"Do You Actually Know Who I Am?"

I can't believe I really said that phrase on Friday night. In a club. To a really famous DJ. A guy called Groove Terminator.

Before I started working for the mag, I was in a club one night and a guy asked me if I was a DJ. If I'm in a certain mood I'll often make stuff up just to see what happens, and although I told him I wasn't a DJ, I wondered what could have happened if I had answered yes. I asked him why he had asked and apparently his friend was convinced that I was Groove Terminator. His friend must have been off his head because I don't look like GT at all. Especially not after the swimming pool/chlorine incident that turned my hair green.

Later on I kept thinking about this, and what could have happened if I had says yes, I am GT. I started writing a story about it called Being Groove Terminator in which I got myself into all sorts of trouble by impersonating GT, someone in the club pointing out that GT was here, the whole club having mass delusion that I was GT and requesting that I do a set... The story goes totally leftfield and I actually become GT. The people in the story are all real life characters, Like The Dreaded One, the guy who asked the question who became a friend in the end etc. I wrote an installment a week and got myself into more and more trouble and just didn't know where I was going with it. It was a fun way to write, and the story - when it finally came out - was popular (at least in the local clubbing scene).

But before it came out, I was telling my hairdresser friend about it and how I was doing it in installments (at the time I was actually sending it out with a corporate newsletter thing... Just started with a few lines and got longer due to popular demand). Anyway, the hairdresser asked if she could be put in the story, so I said yeah sure, and put her in the next installment. She also said her boyfriend worked in the same studio as GT and did I want her to pass on the story when it was finished. Again I said yeah sure.

The story finished at around 5,000 words and I gave it to the hairdresser and forgot about it.

Then one night I was sitting at the computer writing and the phone rang. There was a guy on the line who was still sort of chuckling and there were other people in the background laughing. Turns out the caller was Nigel Tucker, Groove Terminator's manager. He said they were all laughing at the story and could they put it up on GT's website. I said yeah sure.

Maybe a year after that I got the job at the magazine and through the year went along to the Dance Music Awards. I literally bumped into GT and thought fuck it, I'll introduce myself. He remembered the story and said it was very funny... Quite flattering because he is a very funny guy. And I don't know, I just like that story because of its series of coincidences. It just felt like a complete and rounded story all stemming from that one random enquiry.

I've met GT a few times since then and we've chatted and it's all quite normal. But I hadn't seen him in maybe 12 months (think he's based in LA now), and there he was in the club the other night, so I decided to say hello. He said "Hello mate, how are you?" with a friendly smile, and we started to chat. But neurotic Quick took over and I convinced myself that he he was being polite and pretending he knew who I was while going through his memory trying to think of who the hell I might be. Hell, I do that all the time. So I stopped mid-sentence at one point to say, "Do you actually know who I am?"

He laughed and said yes of course, and I must have sounded like the world's biggest twat. It didn't come out at all like it was meant to.

My advice - under no circumstances should the phrase "Do you actually know who I am?" be said, no matter what the intention. Some phrases have powers far too strong for us mere mortals.