Gemma Edwards has been DJing around the South of the UK for a number of years now. Describing herself as a professional emo, she is heavily influenced by the alternative music of the early 2000’s and 2010s that she grew up with, and shares this with her audiences at club nights and festivals around the UK. Her insights into the industry as a female DJ both online and at physical events are at times on one level shocking, to hear of some experiences she’s encountered, but on another level, unfortunately not all surprising. Gemma is very open with her experiences and stands by the importance of sharing these, both good and bad, to help encourage positive change to not only the music world, but filtering over to general society as a whole. I have no doubt that whatever gender you identify as or generation you’re from, there will be something you can take from this.

© Alia Thomas - do not use without permission

Gemma, for those who aren’t aware, could you tell us a little about yourself and what you do?

I'm a self-employed DJ. I have been for 8 years or so, I work on the national club circuit and festivals as well as private events like weddings. I’ve worked with some bigger brands like BAFTA, AEW and Live Nation, but mostly I DJ club nights around the South of England, so all the late night driving sort of stuff.

I know you were actually a photographer initially, and transitioned into the DJ life from there. What type of work did you do as a photographer?

I used to work for a brand called Suicide Girls, which is kind of like an alternative version of Playboy. They are a worldwide brand, so there's staff photographers in most countries and I did that for several years during and after graduating from university. I have done other bits and bobs over the years as well but that was my job primarily, although I don’t do any photography anymore.

So you've always been in the alternative scene with what you do. How did you then transition to DJing?

I get asked this all the time, people want advice on how they can do it and it feels so disappointing to share the unhelpful truth which is that somebody just asked me to DJ one day. It wasn’t my idea, I'd never even considered it and I definitely never imagined that it could end up being my job. My friend at the time was running a club night, it was a rock night, and I think they were struggling to find DJs that really knew the music that they wanted to be playing. At the start they had DJs on board that were good DJs within other genres but getting them to learn decades of culture and references and who was popular when was proving difficult and those are some of the most important things to know that will help you read a room quickly. The kind of DJing I do as a rock DJ is technically fairly simple for the most part, it's more about song selection. Most DJs with rock club residencies are not mixing and scratching or doing any crazy tricks, especially back then. So it was easier for them to teach me the basics of DJing than it was for them to train somebody in decades of music history, because it can be a little bit niche. It doesn't seem so niche now though, it’s had a really big boom again. There was one point at the start of my career where I was DJing three rock nights on one road a week which sounds wild now, because it's just not like that anymore. I think it was, like everything I seem to have done, just the right time, and I was just lucky that it was really popular then which gave the start of my career some really good momentum.

You call yourself a professional emo, playing all the music from that era of the early 2000s, but you DJ online, on Twitch, as well as in the clubs, so apart from the obvious, is there a lot of difference in DJing in clubs to DJing online?

I actually don't think there's a ton of difference, which is why I took to it quite quickly without a lot of the uncomfortableness that a lot of people would feel being online. You're just streaming live with a camera in a room by yourself - you can't see anyone but everyone can see you, you have a chat room instead. I have a full portrait screen that I keep the live chat on with the viewers typing, so that to me is like the dance floor, that's the room. So people will give feedback by either just typing that they’re having fun or using fun emotes (/emojis) - there's dancing emotes or headbanging emotes, ones to symbolise whatever they're doing, so you get that feedback like that. There are times when obviously that's not happening, but that can happen in a real club as well and I do struggle actually when I'm not getting my energy reciprocated. I kind of run out of energy eventually which is difficult on camera because you could end up just standing around looking bored, but you know, it happens to the best of us, and that does happen in clubs as well. The easier part, I suppose, is because you can't see and feel everyone as easily as you can ‘in real life’, if you're playing something that would kill the dance floor in real life you don’t necessarily know about it.

