Stage fright: I'm a professional DJ and these are my tips on how to overcome nerves on stage

As you watch DJs at festivals like this weekend’s Tomorrowland, don’t let your nerves hold you back from trying DJing yourself. In this exclusive extract from Phil's book "Rock the Dancefloor!" he shares his top tips for overcoming nerves wherever you're taking the stage.

The first time I got to DJ in a bar I’d wanted to play, right at the start of my DJ career, I spent weeks practising. I was so worried that I prepared the whole set and had it all written out on a small card – even though, realistically, my hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold it.

A few years later when I was well and truly established as a DJ, I was playing at 5am at Privilege in Ibiza in front of thousands. I had to walk a gangplank across the swimming pool (yes, there is a swimming pool inside that club!) to get to the DJ booth. When I got there at 10pm, I was so consumed by nerves that I used my VIP pass to find somewhere nobody I knew could possibly find me and hid for seven hours, talking to nobody, feeling ill to the core, missing all the fun.

Oh yes, I understand DJ’s nerves. Which is why I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned over the years about performance anxiety so you can hopefully deal with it and move on to play great DJ sets yourself.

Why we get nervous

People forget that DJing is performing, it’s being up on stage. It’s slipping into character, just like singers and actors do. They are allowed to be nervous before a performance, and so are you. In fact, it would be strange if you didn’t get nervous before a gig. After all, you’re quite likely in an unfamiliar place, you’ve considered in graphic detail what could go wrong, and in the quiet before the storm, those imminent good times feel so impossible an outcome that your irrational mind decides they’re simply not going to happen. Self-doubt creeps in. You start asking yourself what the hell you’re doing there at all.

The thing is, all of this is perfectly normal, and it’s because you care – pure and simple. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t feel any of this because you wouldn’t be invested in the outcome. Once you’ve reminded yourself of this, it’s simply a case of dealing with the feelings. Luckily, there are things we can do.

Conquering DJ nerves

There are three tactics I use when I get nervous, and in my experience of coaching DJs in our online courses, they help a lot to get you out the other side of the often-unavoidable pre-gig nerves.

1. Remember that nobody can see your nerves.

Remember what’s going on inside doesn’t show on the outside if you don’t let it. My girlfriend – now wife – used to come into the DJ booth when I was in my first hour of warming up a club night I used to promote and DJ at. I’d be smiling away, dancing a bit, shaking hands with people as they arrived, giving familiar faces a nod and a thumbs up. She’d be having a great time herself. Making sure the crowd couldn’t see me, I’d sometimes then turn to her and rather uncharitably growl, ‘I’m playing awfully. There’s nobody here. It’s going to be a disaster. How many times do I have to remind you I’m working? Can’t you leave me alone?’ Nerves. I wanted her to understand that because I didn’t want to fake it in front of her, but week after week she still found it hard to believe I was feeling like that on the inside compared to the impression I was giving everyone else on the outside. You have to remember that some of your crowd might be feeling nervous too, simply about their night out. Your job is to lead from the front, however you feel inside. This is one time where faking it until you make it is perfectly fine.

2. Have a well-rehearsed plan B.

By the time you get to play your DJ gig, you’ll have at some point considered everything from nobody dancing (I still have this as a recurring dream, by the way, three decades into my DJing career) to the music suddenly cutting out (ditto), and all the other things that might possibly go wrong. The trick is to face head-on all of these fears, ask yourself, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ then decide how you’d behave to get out the other side.Having a selection of guaranteed floor-filler tracks in your library to use if all else fails can calm your nerves. Having a rehearsed plan B should your laptop crash or USB drive fail will help you push that worry from your mind. Work through your ‘what if’ list, and remember that DJing isn’t brain surgery or flying a passenger jet – nobody gets killed if you don’t perform at your best.

3. Remember it’s going to pass.

Sometimes in life, even though we know the outcome of something, we can’t change how we feel through the process. I’ve run marathons throughout my adult life, and regularly put in fifty or more miles of training a week. You’d think I’d have that one all worked out, right? Yet often when I start off on a training run early on a cold morning I find my brain telling me, ‘What are you doing? You’re not going to get around this circuit. Stop, you can’t do this...’ It never gets any better. Yet ninety minutes later, pulling up outside my door feeling great, I realise that the horrible feeling lasted just a few minutes right at the start.

It’s the same with DJing – only DJing doesn’t hurt so much. I actually believe it’s impossible to stay in that highly stressful mental state for too long, and simply pushing on with what you’ve got to do is all that’s needed to come through it. With DJing, it might take twenty minutes or it might take an hour, but sooner or later, you’ll relax and realise you’ve been having fun for a while now. Job done! You’re out the other side. Have faith, because this nearly always happens.

‘It’s not all about you, petal...’

A good friend of mine and a great DJ, Dan Bewick, once gave a talk at one of our DJ seminars and this was one of his pieces of advice. Really, it’s all about realising that as the DJ, your job is a great one, but there’s a lot more going on at any venue – some of which you can influence, some of which you can’t. The best you can do is constantly remind yourself of that and play your part as well as you possibly can.

If it’s practical to do so, occasionally leave the DJ booth and spend a bit of time with the audience, seeing the night from their point of view. Put on a long song, go and get a drink, make an excuse to pop out quickly and greet somebody you know. Not sure what direction to take the night in once you’ve got everyone dancing? Head out to the floor and ask yourself, ‘What would I want to hear next if I was here on a night out?’

Of course, this isn’t always possible, but do it if you can. Ultimately, it’ll remind you that ‘it’s not all about you, petal’. Combine this with the knowledge that nobody else can see your nerves, that you have a well rehearsed back-up plan, and that this feeling won’t last forever and you’ll be a better and less nervous DJ as a result.

Extract by Phil Morse (Founder/CEO of Digital DJ Tips) from the best-selling book "Rock the Dancefloor!", of which the second edition is now available on Amazon and in all good bookshops.