and is only too happy to share some of the vast amount of knowledge he's accrued over the years. Every Thursday, you'll find him helping to develop Ireland's next generation of DJs and producers through the one-year, full-time course he teaches on, apparently the only one of its kind in the country. He's been a host on national radio, Ireland's RTÉ 2fm, and up until a couple of years ago he produced a video series called The Quarterly Crate, a roughly three-hour show in which he highlighted the best recent vinyl releases.

More recently, though, plenty of Sharpe's focus has been on matters far beyond dance music. As one of the principal figures behind the Give Us The Night campaign, Sharpe and his colleagues have been pushing for overhauls of Ireland's archaic licensing laws—"We endeavour to highlight the contribution of the night-time industry to culture, community and the economy in Ireland, and to raise the quality of nightlife to international standards," their mission statement reads. Sharpe seems to be absorbed in the campaign with the same vigour and energy you find in his DJ sets, but the challenge for him right now is keeping his DJing at the extremely high levels he demands of himself. I saw this level firsthand when I caught Sharpe at Corsica Studios in London, on one of the last Friday nights before the coronavirus began decimating the club scene.

In the interview you did with the RA Podcast in 2016 you talked about techno being in a healthy place. In your view, where is the music at now?

We can dig into the past as much as we like. And for that reason there maybe isn't as much of a desire to create new strains of techno. I guess we just look back a lot. Everybody does it. I think in general in electronic music, we've scoured the past—almost every nook and cranny has been navigated now. To the point now where eurodance and a lot of things that people would have thought were quite naff if they had have come up in conversation a few years back—nothing is off the table now. I think that's good on the one hand because it's helping a new generation to discover the music that we got into in the '90s that was cheesy, that was very mainstream, but it was our entry into all of this. People might complain about trance coming back, but I wasn't complaining when it was happening back then. I love trance. I think some of the best trance is up there with some of the best techno. For me there is nothing to pick between them.

I think for a while people were playing trance in a kind of ironic way. But we're at a point now where it's been played a bit more and people are realising that the crowds are actually really enjoying it. I'm interested to see what comes of that, and there are obviously already some movements, particularly with the Copenhagen scene. Melody is coming back a bit. But I think there aren't as many basslines now in techno. A lot of contemporary techno is very kick-drum focused. A lot of what is happening in the low-end is focused on the kick rather than the groove or the bass.

There was an interview you did with the Irish Times a few years ago, and in it you touched upon a couple of tantalising subjects that you didn't get to expand upon. You said it was a personal goal of yours to have your own style of DJing.

I think the way I was quoted there maybe made it seem like I was still looking for that, to some degree. I think my early mission as a DJ, from when I started, was to develop my own style of DJing. And that was always very important to me. I used to read magazines a lot when I was coming up, and one thing that always stood out to me was that DJs and producers wanted to have their own style. It was a very natural ambition for me to have as a DJ. I didn't see that as being unusual, and I'm sure a lot of DJs at the time felt the same way.

When I bought turntables for the first time and I first started getting into mixing, I very much learned on my own. The first few years of me DJing were very much done in isolation. I had a few friends who were DJs, but generally I was trying to learn by myself. As a result, when you go very deep down the rabbit hole of buying records, being quite religious about certain mixtapes, buying magazines, soaking up all of the information you can get—you just become very focussed. Music becomes your main companion. I would be cycling in and out of work listening to mixes on my Walkman that I'd done. I was my own judge and jury when it came to mixes. It took me a few years before I wanted to put myself out there and play in clubs.

I know now a lot of people want to DJ and get out there and play in front of people as soon as they can, and I can understand that, it's natural. But I didn't really have anyone pulling me into the scene who would encourage me to DJ early. For that reason, by the time I did go and start playing on pirate radio shows or in clubs, I'd reached a level that I was reasonably happy with. But even beyond me being happy with it, I reached the point where I was being fairly well received by other people. The feedback in Dublin seemed to be that I had some way of doing things that people really liked. I did feel that I was on a mission because of the music I really loved, which I wanted to represent in a way that was a bit different from the way other DJs were playing.