When I'm DJing in person at a venue, there’s quite a lot of pressure to not ruin the energy on the dance floor, and I feel like people are fairly sensitive to that now. If people don't know a single song, that's like the end of the world. I don't think it used to be like that when I started. A song you didn’t know or like just meant if you really didn't want to listen to it you could go to the toilet, you could go get a drink, you could go and smoke outside, whatever it was. So there is a lot of pressure now. As soon as you play something that someone doesn't like, people make that very obvious and then you need to scramble to get out of it. Whereas online if I've got 200 people watching, there's never going to be 200 people typing whether they love the song or don't love the song. Most people don't ever type anything at all. So you have a much smaller selection of people that are actually reacting. So although there's still lulls in the activity, it's not quite as in your face because you can't see them. If you play something in a club to 200 people and only five people are saying how much they love this song, in the chatroom those five people are the only five people writing and fill the chat room, so then that’s a huge boost of energy, but I also find on Twitch, I get a lot of comments from people asking what the song I’m playing is because they really like it and want to add it to their playlist which is great. That almost never happens in person. If people just don't know it from the first few seconds, you're getting faces, eye rolls, or people will just shout to change the song or something. They’re often joking, but not joking, and I'm normally sober and, it probably depends on my mood that night, but I can be quite sensitive to that sometimes, which can then kill my vibe. It can happen on Twitch as well but I don’t feel so affected by it on there.

I suppose the difference is Twitch is like you're in my house, so if people don't like it, it doesn't really offend me because they can be anywhere else on any other stream, they haven’t paid entry, they don't have to move venues or leave their friends, they don’t even have to move from their chair. One click of the mouse and you can just close the tab or move onto YouTube for a second. If you really want to hear a certain song so badly, play it on Spotify right now and then come back for the next song. Whereas when I do club nights I'm booked by an external promoter, so I'm not necessarily representing only myself, I'm representing somebody else's brand so there's less leeway.

Okay, for people like me who don't really know anything about DJing or that world, what is it like to be a DJ? I appreciate you have touched upon it a bit already in terms of the pressures in the club versus online.

I think a lot of people would probably be surprised to hear that it's quite solitary. You have a two-hour drive there on your own and then you're on stage for say four or five hours, for me that’s on my own. A lot of DJs have someone with them, but I'm on my own for the duration of my set and then a two-hour drive back on my own. My partner will then be at work during the day. Out of the week you can only really make money Friday and Saturday, but there's other work to do as a self employed person. There's always admin, learning, finding music and invoicing and boring things but pretty much Fridays and Saturdays you're out of commission forever. I almost never take a Friday or Saturday off because it isn't like you're losing one day of pay. It's like you're losing a week really because you can't just ‘do it tomorrow’ because there is only those Fridays and Saturdays that are the big jobs, which is when everybody has their birthday parties, family stuff, anything important like that. You miss out on a lot unless you're in a place where you can afford to lose the money, which Twitch has really helped me with because it means I can earn money elsewhere. But even on Twitch my stream wouldn't be received the same on a Tuesday as it would on a Saturday because the way I've positioned my channel is kind of like a Saturday night club night, so it's just not the same vibe during the week. People are not drinking and going to bed early because they have work, so it's a little bit different, but I really love my job, especially the emo stuff because that was my sort of peak obsession with music when I was like 12, 13, so to be able to play those songs as a job is a dream. Being able to do that full time is amazing, and some nights are better than others, obviously, but having that energy of everyone singing my favourite songs from my youth is great. A lot of my crowds are creeping up to or over 30 so they come to these throwback nights to reminisce and I think that's really nice. Festival season is when it gets a little bit more like camaraderie for me because you have a lot of DJs working various sections of the festival. So that's the one time of the year when I'll really see other DJs. The rest of the year, because I don't have an in-house residency at a club and I do traveling club nights instead, I'm usually the only person in the building that is there for that brand. So everyone else, you know, the bar and venue manager etc, we're not employed by the same person and I might only see the same person once every three or four months, so you don’t get to know many people well.

And do you travel all over the UK for these things?

