It’s been a busy week or two for the 59-year old Detroit man and occasional DJ Derrick May. Despite ongoing attempts by Mr and Mrs Craig – Carl is his friend, Hagi is Carl’s wife as well as manager to both – to rehabilitate May into the DJing world are still not going very well.

Ears To The House recently covered the show May did in Georgia, of all places. Earlier this week, he was performing at Undermoon Festival on a Tuesday night – and he’s due to play in Mallorca tonight. This evening’s gig was only announced yesterday on social media – and as we understand it, the reason for this was because the booking was only made last week.

We spoke a while ago on this site about how booking Derrick May for a show these days poses all kinds of unique challenges that almost no one has – so we thought on this Friday, we’d expand on this and go through the rules which currently exist, as far as we can see…

1. The first rule is that you don’t mention the fact you’ve booked Derrick May to anyone. Not your best friend, not your mother, not anyone. At least not initially anyway. Due to the fact May has been accused of sexual assault and rape by at least 12 different women in the past two years, some people react quite badly to finding out a venue has booked someone like him to play. There are lots of reasons for this, but the gist of it is simple. Tell absolutely nobody about the booking.
2. Whilst continuing to tell absolutely nobody about the booking, you must try and organise everything. Prepare the lineup, get things ready to go up on social media – in short, promote the event. You’re not going to be able to pay the alleged $10,000 fee for booking May if you don’t sell any tickets, are you? Just remember not to tell anyone what you’ve done. Imagine it’s your dirty secret. If you must say something, perhaps throw them off the scent by telling them you’ve booked an unknown called Merrick Day. Hopefully no one will notice.
3. Announce that Merrick Day, sorry Derrick May, will be performing at your venue. Shortly before doing this, you might wish to let the poor sod running your social media pages know that some people can get a bit weird about booking May for shows – so they might need to limit comments on social media or start blocking people who call him things like “sexual predator” and so on. Like the positive comments and pretend the other ones don’t exist by banning them – because that’ll clearly change their minds.
4. When websites like Ears To The House, or journalists like Michael James and Annabel Ross inevitably find out about the gig, be prepared for at least one of the above to write about it. This might be a good time to say nothing or make the claim that “well, Derrick May never did anything inappropriate to me” – despite the fact you’re most likely a 47-year old man whose comment has no relevance to anything anyway.
5. Be prepared to have some photos taken with Derrick May. Try to smile, even if you want to curl up all your toes on the inside. It’s probably part of his contract with you to get some photos to try and give the impression that everything is normal, anyway.
6. Pretty much the second the event is done, immediately move on the conversation on your socials to the next gig. Imagine you’ve just had a colonoscopy – you’d want to talk about something else instead too, wouldn’t you? The bigger the name, the better. Anything to restore your credibility. It’ll inevitably fail to do so, but there we go.

All clear? Probably not – but such is the minefield of booking a man accused of sexual assault and rape who has never made any concerted effort to deny the allegations made against him…