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Dave Clarke

international news _ 18th August, 2006

Hand Baggage Ban On UK Flights

Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)

British DJs carrying laptops and CDs overseas will have to risk checking their music and equipment into aircrafts’ holds from now on, following this week’s UK terror alert and subsequent ban on almost all items of hand luggage.

The development was greeted with dismay by techno star Dave Clarke, who fired an angry broadside against Tony Blair.

“It's great that the security services stopped a plot, but this hand luggage ban is totally impractical and I have to say we are reaping the rewards of Tony Blair's Foreign Policy,” Dave told Skrufff (speaking from Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport).

“We are now in a situation where we cannot extricate ourselves diplomatically, we should have never stood shoulder to shoulder in our allies’ imperialistic dreams. It was terrible what happened with 9/11 and we mourn shoulder to shoulder with America but Afghanistan is worse off, Iraq is descending into civil war, and the situation in Israel and Lebanon is getting worse all the time.”

“We have a good chancellor (Gordon Brown) but an incredibly naive leader who seems to be led by his interpretation of God's will; he wanted history to judge him, well he is history now,” he stormed.

“I won't travel through airlines under such draconian measures,” Dave continued, “If the ban continues I will consider buying my own plane and operating it privately and presenting HM government with a tax reduction bill due to their ineptitude of cohesive foreign policy making,” he promised.

Dave estimated he saves seven to ten days a year by carrying his music as hand luggage as he travels the world and said he’d switched only after frequently having his hold baggage delayed. A much bigger risk DJs will now have to face again is theft, which plagued the dance music industry throughout the 90s as baggage handlers targeted record bags.

“I've not checked in tunes- either records or CDs- for over 10 years, so the thought of my tunes not turning up the other end is quite a worrying prospect, to put it mildly,” Judge Jules told Skrufff.

“There are certain airports which are known amongst DJs as being black holes for lost luggage. Madrid is a particularly bad example,” he added. One such DJ is UK techno pioneer Jim Masters who three years ago lost his records when flying out to Brazil.

“Some motherf**ker at Madrid airport stole ALL of my records - not just took the box style, but the little sh*t carefully removed every record from the bags, zipped them back up and put the bags back onto the plane,” Jim said, in a letter mailed to the media in 2003,

“As you can guess, I had quite a shock when I lifted my feather-light bags up at Sao Paulo and found them empty.”

With many DJs now also routinely carrying laptops, the theft risk everywhere is likely to be dramatically higher, everywhere.

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