I actually don't travel super far, I limit the distance now or I just end up getting run down. If I finish a club night at three in the morning, it can be like five or six a.m. by the time I get home. I have a car, so I just drive straight home instead of paying for hotels. I get paid quite well for what I do because I don't charge for a hotel on top so it would be out of my own pocket in those cases. Usually if I do a festival, then because I don’t want to camp, I'll be paying for my own accommodations for the duration which adds up. Generally I have a two-hour travel limit but to be honest, even that is pushing it. I've really felt over the last few years that I do struggle with all the travelling. I spend a lot of time in the week on an almost normal schedule, so to go from that to starting work at 11 p.m. and getting home at 5 or 6 a.m, it does throw you a bit - or I might just be getting old and enjoying sleep more! I try and nap before a late drive now so I won’t be so tired that it would be dangerous driving home, and obviously if it is then I just have to pull over and I've done that before. I've had to go to services and nap in my car for a bit. So I try to not go too far now for that reason, but then you are limited with the jobs that you're getting. So again you need to be in a position where that's viable. For me, having Twitch is what makes that viable. If I had to turn down work on a Friday or Saturday I'll stream instead, and I generally make more money streaming than I make DJing anyway. It's actually been quite empowering to be able to turn down jobs that are badly paid or too far away because I have that plan B, but it's a tough balance nonetheless.

It's interesting to know that you can potentially make more from online DJ work - I suppose that wouldn’t be widely known generally.

Yeah, I think a lot of DJs are finding this post-pandemic. A lot of DJs still DJ because that's the job, they want to do it, there is nothing like an energised room in person, but often the cooler the gigs are, the lower the rates can be. So a lot of people aren't making a tonne of money for some of those gigs, but on stream you have very minimal expenses really, other than initially buying your equipment to stream which is a lot of money. Once it's all in place there's no loss and then you just go to bed in the next room.

So you've just talked about what the DJ world is like in general, but what's it like being a female DJ in the DJ world? As I say, I don't know much about it, so is it still very male dominated or has it got a lot better, and how does the situation differ now from when you started?

I would say it's getting a lot better, but the music industry overall is still not great. There's a lot more women on festival lineups in general than there ever were, but it’s still not balanced, and it's kind of the same with DJs. You see a lot more women DJing now but not necessarily headlining, the same as bands. A lot of women on the lineup, but they're very, very rarely headline spots. When I first started DJing, I was the token female DJ where I worked, and that wasn't just my feeling - they said that to me. That was the point of why I existed there, and that then became a factory of creating women DJs, because after I left, they got another one, and another one, and another one. A lot of us started the same way, which of course everyone is glad to have started at all, but it wasn't necessarily with the best intentions. Im glad we all know each other now, though. You get used to ignoring bad behaviour and mistreatment, especially when you feel lucky to be there so it all became a lot clearer once I started talking to other women with the same experiences. I then went straight from that to a Suicide Girls club night, who I worked for when I was a photographer. At that time they had a massive worldwide burlesque tour. Off the back of that, they started a monthly London club night and brought me on board with them. That was all women - everyone from promo to social media, dancers, DJs, venue manager. Every job role was a woman, and there was normally two or three of us DJing. Post that, I think there's still a little bit of tension sometimes. Instead of not getting bookings because you’re a woman men will say, “people just book you because you’re a woman. They want to look good and be seen to be doing that.” You do still get that a little bit.

Do you think there is some truth in that still?

Yes but I do think it's changing for the better. Inclusivity and representation rarely happens passively, you have to be really active about that and I know that can feel forced for some people, especially for men that are having to step aside when they have never had to share that space before. I can see how it comes off negatively, but it has to change at some point. Promoters are suddenly starting to look at their roster and think, “we've got six white men, this makes us look bad” and I’m sure some of them probably are only doing it because they know that it's bad, but I guess that's how change happens. Again, it's not necessarily with the best intentions. It's because of how it comes across on social media, you know, what are people going to say next time they see this line up. I get a lot of women saying how cool they think it is to do this, which is really nice, but for me, I don't think I'd even notice a woman DJing now because I know so many. When I was younger, I don't think you saw that at all. Maybe a couple of radio personalities, but there definitely wasn't women just DJing generally like there is now, there was no representation at all. You wouldn't go to a bar and see a female DJ, or go to a wedding and have a woman DJing. It just wasn't a thing. I feel like now it is more normalised - that side of the representation issue is definitely getting better.

