While punters revel in dancing and debauchery,
the DJ goes to work.
But this isn’t your ordinary office commute. This job requires travel across oceans and continents several times a weekend. It demands being awake for days at a time with the ability to stay focused and creative on demand well into the wee hours of the morning.
With the restrictions easing it is perfect timing to bring clubbing back into the limelight as club culture begins to regain life and punters are itching for the dance floor.
SIDECHAIN is a 8 x 30 min episodic docu-series that explores the emotional impact, mental health and physical toll that live performance and touring takes on DJs and what these DJs are doing to combat that.
Insert Video of DJ fully enjoying large crowd here
The music industry enables behaviours that are not always conducive to people’s positive mental wellbeing. The demands are as high as the adrenalin and the lows are entrenched in everything from sleep deprivation and airport food to withdrawls and loneliness.
Collage of travel, hotel, crap food, working on plane etc images here. The rigours of the job.
The SideChain docu-series aims to enter into heartfelt, artist-led, conversations with DJs that pull back the curtain on what the job of a successful working DJ really looks like and opens the discussion on maintaining a healthy mental and physical wellbeing in the world of professional DJing. It aims to destigmatize the phrase “mental health” and challenge its negative connotation to instead encourage open, honest conversation. Imagine the dual conversation of Comedians in Cars Having Coffee mixed with the intimacy of Song Exploder.
GUESTS.
Bushwacka!
Carl Cox
Jumping Jack Frost
Honey Dijon
Luciano
Paulette
B. Traits
Simon Shackleton
FORMAT.
The proposed format is one in which an artist, armed with a curated set of questions and the help of an off-screen director, has a dialogue with another artist. Each person would appear in two episodes - the first where they are being interviewed and a second where they are interviewing (or talking with) the next DJ, hence the working title SIDECHAIN. Our hope is that this will create common ground allowing each artist to be more vulnerable and open with one another thereby enabling a more intimate conversation about mental health.
TEAM.
Images and short bios of each team member.