DJ Kidson
aka John Kidson
Biography
Kidson has been involved with the music scene for a few years now, but not in the lime light, but behind the scenes promoting events. With a list of successful events behind him and many more to come, Kidson is stepping forward and showing his love for the scene and the music even more…
John Kidson: “Just pre hand to announcing this all my focus and time has been taken up by my events. But I can’t hold it off anymore, I’ll still be running my brands with bigger plans than before.”
You will find Kidson when DJ’ing live in clubland mainly playing, Breaks, Nu Rave and Drum & Bass. This is a different story once on the radio though, a large tune selection will always happen covering his early Hip Hop routes to current day tracks he maybe feeling at the time.
Background…
Since a very young age (John Kidson) aka Kidson has always been into music, from Drum and Bass, Pop, Hip Hop, anything to keep his mind going.
John Kidson: I moved to London in 2006, before I lived in Hastings. I mainly moved for work reasons, but also to follow my music love as much as I could. Once settled in I started to learn more about the rave scene within London. Over a 6 month period I visited most of the main London venues at the time, trying to work out who runs which brand. This put me onto the path of Vinyl Vera. A lovely lady who has played a large part in my music life and still does to this day!
When meeting Vera I was just at the starting point of setting up my first ever website called this ClubingCity.co.uk. This site isn’t around anymore as i didn’t run this for long, I will explain more later. The aim of Clubing City was to help join music fans. It was a simple online forum, I learned as I went along. A painful way, but it worked. Vinyl Vera was the first person I interviewed for the site, and with Vera’s help this led onto me interviewing Charlie (Fantazia Promoter), Food Junky (DJ), Robbie Dee (MC) plus a few others I sadly can’t think of as I write this.
Just around the start of 2007 I went up to Cambridge to meet a guy called Grant Epidemik. At the time he was running his brand Epidemik @ The Junction club. I helped out on the night, putting banners up, flyering at the end ect.. And I was hooked, it wasn’t long before the Clubing City website closed down and I jumped on board with Epidemik, helping promote, flyering and website work. I took every chance I could to learn as much as I could from everyone around me and very quickly I became good friends with household names within the rave scene. I’m not sure if it was Grant’s intention or not, but a lot of his promotional skills I picked up as time went on. Always watching how this music scene runs, loving every event, and flyering at 6am every weekend. It sounds mad I know, but you can’t beat knowing whats going on. 
Towards the end of 2007 I was driving myself mad, I really wanted to run an event myself. Nothing huge, as I learned very quickly that its all to easy to put money into something and just think it will work!. I went venue hunting to find that right venue, this brings Vinyl Vera back in the picture as she had invited me to a party called OOPs. I went along with a friend DJ Flashback, we were working very closely at the time on his website, music, promotion ect.. I fell in love with the venue , very small but it had that extra touch over all the other venues I had been to so far. I don’t think I have found a venue to match it yet either. It was called The Fortress Studios in London. And before the night was over I had booked the venue for my first ever event ; The K2 Sessions. Also around this time I started running radio shows with DJ Excess, Steve Charms and Skyz. All these where broadcasted on Eruption FM.
Fast forward a year to 2008. I held about 8 events at The Fortress, and luckily for me they all went down very well. As most people do, I had the bug to push myself more, so I moved around a few venues around London such as Ministry of Sound, Gramaphone, The Factory, and The London Stone.
I would say 2009 was the main year for me so far. I started DJ’ing early in the year. I moved my event brand and held a summer event @ The Rhythm Factory. Also within this summer I put a bid in and took over the well known rave website www.Nu-Rave.com This sent me into a new side of the music, selling vinyl and digital online also running an online radio station. For the rest of this year I had my head down, upgrading and pushing the Nu Rave website. I also picked up a nice selection of gigs in this year aswell. Whilst this year was flying past me I managed to meet the Different Drumz lads, a nice mix of DJs, Promoters and MC’s which still to this day I work with on a mixture of projects.
Now things were starting to take plan in 2010. The Nu Rave brand was running really well, and I held another two large events @ The Rhythm Factory, one of them being the 2010 Nu Rave Awards. This was a first for me planning online votes and awards. The event itself really showed how well our scene works with everything coming to plan. All the artists, labels, promoters ect.. supported it and came along. As in 2009 my dj’ing was coming along well, playing more events within 2010, so a nice increase as time went on.
As I write this now! (Feb 2011) Life for me is running at such a high speed. My dj’ing is going really well, and my radio shows have massive support from everyone listening week in and out. I have just held a top event under the name LDF (London Dance Factory) @ Hidden with a collection of promoters arranged by myself. I have a mix of K2 and Nu-Rave.com events in the planning for this year, also pushing the Nu-Rave.com site like normal and watching things grow and grow!
Reading back over this there is plenty of things I have missed out, but this is just a catch up not a book, that will come once I’ve lost everything!
Thank you for reading,
John Kidson K2 Promotions