Twenty years
on the floor

I started at sixteen, playing clubs around Sheffield. That's where you learn the only thing that really matters: a floor tells you what it wants, and your job is to listen.

I moved over to Manchester and started working weddings and events alongside the club work. Two decades on, I'm resident at The Ivy in Manchester and I've played more than two hundred weddings: barns, manor houses, hotel ballrooms, warehouses and a fair few marquees in fields.

Everything is mixed live, using current edits and mix tracks so it never sounds like a radio playlist. I read the room rather than run a set. If you've got a list of must-plays, brilliant, send it over. If you'd rather hand the whole night to someone who does this every week, that works too.

Full PA, top-of-the-range Pioneer decks and moving head lighting come as standard. Everything is PAT certified and covered by £2 million public liability, the paperwork most venues will ask you for.

Matt Hydes, Knutsford, Cheshire