Sometimes quotes from books or films pop up repeatedly in certain situations through your life. Something that has stayed with me since I was a young child is a quote from Roald Dahl’s The BFG:

“The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.”  

Back then I used to imagine this time was about 4- or 5am, and in the years since then this quote has come back to revisit me many times: most often when I come out of a club just before it gets light and everything is silent outside. Ironically leaving a club at 4 or 5 often makes it the witching hour for the opposite reason Roald and young-me intended. They saw it as inconcievably late, but in clubbing terms it means you’ve done a cheeky sneak-out a little early for whatever reason. It’s a very different experience to leaving a club at the more ‘normal’ time of 6am, when it is more likely to be light, everyone else spills out with you, corner shops are opening and weekend-shifters are on their way to work.

I always thought about that quote and how life changes your perception of things, and it struck me again when our good friend Toby Kidd had a baby. We thought he’d probably have a little less time for his DJing larks; running Fresh Out The Box, organising Truck Festival, DJing at Secret Garden Party – the photo should help you get the drift. In actual fact, Toby faced The Witching Hour and made it his own – siting nightly feeds as a key ingredient for making his latest mix, describing a productive babe-in-one-arm-itunes-in-another situation – in the silence and no-distractions of the witching hour.

So, aptly-named and completely banging – I present to you Disco-DJs.com’s Nightfeed, with Toby Kidd.