At the beginning of his headlining set at Coachella, popular DJ David Guetta proclaimed “I’ve been doing this many years, but there are still a few shows – and Coachella is definitely one of them – where I’m about to go onstage and my heart is beating so fast…”
An interview with Beatport may shed some light why Guetta was nervous. Apparently, just moments before the show began, Guetta’s computer crashed. He was unable to save his playlist to an SD card in time, and had to transfer his files randomly onto USB drives.
“Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend]… I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”
Essentially, Guetta lost his playlist, and was forced to create one during his live performance. Now, of course it takes a certain level of technical skill to produce and mix the music, but the fact that having to select songs on stage could be considered “something crazy” seems hard to fathom.
Guetta also talks about the surprise appearance of Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, and how he asked his tour manager to download “I Gotta Feeling” from iTunes since he didn’t have it. That was “completely crazy,” apparently.
“When Fergie decided to come last minute, it was like, OK, but I don’t have ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ because I don’t play it any more. I called my stage manager to go download ‘I Gotta Feeling’ on iTunes so I could play it. It was just completely crazy, but I loved it. And actually the set went amazing, and in a way the stress adds to the adrenaline.”