People of Paris
From humble roots in 2006 playing CJs (computer jockeys) in their living room for friends at house parties, Marc Moore and Steve Dunstan aka People Of Paris have grown into the hottest ticket on the Auckland party scene. Not to mention, countless gigs at some of NZ’s best festivals, including Rhythm & Vines, The Queenstown Winter Festival, High Life, and Deep Hard & Funky.
In the early noughties Auckland clubs were dominated by hip hop and house music and if you weren’t into either genre you were screwed for choices. One night Marc decided to break the monotony.
“It was winter and we were all bored so we thought we’d have a house party. All we had was a stereo, a line-out cord & my laptop. I guess it was the music that got everyone amped. The Strokes, Killers and Kings of Leon mixed with retro Bowie, Stones and Blondie etc. The dance floor went nuts. After a few house parties (which we named Club44), where there’d be 80 people on our wooden living room floor cutting loose, we started to get a bit more serious. Steve had been coming to the parties and thought we should get together as a duo. I wasn’t much of a DJ, itunes had way smoother mixes than me – nine second cross fade worked a treat – but Steve had skills on the turntables and knew how to work the mixer and I knew what songs people liked and how to keep the dance floor going. Things got too big for Club44 so we took our party to Rising Sun on K Road. We decided to do it quarterly and so People Of Paris was born. We came up with a super cultured name to sound like amazing turntablists from Europe, clearly something we are not – a total piss-take.”
Aside from DJing, People of Paris have organized parties and collaborated with bands such as The Checks, White Birds & Lemons, The Coshercot Honeys, Motocade & The Tutts. They have also played official after-parties for Bloc Party, The Rapture, NZ Fashion Week, & Gnarls Barkely – where they famously dropped the cover version of Crazy by The Kooks while Cee Lo was on the dance floor. It’s that combination of irreverent spirit and killer music that keeps each of their parties at max capacity. They’re now in high demand for corporate companies and underground gigs alike.
“One thing we have never claimed from the start was to be good DJs in the technical sense. We’ve just learnt as we’ve gone along and still don’t have half the skills of most proper DJs. Our main thing was to play good fun music, music that you didn’t normally hear at bars and clubs, maybe even music that our friends were listening to on their ipods. It’s pretty buzzy when you go to a club and hear a song that you’ve been vibing out on for a while, and if we can achieve that, we know we’re doing our job properly.”
Schedule
Sat 31st Dec, 20:00 Cellar Stage