I was playing my first Friday night gig at a local Raleigh nightclub. I've played their trance nights and electro nights, but they were on mondays and tuesdays, so the pressure to perform well and keep the crowd happy was not as intense as it was tonight (Friday and Saturday nights is, of course, when the club makes the bulk of their money). This was the first time I was basically given straight 4 hours to rock a crowd on a peak night, so I wanted this gig to go flawlessly. I started off at 10pm with some house and progressive, and eventually began building the energy. I had a decent group of ladies on the floor building good vibes and so I began to start building up into the main portion of my set. At 11:30 the tail end of a tornado south of our location came through and knocked the power out in the club; CDJs, mixer, booth monitor, house sound, lighting, the whole 9 yards. After a breaker reset and a few other workarounds, we were back in business by around 11:45-11:50, right when I should have begun to start banging it out. The groups that were there have left and I'm stuck with an empty dance floor at peak hour and I'm pretty flustered. I started playing electro remixes of some Top-40 to try and bring back the energy, and eventually the club filled back out again with a new set of people. I had the new groups enjoying themselves, the club got some good promo shots and rep, and overall the night was a great success. However, between 11:50 and 12:15 I was panicking hard. Looking back I'd say that I pretty much picked up right where I left off at 11:30 without dipping back down and building the energy up again (i.e. if the power had not have gone out, I'd say that I probably would not have changed a lot in my set). Do you think I did the right thing, or should I have dropped the energy back down and acknowledging the hiccup, and then continue on from there, pushing the peak till 12:30? Anyone got any similar stories and a description of how you dealt with it? This was a new one for me, so any input would be appreciated.
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