By BRIAN NIEMIETZ
Posted: 1:32 am
October 11, 2008
MODEL Eve Salvail has been a fixture in high-end glossies such as Elle, Glamour and Marie Claire since 1989. Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace and Valentino have hired her to hock their wares. But nowadays, "DJ Evalicious" can mostly be found spinning records at nightclubs like Bijoux and the Plumm.
"We're a very small minority," Salvail says of chicks
who mix.
True, but there's no denying the wax ceiling of the deejay world has been shattered by a colorful palette of mixmasters such as Salvail, MisShapes tastemaker Leigh Lezark, and celeb party favorite Donna D'Cruz, to name a few.
And while it's no lie that they might legitimately rock the house, it doesn't hurt they're (very) easy on the eyes. "If there's a beautiful girl behind the deejay booth, people just want to watch them even if they're not playing well," says Noel Ashman, who books world-class models like Salvail, Sky Nellor, Candice Lake and Caron Bernstein to spin at his club the Plumm.
In fact, Thursday nights at the Plumm are specifically for models who want to participate in the club's on-the-job training program.
It used to be that every model wanted to be a singer on the side - now, it seems they want to spin. That said, beauty does not an automatic master deejay make: "If they can't hold the room, it limits what they can do," admits Ashman.
The models can learn certain tricks of the music trade from the professionals. But what the club's in-house deejays can't
teach is a woman's ear for what other
women want to hear.
"You don't give a s - - t what guys think, because if the girls are dancing, the guys are happy," says Ashman.
"You don't deejay for the guys in the room."
One of Ashman's partners at the Plumm is DJ Samantha Ronson, better known as Lindsay Lohan's girlfriend. When Ronson is in town from LA, she periodically works the turntables along with Lohan, herself a novice deejay who's spun here as well as at Level V and Tenjune.
On one occasion when Lohan was deejaying with Ronson at the Plumm, Lohan let the record spin for a couple minutes, worked the slow-starting crowd into a frenzy by dancing on a nearby stripper pole, then returned to the booth - and a born-again party. That kind of thing brings a venue the kind of press the Ronson/Lohan teams' $25,000-
per-gig male counterparts would be hard-pressed to deliver.
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