Start Broad. Get Interesting Later: How To Approach Your Wedding Music Over An Entire Evening

Five hours is a long time in music. It's roughly one hundred and fifty songs, depending on how enthusiastically the person playing them approaches the concept of playing a full-length record. It's also a really long time for 120 people to agree on anything. At a typical wedding you've got several generations, old school friends, workmates, parents, cousins, people who spent their twenties at clubs and festivals, and people whose relationship with contemporary music ended somewhere around Now That's What I Call Music! 47. Trying to find five hours of music that everybody unilaterally loves is therefore basically impossible. Fortunately, you don't need to. The trick is to think less about creating one enormous perfect playlist and more about giving the evening somewhere to travel.

This is why kicking it all off with classic crowd pleasers is the smart play. I know that can sound slightly unadventurous, particularly if you've given me a brilliant selection of obscure disco, indie, hip-hop or electronic music that you're desperate to hear, but the first job is usually to establish some common ground. Familiar music lowers the stakes. People recognise something, sing along from the edge of the room, move a little while they're talking and gradually become comfortable with the idea that dancing may shortly be required. I'm also learning things. Somebody sings along from their table. A group near the bar starts moving rather more than is strictly necessary to collect a drink. The bride's dad turns out to have unexpectedly strong feelings about Thelma Houston. This is the reconnaissance part of the evening. I'm not trying to demonstrate impeccable musical taste at 7.50pm. I'm trying to understand the room and ensure no one feels left out from the start.

It also means I'm reluctant to spend the songs that really matter to you before there's anyone around to enjoy them properly. If you've told me that a particular LCD Soundsystem track is absolutely your song, I'd much rather play it later when you're surrounded by your friends than while you're outside with the photographer and half your guests are looking for coffee. A favourite song isn't automatically a useful song simply because it's good. Timing does an extraordinary amount of the work. Once the room has confidence, though, everything becomes more interesting. You can move away from the obvious choices, follow a particular group for a while, introduce something stranger or play one of those more personal records because the dancefloor is now ready to receive it.

The more inclusive you are at the beginning, the more freedom you've earned later.

That's the bit I think often gets misunderstood. Starting broadly isn't the same thing as playing safe all night. Quite the opposite. A dancefloor that trusts the DJ will follow you much further than an empty one ever will. Get everybody through the door first; then you can start showing them around the house. Maybe the crowd turns out to love disco more than anyone expected. Maybe the indie section can go considerably deeper. Maybe a strange request suddenly opens up twenty minutes of music you hadn't planned to play at all. You test things, learn from the reaction and gradually discover how adventurous the room is prepared to be. The evening becomes a conversation rather than a sequence of pre-approved songs.

And you can't run that conversation at maximum intensity for six hours. Even if you somehow assembled 120 people willing to dance continuously from dinner until midnight, they'd be exhausted by nine. Parties need shape. There are moments when you push, moments when you ease off, periods when the floor grows and periods when people quite reasonably decide they'd like a drink, some food or ten minutes outside. The biggest songs become bigger because you haven't spent the previous two hours shouting at everyone with equally big songs. A record that feels enormous at 11.15pm might have felt faintly ridiculous at 8.10pm. The music hasn't changed. The room has.

So when I ask couples about music, I'm not trying to obtain enough songs to fill the night. I already have enough songs. What I want is a sense of your taste: the music that genuinely matters to you, the things your friends will recognise instantly, the corners we might explore later and the handful of things you absolutely cannot stand. Then the evening can develop rather than simply unfold in the order it was planned. Start broad. