Thanks very much mate.... to be honest though, I did very little on this one. We know Lena a little from DJ-ing in Germany but it was Liza's idea to try and book her, then Liza contacted her and she agreed to play for us (and at a very reasonable price), then it was Liza's idea to make it an all women thing and after that she did all of work in terms of dealing with her agency and also with the venues, and she found the guy who did the posters. And she put the posters up (having even mixed up the glue). When you get right down to it, my main role was picking Lena up from the airport and driving her around for food and stuff and just being there as a kind of general dogsbody in case anything was ever needed (but it never was). Having spent more time with her like that I realise that she is a really lovely person. Great DJ who can play totally crazy stuff and take the notoriously conservative Lisbon crowd with her, but also really sweet to hang around with.
And this is what we hope to do in future, obviously we can't compete with Lux in terms of the money that we offer but what we can do is, instead of putting guests up in a faceless hotel and giving them the standard "artist's dinner" we can let them stay in our flat and if they want to have a holiday we show them around the town and so on. Lena said that she knew that she could trust us to look after her like that but she didn't realise that the party would be better than any of the times she had played before in Portugal - also she really liked the smaller place and said that no-one books her for that intimate sort of thing any more.
I'm hoping that if we can do a few events where the DJ has loads of fun playing AND enjoying hanging around for a few days then maybe word will get around a bit and more people will be interested to play. And at the same time, if we can keep booking good people and putting on good parties then maybe people in Lisbon will start to see us as a mark of quality and will trust us when we have slightly smaller names... I dunno, that's the dream but with Covid it's all totally in the balance of course. DJ Assault played a couple of weeks before but they changed the rules after I bought the ticket and I thought I couldn't go so I made other plans... and then they changed the rules back and I could have gone but I missed out. I was really worried that something like that could happen and mess up the whole thing for us.