DJing in Dublin was very competitive then as well. There were a lot of DJs, and there was also a very strong techno scene, with a generation of DJs who had come before me, like Francois, Warren K, Joe McGrath. At the time they were the main three techno DJs in the city, and they had a lot of support and they ran nights, which is how I got my break. The harder techno sound of the time was maybe reaching a bit of a peak. Maybe I was the DJ who was willing to go a little bit heavier.

On the subject of style, the first thing I wrote in my notes when I saw you on Friday was "urgent."

I forget exactly what the person said, but someone on the internet once said I play as though someone owes me money.

I was going to say like your life depended on it.

I've always kind of felt that way. I don't want any distractions when I play as well. People come up to me when I'm playing and wonder why I'm very brief, or virtually ignore them sometimes. But we're only up there for an hour or two, the time for talking can be afterwards. And you know me—I love to talk. But when I'm up there I don't need distractions. I'm going there to deliver as much as I physically possibly can. I will push myself, even if I am very tired. Physically, you might not always be feeling as energetic as you would like to be, but for me it doesn't really matter.

I don't ever want to be complacent when I play, thinking, "Oh they've booked me before so they like what I do, I can just take it easy." I could never do that. That would be completely against why I DJ. I DJ now with the same attitude and vigour that I had at the beginning, if not more. I feel now the stakes have maybe even risen in terms of playing bigger gigs and in different countries.

I kind of like being the underdog, to be honest. As someone who has been doing this for a long time, you do want to be recognised for what you do. But at the same time, I love nothing more than going to a gig where very few people know me. They don't know what to expect, they don't really know much about me. I love that. I thrive off that. It reminds me of being a DJ at the beginning. It gives me the hunger. I live for that, to be honest. I had a gig in Nantes a few months back where a lot of the crowd had kind of circled me while I played. They were all watching me. I love that. It was a dark club where not everyone was filming, it was just in the moment.

Would you say that the main way you express your hunger is the speed at which you mix records? When I watch you it seems that the goal you set for yourself is to mix in the next track as fast as you physically can. Is that a fair assessment?

To some degree. It depends on the venue. It depends on the atmosphere. It also depends on how many decks I'm using. Recently I've gone back to using three decks a little bit more, and in that case you have no time to hang around, you're always working tracks into the mix.

I remember talking to a friend of mine, Giles Armstrong, about a track I liked but that I didn't really like that it had a long breakdown. And he was saying something to the effect of, "It's not all about them just being mixing tools." For a long time I was DJing tracks as mixing tools. I still do, but as I got older, as my tastes have widened within techno as well, and as I've learned to get the most out of a crowd, there are definitely times when you need to step back from a track, let it breathe and let it do its thing. But depending on what mood I'm in, and depending on what the crowd seems to want, then yeah, I can be pretty relentless, I want to throw the next one in.

I sense a sort of thrill in the way you play—the danger of being live in the mix so much, working the tracks together, aiming for a sort of alchemy.

I'm glad you picked up on that. It's a sort of "live by the sword, die by the sword" kind of style. You can rock up to a club and realise that the decks aren't in very good working order, you're chasing the pitch for literally the whole set, sweating an awful lot more than you might do normally—those kinds of nights can be long nights. I have to say though, in support of a lot of clubs out there, I find that the turntables are pretty good. I know they have a bad rep, but by and large I don't remember too many gigs recently where I had to chase the pitch.

The problem I sometimes have is on bigger stages with a lot more vibration. You really have to watch it when you bring in a track, almost being careful, and that's when I feel that there is a little bit of a muzzle put on me. When I come away from a big stage sometimes, the crowd may have been happy with it, the promoter may have been happy with it, but I know that if I was able to cue quicker—when you go to cue on one of those bigger stages the record often bobbles on you. For a while I was finding this with hanging tables or stages, but I got used to that over time.

You are always learning as a DJ, and I am still learning, and one of the things about going back to playing on three decks recently is that I want to challenge myself. By using extra decks you are challenging yourself.

You seem to have an unwavering commitment to using the pitch in the mix and never touching the records to speed up or slow down a track. What's the thinking behind this?

The simple answer is that the pitch is my best friend, and it has been since I started DJing. It can be every DJs' best friend if they want it to be. It's who you can rely on more often than not. In my view, you can rely on the pitch more than you can on your hands. Adjusting by hand also seems to be more short-term rather than a more permanent fix. Obviously with turntables it's quite different to CDJs, you can't just settle with the pitch and know that the tracks will just stay there. You still have to work it a little bit, there is still that fine tuning. You can definitely walk away from tracks in the mix on CDJs longer than you can on turntables.

