There is a version of this job that lives in glamorous venues, and there is the version I did this month: loading speakers into a van on a cold evening, driving the E40 to Leuven and, a few weeks later, crossing the border to Lille. The Greek community circuit will never make a film montage, but these nights are some of the best dancefloors I play all year.
Leuven: a university town finds its kefi
Leuven's Greek community is a lively blend: researchers and doctoral students, families who settled decades ago, and a rotating cast of students. Their party had that unmistakable community-hall warmth: home-made pites on trays, children weaving between the tables, and a committee of volunteers who had thought of everything except sitting down themselves.
Crowds like this ask for range. Within a single hour I went from gentle island songs for the grandparents' tables, to modern laika for the students, to one glorious stretch where a professor led a hasapiko with a precision that suggested decades of practice. The room was multigenerational in the truest sense: by the last hour the grandparents were teaching the students steps, not the other way round.
Lille: the border means nothing
A few weekends later, Lille. It surprises people that I regularly cross into France, but for the Greek diaspora the Belgian-French border is a formality: families and friendships stretch across it, and word of a good Greek night travels faster than any motorway. The Lille gathering had a slightly different flavour: more of a dinner-dance format, elegant tables, a proper meal, and then, once the plates were cleared, a transformation so fast I barely kept up with it. One moment coffee and conversation, the next a syrtos circle occupying every square metre of floor.
Different city, different hall, different accents, and the exact same moment when the first circle forms and every arm goes up.
Why I keep saying yes to community halls
- These crowds listen with their memories. Play the right song and you are not a DJ any more; you are a time machine.
- Community events are training for everything else. The reading skills I use at a corporate reception or a wedding were forged in rooms exactly like these.
- The diaspora is a network, not a place. Leuven knows Lille, Lille knows Brussels, and half my bookings are born from someone's cousin seeing me play in another city.
The van rolls on
Antwerp, Ghent, Luxembourg, Maastricht, the circuit keeps growing, and my diary keeps filling with towns I had never played two years ago. If there are Greeks there, there is a party waiting to happen; it just needs someone to bring the sound.
Does your Greek community, association or cultural organisation, anywhere in the Benelux or northern France, have a celebration coming up? Get in touch and let's put your town on the circuit.