Following this blog’s post yesterday where my ever so helpful insider gave me all the latest from inside clubland on the issue of vaccine passports, a few people got in touch to ask a slightly different question. If vaccine passports were introduced and clubs were to keep booking anti-vaxxer DJs, could they potentially lose their licences later on?

My insider explained yesterday that many clubs don’t treat DJs in the same way as the clubbers, mostly because the relationship is different from a legal point of view. As I understand it, clubbers are paying money at the door to attend, whereas DJs are being paid to attend and are effectively treated as short-term contractors – which is leaving clubs rather uncertain exactly how they should treat these DJs.

However, the question over licenses is an interesting one. As I’ve written about before, nightclubs in the UK and many other countries around the world operate within a hostile environment – which in many cases would frankly prefer they didn’t exist. The clubs themselves are often given licences by the local council in that area – and the licence applications are frequently assessed by people who have literally no idea about nightclubs.

This means that questions can quite easily arise from past negative media coverage. For example, let’s say that a club was to be discovered as the source of a major Covid-19 outbreak in that area. You can bet your bottom dollar that the council would ask all sorts of questions about that, mostly from people who consider being out at 9pm a late night.

If a club had a reputation for repeatedly booking anti-vaxxer DJs whilst insisting their own attendees are double jabbed, it would inevitably raise questions about why DJs were being exempt from the rules everyone else had to apply,  And if they don’t have an answer to that question in front of the licensing panel, they might as well rip up their application form on the spot.

There’s only one other possibility. I’ve heard rumours this week about two different DJs who spend a lot of time on social media saying dangerous nonsense about the Covid vaccine. Yet I understand that these two gentlemen are, in fact, fully vaccinated themselves. Apparently, they’ve both been putting this stuff on social media because they know it gets widely shared. A despicable strategy if correct.

I can’t confirm at the moment whether these rumours are true – but I do know there’s far too many DJs in the scene who will do quite literally anything in order to get booked. And this doesn’t seem one stretch of the imagination too far to me…