People still find it hard to believe that I’m a DJ sometimes though. There have been times when I’m working and a male friend will happen to be talking to me, has never touched the decks, and people still think he's the DJ. He has to tell them, whilst i’m literally at the decks working, that I’m the DJ and not him! One guy said to him “oh but you're the one picking the songs right? You're telling her what to play?” It seems to be a common assumption that if you’re a woman you can’t possibly be the DJ. I’ve not been let into venues or on stage before because security don’t believe that I’m the DJ that’s supposed to be up there, despite having the same accreditation as everyone else, the correct accreditation that I need to be on the stage to do my job, and it happens every summer at at least one festival. Sometimes they'll ask me for proof besides the official accreditation - I've had my decks on me before and they still want some mystery other proof. It can happen to everyone at times but it does feel like a certain type of security guard just assumes you are a fan trying to get backstage, it's pretty frustrating especially when you’re in a rush.

You mentioned working festivals… You’ve worked the likes of Download which is huge. What other ones have you worked so far?

Last year I did Download, Reading Festival, 2000Trees, Arctangent, and Boardmasters. Boardmasters is insane. It's a silent disco, and the first time I got asked to do it, they must have asked me the week before? In terms of England I am one of the most local DJs, (but it's still at least four hours away, so it's not exactly local) and for some reason I assumed it would be maybe around a thousand people. Quite often at festivals you'll have DJs, but you will have different tents of DJs at the same time, at Download the main tent in the evening can be up to 10,000 people, and the second one up to 5,000 plus a smaller stage elsewhere. So I just assumed this would be a smaller tent somewhere with maybe 1,000 people. The festival itself is a lot smaller than Download, which is around 90,000 people, and Boardmasters is maybe 50,000 - so just over half. Anyway, no one told me - I guess they probably thought I knew - but I found out just before I went on stage that 25,000 headphones had gone out for the silent disco. It doesn't necessarily mean 25,000 people are on your channel at once, but that's how many people are there for it overall. Last year it was 32,000 headphones that went out, so it was even more. That is still baffling to me. They do it on the main stage there, which again is very unusual. Normally at a festival we have a dedicated separate area like an afterparty where the DJs are but Boardmasters put you right on the main stage - the biggest stage I've ever been on in my life. They have screens about the same size as this room we’re in - huge! They put my name, Instagram, logo, stuff like that on there, which most festivals don't do at all so it's kind of crazy to get all of that from one of the biggest ones. The crowd are a lot younger there as well. I'm quite used to a 35-year-old crowd when I'm DJing but these guys were mostly teenagers, so they come out at 7pm and just go mad the whole night loving every song. Really high energy, and with it being on the beach you can watch the sun setting on the beach at the same time. It's just amazing.

Do you get to know how many people did listen to your channel that night?

No, only how many headphones have gone out. So you assume all those people are listening to someone, and the main stage is obviously where most of them are. Last year was different because I did it on my own. So I think I had an hour and a half or so and it was only me on the main stage, whereas the year before there was two of us on stage like a DJ battle.

So in that situation was it another female DJ you were “up against”?