But for me, it's also about the way I taught myself to mix. I wasn't watching other DJs with their pitching techniques. It's just the technique that worked for me. Here are these pitch controls, they speed it up and they slow it down—that's what they're there for.

Ah, I guess I just assumed that you'd seen Jeff Mills in the '90s and picked up the technique from him.

No, no, not at all. There was a legendary gig that he did in Dublin, roughly around the time that I was starting to go out, but I wasn't at it. It's kind of funny because everybody in the techno scene that I ever met all claimed to be at the gig; but I heard from other people that there were only 100 people at the gig [laughs]. From what I heard he had a lot of problems with the turntables that night, he really was unhappy with his set. But there were people there, like Eamonn from D1, who said it was the most inspiring DJ set they had ever seen. It perhaps plays into the idea that even with inconsistencies or without full accuracy, the energy or intensity of how somebody DJs can still really make a mark on the crowd.

When it comes to using the pitch control, I actually consider touching the records as being a bit of a bad habit. I'm not as militant as I used to be on that—I used to really dismiss that as a technique. But over time, when you see touching the records working for other DJs, you just think, "Well that's the way they do it and that works for them." I've seen a lot of DJs who are very close with the pitch already and then they just touch it or guide it to where they want it to go. If it has the same effect as me fine-tuning it with the pitch, then I wouldn't hold it against them [laughs]. I guess in the past I just felt that by touching the records you were only temporarily fixing the problem. It was almost like their arm was part of the motor on the turntable.

That sort of rhythmic jabbing motion you make with the faders, playing with the track you're bringing in—is that something you've always done?

I always like to kind of chop it up. I find that I mix a little bit more like that in small spaces, actually. The sound is often more cavernous, a bit more intimate and impactful. Everyone there is to be attacked, which I mean in the best possible way. You can really fuck people up in those situations, in a wholly positive way. Using the faders is very much a part of my DJing, but it depends on the space and on the reception from the crowd to that kind of mixing as well.

I get the feeling that with chopping and cutting, it's almost a communal feeling within a small space, which doesn't always transfer as well to a larger space. It can do. And when it does it can be really special, it's great to have that kind of connection when you're playing to a bigger crowd. Overall though, I don't think too closely about it, I play almost totally off instinct.

You seem to select music from your record box while you have two tracks live in the mix, so that by the time you fade a track out you already have a record tucked under your arm ready to put onto the turntable.

I compare it to a game of snooker. That's what DJing is for me, thinking a few shots ahead. When we get to the end of this stage, where am I going to take it? I'm sure that's the case for other DJs. I guess as well a lot of DJs who play all digital—what I'm doing physically with the record they're possibly doing in their head. I don't want to come across like what I'm doing or how I'm approaching things is somehow better. It's just in order for me to play the way I want to, I always have to think a few shots ahead.

Are you trying to get to a certain track further down the line? Or is it more a case of being, say, in a dark and metallic phase and you're selecting tracks that fit that theme?

Sometimes it's about stacking energy on top of energy, that's kind of what I want to do. There are tracks that are just being layered in there—they're coming into the waiting room, they're being quickly seen, and then they're gone again. They have a purpose because they have a sound or an element in there that works well at that time. But by playing that, it sparks something else that I want to play on top of that. Something like a very metallic snare, for instance, from a tool-based techno track.

It sounds like you're almost thinking in terms of timbre and tone rather than in terms of pieces of music or tracks.

A little bit. I'm thinking a lot about rhythms—yeah, tone and timbre is a good way of putting it too. I'm thinking definitely of the elements that are in a track. And building blocks, and what component I have in another track that sort of sits nicely on that, as soon as possible. There can be a sense of uncertainty sometimes when you're doing that as well, and that's something I like about it. I'm known as someone who plays in the harder realm of techno, but I definitely like to get through lots of different stages of it and intersperse it with other styles.

Working as quickly as you do, is it necessary to get to know your records very well?

It definitely helps. I have to say that in the past couple of years, particularly as our campaign has gone into overdrive and has become almost a national movement, I haven't had as much time for preparation before gigs as I would like. I think once I realise that, I can prepare myself with new records at least to the point that I know them relatively well. I think it's happened to every DJ that you play a track and you didn't quite know where a break was going to come in, and you get caught out by it a little bit.

There aren't that many tracks that I need to cue up that far into the record, if you see what I mean. There are some for instance where it's a longer track and there are three breakdowns in it, so sometimes I might mix in from the first breakdown onwards, so the track is going to peak a little bit after that. That's the optimal time, then, to mix it in. I don't need to be playing two, three, four minutes of something before it kicks off.

Sometimes I will get records but if I haven't played them enough that week I will wait a while to play them. I don't necessarily filter records into my set on the first week that I get them. I just know that I haven't gotten to know them enough. It's also about finding a balance. I don't really want to be playing the same set for a few weeks in a row because it's handy to. You always want to be filtering new tracks into your set.

There are, to be honest, some records I buy that do sit on my shelf at home. I don't always play every single record that I get. But with somebody like me, with my record collection growing and never getting smaller, it's about keeping on top of what you have.

Does any of this at all draw you to the idea of digital DJing?

No, Jesus [laughs].

That was such a good answer.

I used to play digital stuff on the radio, in order to keep the show upfront. But I think with me actually playing in a club in a style that I like to play, I just think that it'd be too much of a compromise... looking at screens. It's not for me.

Is the screen a big part of it?

I don't know. I feel a loyalty to vinyl. A huge loyalty. I feel like I would be doing the dirt on vinyl if I started playing digital. I've had my fair share of disagreements with people over the years when things were changing. I was never against digital but what I was against was people telling me that the format I was playing was obsolete, and that it was for dinosaurs. I feel that a lot of people maybe changed out of convenience, not because it was a technique improvement. Well, I thought so more in the early days of the shift over to digital, but over the years I've seen DJs who have really, really started to use the technology particularly well. They're doing things you can't do on vinyl, and fair play to them, I tip my hat to them.

I think if we all stopped playing records it would lose its visibility, and if it loses visibility then part of the original culture has died. I'm not willing to contribute to its death personally. I'll keep playing records until the end.

You were playing on a Pioneer the other night. Is that your preferred mixer?

For a long time I was against the Allen & Heaths, but I was messing around with one in the college yesterday and I was for the first time really realising how much longer the faders are, and I was kinda thinking that there is stuff you can do with the Allen & Heath faders that you can't do with the Pioneer. But in general, with the DJM versus the :92 you've got more curve control features, and that can be more useful with fading. More than that, though, it's the functionality of the Pioneer over the Allen & Heath. The two-band mid-range on the Allen & Heath versus the single mid-range on the Pioneer—less is more for me. But I do like the look of the new DJM-V10 [which has two-band mid-range], it has four phono channels on it.

I do like the feel of the faders on the Pioneers. I think you can abuse them a little bit more. I also like using echo, delay, reverb. Sometimes I use the roll function but not too much now. I came up using Pioneer in clubs—the 600, the 800, the 900.

I'm not big into rotary mixers, I always prefer faders. I do appreciate them and the quality of the build of a lot of those mixers, great looking and functioning, but I prefer mixers with faders.

Thinking about the set at Corsica Studios, you were playing more groove-based and percussive than I'd necessarily associate with you. I was wondering about the factors that go into a decision like that. When and how would that decision be made?

I think from when I leave the house and when I've packed the records. I pack my record bags like a record shop—I have all of the sections. New arrivals. Old classics. Groove-based, tribal. Electro. Ravey stuff. American stuff. Whatever it might be. But when it comes to that late '90s, early 2000s kinda loopy, tribal type records, I've always got a few of those to hand. I feel in the scene now I'm also trying to fill gaps of what I don't hear DJs playing as much. Luckily I've got a big enough collection to go back to some of these tracks.

When I'm DJing I think of myself as a team player. I want to fit into the night, in two different types of ways. I'm thinking about the time of night. If it's earlier I do want to have more rhythm and more shuffle going on. I want people to move their bodies in a different kind of way if possible. At lots of events I'm at now it's very kick-drum dominated with very little swing.