No, it was a male DJ I know. I didn't know what to expect having never been on a main stage before. I'm not big on mic work - I will use the mic but I'm not a DJ that talks a lot to the crowd, and I do think it is a little bit different for men, and realistically some of this is probably internalised anxiety, but I just don't think a lot of people want to hear a woman on the microphone and men have more opportunities to ‘perform’ a bit more without being accused of sexualising themselves or inviting harassment etc - they're taking their top off, they're getting down into the crowd. I can't do that personally, I don't feel like I can safely get down off the stage (or more to the point get back up as I’m short) or go into a crowd. You're slightly limited as to how you can perform in a visual way without feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, you know? Anyway, he is a lot more experienced as a DJ than me so probably more prepared as well so the first night he had the crowd on his channel for like the whole first half of the night. It was the first time I'd worked for this company as well so I felt really embarrassed, like ‘am I doing a terrible job’, and I wasn’t but when it’s a silent disco it's not like you can play a good song and get them on your channel because they can't hear you! So it doesn't matter how good the song is, you literally have to wait for the other person to play something that they’re less keen on, and then grab them on your channel and not let them go. I have been too considerate in silent disco battles previously. I’d feel bad when I'm hogging the crowd and would get worried wondering if the other DJ was feeling rubbish because you can see another DJ's energy dip, as mine does, it does suck - even half and half sucks. Most DJs want the crowd response and you need a large majority to be able to hear them over people singing on the other channel. Quite often I've done more of a general pop event but I've been the rock channel which obviously isn’t going to be the popular channel. It’s like the biggest b-side channel for those that don't want to listen to pop. Of course you don't expect everyone to be on your channel, and it's still fun, but when it's something like Boardmasters there wasn't really any stipulation of what you should or shouldn't play, and I was a proper commercial channel there so we were kind of probably almost dancing on similar lines at times and you do get used to your own flow as a DJ. There’s songs you play at 7pm and there's songs you play at 11pm and songs you play at 1am, so a lot of DJs change it up at a Silent Disco and go in at 7pm with the peak songs because you want to get the crowd and I just hadn't really considered that because I'm probably a little bit hard and fast with the rules on that sort of thing. You know, you don't play Mr Brightside at 7pm because what are you going to play at the end of the night? But those rules tend to go out of the window with the silent disco - it can get very competitive, but luckily I had been booked for two nights, so the second night I came back and I knew exactly what I was getting into and it was a lot better that night. I really enjoyed myself and definitely had my fair share of crowd time! Plus, they asked me back the next year which is always a good feeling.

You mentioned earlier it was a bit of a concern of yours about going into the crowd and feeling uncomfortable, unsafe. Is this something you’ve experienced before?

Not so much being in the crowd at a larger event whilst DJing, but it’s happened to me as a woman in clubs before. I'm probably a shyer person in that respect anyway and wouldn’t be comfortable with loads of strangers touching me and my body, so I wouldn't necessarily be pushing myself out of my comfort zone in that way but I've definitely had people make very inappropriate, disgusting comments. When you're on the big stages people can't really do anything - you're enjoying this energy and this night together but you're out of arm's reach and people can't necessarily say anything horrible to you as you wouldn’t hear it, but in a lot of smaller club nights or pubs and bars, you’re at floor level and people can talk to you the whole night. Sometimes they mean well but are just a bit creepy, or you know oftentimes they're trying to flirt with you, and then sometimes they are just straight up inappropriate and, for me it's always older men saying inappropriate things for the sake of it. Less so now but I could maybe give them the benefit of the doubt too much before, where you think you misheard what he said. There was one guy that said something really gross to me, and it was frustrating because I genuinely didn’t hear what he said initially, then he just said it again, and once I’d heard what it was and it was something disgusting, I was so annoyed at myself that I'd let him say it to me twice because I was thinking he was asking for a song, so it's just horrible and embarrassing. Some venues are better than others with security - it's only been the last couple years I have at times said on the microphone for security to head to the stage because I want this person gone and I would have never done that five years ago. Back then I would have just put up with it for the entire duration of the night - it really ruins my night as well, I can totally kill my vibe when it’s kind of my job to look fun.

That's probably quite a mental toll on you.

Yeah it can be, but those experiences all add up to help you help others. You have a pretty good view of the room from the stage so you can see men creeping around women in the crowd. I have a pretty good radar for it now and I'll clock someone walking in and heading straight over to a group of girls. I think most girls will know what I mean when I say they're trying to get in your circle, try and talk to them, and you know the girls will say they don't want to talk to you and turn around, but they just keep on trying and start touching them in an over familiar way and hovering around but women don't want to complain because nothing's technically happened yet, and a lot of security will also agree with that but I want them out of here before they assault someone because that is often what he's leading up to doing. There’s all sorts of red flags that you keep an eye on so quite often I'll have to come down and ask the girls first that they’re okay. Usually they say they’re used to it, some say they're not okay but they'll deal with it but on this one occasion a particular guy did it again so I personally went and spoke to him, he left but came back into the room to the opposite corner to a different group of women and started doing the exact same thing - I obviously clocked him straight away and he was saying he’s just trying to make friends but they're only ever trying to make friends with young girls, no men their own age. I do wonder how many male DJs look out for stuff like that.

Something else I’ve noticed especially over the last few years is that people can be really quite entitled towards DJs and get quite angry about wanting their request played and wanting it played now, wanting it played again. People have been really aggressive towards me, continuously throughout the night, and I wonder if I was a big muscular guy, would you be talking to me like that? You're not worried about me because I'm five foot two. There’s also a certain level of concern in the back of my mind as to how people may act after the night - are people gonna follow me to my car if I've really annoyed them, if I've had them thrown out. It's never happened before but it's still in the back of your mind when you’re alone.

I completely understand. Unfortunately it's one of those things where we’re told that women aren’t safe walking the streets at night on their own, therefore these things do cause some discomfort, you can't help it, and understandably from what we know of the things we hear and read in the news.

Totally. Some venues are definitely better than others but generally security is getting better. I think you can say now to a security guard if someone’s hassling you. They won't necessarily throw the person out straight away but they'll definitely keep an eye on them and may even know them from previous complaints so its always worth mentioning. I've had bad experiences in the past where, for example this one particular guy who was talking to me all night, trying to flirt but was just negging me and verging on harassing, it went on for hours but he then complained to the manager about me to say that I had been rude to him. I just said I didn’t want to talk to him any more and asked him to leave me to my work. Then I caught him talking to the manager about me on my way out, lying about what happened, I interrupted to explain what actually happened but by that point they had him leave as the venue was closed. When I spoke to the manager they were very much on my side agreeing that he had harrassed me the whole night and they didn’t like how he was speaking about the sitution, but they then said that they had essentially agreed with him to make him shut up. By doing that, the guy who had acted inappropriately left the event believing he was right. They had given him the message that it was ok to do what he did and I really didn’t like that, I didn’t feel supported by that solution or that they had really understood the impact at all.

And then it's not just going to be you that it happens to - the next female DJ that comes in, he or someone else will potentially do something similar so it begs the question of why people aren’t being more proactive about such circumstances in these sorts of spaces?

I think when change is coming, those are one of the last things to change - people will happily passively support you but when it gets a little more uncomfortable and it’s the end of the night, they just want them to go away and I do understand that but when something has bothered you it’s shouldn’t be passed by so dismissively. I used to work in retail and it was the same kind of thing, somebody shouts complaints at you for half an hour but then they get given something free to go away, and it's just reinforcing bad behavior. It’d be a lot better and more appreciated if they said, “please don't abuse our stuff.” Interestingly you do see a lot more women security guards nowadays, especially at festivals, which is nice to see.

Do you think that helps or has a different effect in some circumstances? Maybe not necessarily with security but in other areas of life. Do you feel that women should be standing up for other women more in certain situations?

Yeah definitely. I can think of the one time I actually reported something to a woman and she wasn't helpful, which seems crazy because you would have thought there would be some more understanding or awareness. I think some of it's generational, as I certainly don’t see a lot of younger women working in security. I believe some of it is also due to the fact that everyone’s views will be different on certain things - when you see a sliding scale of harassment from one to ten every single day, something at a 3 doesn't really matter to you today, because you're more worried about the big problems going on, but actually to another individual you never know what they’ve already been through previously. General harassment can still be quite affecting to people.

Of course. I assume there will be difficult and inappropriate people on Twitch too at times, especially with how big a place the internet is. Do you ever find it particularly challenging on there?

You do also get a lot of harassment on Twitch as a woman, and I think working with Suicide Girls beforehand made me very attuned to the internnet unfortunately, in respect of women, so I’m probably sensitive to the smaller things because I know where they lead. I’ll see what’s coming in the chat before it’s happening, because I know exactly who that kind of person is from the first thing they wrote, I’ve seen that kind of person before and other people won’t necessarily understand it until it becomes overtly abusive. There’s a lot of more niche sexual harrassment too, people collect clips of streamers doing all sorts of very normal things, so I’ve become a bit paranoid to doing anything like eating on camera, yawning, hiccuping, sneezing… Most people probably yawn happily and nothing ever happens to them, but then one day you find some compilation of female streamers yawning and it’ll be considered like a form of porn basically!