I don't just want to make a statement around how heavy I can go. Here's the biggest sledgehammer kick you've ever heard. There's far more to techno than that. Far more than who can play the hardest, who can play the fastest. There are all sorts of nuances to this music. I don't want my sets to be dominated by me trying to show that I'm the toughest and fastest and heaviest. I think techno in general has started to lose the plot in that regard. I would like to see people dance in different ways, or respond to different types of rhythms.

How important is it to you to play tracks that people might actually leave the club humming? I'm thinking tracks with some sort of anthemic quality, or something people might already know, like the Luke Slater remix of "The Horn Track" that you played.

It's about playing those tracks that people might talk about the next day to their friends, or they might be asking me about them the next day. I've gotta say as well, I know a lot of DJs are quite protective over the tracks that they play. And to be honest, sometimes someone will ask you for a track ID and you do think, "If I give them the track ID, maybe that goes up online and I don't feel like I can play that as often." But it's not my track! I didn't make it! Do you know what I mean? I have a duty to let people know what that track is. I always want to let people know what I'm playing.

Our industry can be very harsh and unforgiving on the people who built this music and this scene over the years. Generation after generation, there are producers who get left behind for one reason or another. Maybe it was for monetary reasons. Maybe they weren't as good at the social media game. Or they weren't in a clique, they were just doing their own thing. There are certain records that I will play—a great example is some of the old UK techno, London techno acts. District 1 or Spira, who made incredible techno records back in the day, but you'd be hard-pressed to see any conversation about them now online, whereas back then there would have been. Someone I'd really like to talk about as well is Space DJz—Jamie Bissmire and Ben Long, you're talking about two of the best techno DJs who have ever played, you know? I feel it's unfortunate there are people like that, whether they are DJs or producers. They may have made decisions to do other things and not to gig as much and they're not as prominent as they used to be. But I'd like to think that some of these people would still have a place in the scene.

So you teach on a DJ and production course in Dublin. And it's been like 15 years you've been doing this, right?

When I started I actually wasn't too much older than some of the students. What I'll always say about the course is that it's been as much a learning curve for me as it has been for the students. When I started, I had actually grown quite disillusioned with DJing. I'd even stopped temporarily, maybe for the best part of a year. I was doing very few gigs, I wasn't really interested. Our scene in Dublin had really imploded. As things had gone into the minimal era, a lot of the techno scene kind of dipped. I don't want to say "proper techno"—not minimal techno, let's say. I was in a transition with my own DJing, and one of the best things I could have done was to start that teaching job. I was almost forced to DJ by showing the students how to DJ each week, which meant I never really went rusty during that period.

I was working in a record shop during that time as well. I worked in a shop from 2001 until about 2009. I was making music, I was always going to be involved in music. But in terms of DJing I'd taken a step back, but starting on that course really helped re-energise me. Then by 2006 or 2007 I really started to return properly to DJing in Dublin, and enjoying it a lot more, coming back with a renewed energy for it. My palette had widened a lot more in terms of what I was playing. Maybe even more so than now—I was playing a lot of hardcore and jungle and dubstep.

With the course, year on year, I become more focused on the fact that we need to keep DJs in the game for as long as we can. We need to give them all the information, all the knowledge, all the help that we can to make sure that they're still in this in five or ten years time. Even though there's a lot on the course about technique, I would say there's also a lot of career advice and mentorship and trying to build our own community out there as well.

I was really interested to know about the messages you put across to the students in terms of getting gigs, finding work, marketing themselves. Basically finding work as a DJ in what's an incredibly crowded and competitive market place. How does one stand out?

That's the thing, and you have to find a balance because you have to recognise that a lot of the students are like 18 or 19, they're still growing up. You don't want to judge the scene of today in a kind of cynical way in terms of how social media has gone into complete and total overdrive. We try to talk some of this stuff out in class. Students might see DJs who are getting gigs purely based on how many friends or followers they have or how fashionable they are, how much they post online. I just try to say to students, "Listen, if you're comfortable doing that, if it suits you, and if it works for you, then by all means do it."

Hopefully by being on the course the students will be armed with a lot of skills that will put them ahead of a lot of other DJs at their level. So be patient. It doesn't all happen over night. It can sometimes take a couple of years, a few years. Sometimes five years. This is a completely unconventional profession. There's no logic to it, there's nothing like: study for three, four, five years, get a degree and you've got a job for life. That isn't the industry.

It's about arming students with info. At the same time, I try to check myself that I don't make it all seem too daunting, you know? A lot of the time I try to liken my own circumstances to theirs as well... If you're a competitive DJ or you want to go far in this, you're going to be admiring other DJs but at the same time you're going to be—not faulting them but you're going to be saying, I can do that a bit better. I think it's about trying to manage a lot of their expectations, letting them know that frustration of not getting gigs yet, or not being noticed—that passes, you do get your chance. I don't really know many DJs who haven't had a chance. I think it's about being patient and when opportunity knocks being able to make the most it. Being a team player, as well. It's important that people work with each other. It's good to get to know people in the scene. Being part of a crew or community. All of this is important. Turning up to club nights, getting to know people running the nights. People aren't just gonna come up and hand you a load of gigs or a career.

When I contacted you about this piece you were in the thick of things with the Give Us The Night campaign. You'd just had the general election in Ireland. Would I be right in saying that it's now looking like some of the ideas or changes that you've been campaigning for might be implemented in the medium term?

I think so. It's interesting, you can paint a picture to the public and to political parties, to government departments, to the council, and some will be more receptive than others. It can feel like people are getting the idea of what it is you want to do. But at the same time, when it actually comes down to it, there is that layer of resistance. It could lead to a compromise, and it's kind of seeing how big that compromise would be.

Ireland's licensing laws are at the root of this problem. At the moment, all late-night venues are licensed under ancient pub legislation. Which means individual charges for every night that you want to open beyond normal pub hours. If you want to open beyond midnight or half 12, you have to pay a fee for that of over 400 euros. For that, you get to open for two extra hours. It's extraordinary. Besides the opening hours, it's the actual costs that are the crippler. We've had everything compounded by an insurance-cost crisis that has shut so many businesses, and not just in the nighttime industry. This seems to be a problem that the government is unwilling or unable to tackle.

What we know the government can change is the situation with licensing. Planning for venues to be knocked down and become hotels—that's another issue that's very relevant to our campaign, but licensing is the most important because without licensing changes and without a definition for a nighttime venue, we're just going to be chasing our tail here. The industry is in a very depleted state at the moment, and it needs to start growing again. We need to give opportunities to young promoters and venue owners, to people with some vision.

We're not just representing operators, we're representing the whole creative community, the patrons, anyone who wants to contribute to or participate in nightlife or is running a business at night. We're speaking for all of them. We're more than just people who want to stay out late for the hell of it or club owners who want to pull as many pints as possible. This is an industry that supports many creative communities. It could facilitate lots of successful careers and businesses. It's going to take time, it's a generational shift, but we're getting there. I was in the Department Of Culture the other day and the assistant secretary there—even he said this is now on the political agenda. I spoke to another person recently who will be facilitating an open forum within Dublin City Council. She's not that familiar with the situation but even she said, "Listen, I know all of the work you've done, you're at a really pivotal point with this now."

I really understood how seriously you take DJing and how closely you think about it when you explained to me on email how the campaign has taken so much of your focus. You talked about how you don't feel totally 100 percent in the zone with your DJing at this moment, and that seemed quite painful for you.

Yes, your mind is only so big. Things literally take up space in your brain. If my mind is free from campaign stuff, that space is filled with tracks and things that I want to do with DJing. Most importantly, it's about the time I have to dedicate to DJing. The late Thursday nights of staying up and going through records and practicing—I haven't had one of those Thursday nights in a long time. I was always going into gigs on a Friday having stayed up late practicing on a Thursday night.

Last year I was doing a gig in Amsterdam, I think Unpolished. It's a big gig, one of the bigger gigs in Amsterdam. And I was definitely thinking about campaign stuff. This is 2 or 3 AM in a massive warehouse and in my head I'm thinking of what I need to say to someone from one of the political parties who had just contacted us. There are lots of things with the campaign that you need to do as fast as you can. Unless you capitalise on certain developments very quickly you miss that opportunity. The last couple of years have been about not letting a second slip. Trying to switch off from that when I travel can be difficult sometimes. This is when I need to check myself and see how I can find some balance.