I try not to make it obvious when someone has hurt my feelings though because I don’t want everyone else to know or give trolls the satisfaction as a lot of people are online just to upset others for fun,. There’s been a couple times where I’ve had to turn my camera off and just have a moment to myself because I really don’t want to cry or look visibly sad on camera, but I just need a sulk for a minute - I don't want you looking at me forcing a smile or forcibly trying to look fun. Both Twitch and DJing are similar in that respect - anything can happen. You have to go and DJ on the stage, jump around and bring the energy even when you've got a nauseating migraine. It’s happened before, and I've had to leave stage multiple times to be sick and then go straight back on like nothing’s happened. Of course you can cancel, but in most places they’re not going to find someone to fill in within that short time frame and because of that, you may not work with them again because you've let them down massively. So it doesn't really matter what's happening. It was different with Covid as the sick day was pretty much a legal requirement. That was probably when I learned to take sick days to be honest. I still don't take them very often. I generally feel like I get sick from work so I'm rarely that sick at work.

So it sounds like you're quite considered with what you do and what you show. I appreciate if anyone's on stage there’s a lot of consideration in terms of what they wear for stage outfits and I suppose it’s the same for streaming as that is a ‘stage’ for you too…

Yes, which is a shame because I feel like I can't wear anything that could be seen as trying to be sexy unless I want to deal with awful comments all night that wear me and the moderators down, so I generally wear a t-shirt and jeans and I still get hassle from it. Again it's more trolls, they just want to make you feel uncomfortable, you get the opposite reaction where people will say “finally a girl has actually got clothes on” which frustrates me as, you can't win.

I don't know much about Twitch as a whole but it’s good to know that you've got Moderators on your channel helping you filter the inappropriate people and content out. Are they employed or is it voluntary help like this?

No they're just my friends, it's a voluntary position and different channels will have different amounts of work that the mods will do so some are paid for big streams. I stream once a week for four hours, so it’s not that much, and I'm at the laptop throughout stream so I do a lot of mod work myself, but it’s great to have help to monitor if people say inappropriate things and kind of keep the good vibe on course. If somebody just came in and said something blatantly racist and disgusting, the moderators can just delete them and then that person's gone - if they do it quick enough it normally means everyone else in the chat hasn't even seen it yet. Occasionally it'll be something I want to address but other times it’s tricky as it’s not always in English so can take a while to work out what they are getting at.

I feel like we’ve covered a lot in this conversation - thank you for sharing so much. I’d love to round things off by finding out from you what you love most about your job. You’ve been honest with all the challenges you’ve come across, but despite that you’ve kept going with it. What’s kept you continuing to DJ both online and in clubs, and what advice or words of wisdom would you give to young girls and women aspiring to become DJs themselves?

I just love it, it’s my dream job and particularly with what’s been going on in the world the last few years it’s so rewarding to give people a space to let go and unlock forgotten, happy memories as well as creating new ones.

Each generation the social climate expands what we feel comfortable talking about with our friends, family and publicly. 10 years ago we weren’t even having these conversations but now these topics and similar often included in the general discourse which is great. As long as we are actively engaged in being inclusive and supporting diverse representation wherever and whenever we can, the landscape around you will change for the better. I also wherever possible book women whether that’s for art & design jobs for my own brand, if we need a photographer at a festival or if I need cover for one of my gigs. I know it’s been said to death but we need to lift each other up and that is a great, low effort way to do that.

Being able to connect with like-minded women with shared lived experiences has improved my reality tenfold, I’d really recommend putting some effort in to see what’s out there in terms of networks or creating your own. Not just for rants which is of course completely invaluable but to ask advice and share information - whether that be to do with pay or safety concerns. Sharing those stories is a great way to arm each other with added information, it’s only ‘gossiping’ and ‘bitching’ when it’s women. Keep talking!

Huge thank you to Gemma for all her honesty and insights into her experiences as a female DJ. There’s a lot to be taken from this conversation, and I hope something hits for all who read it.

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A Conversation with Gemma Edwards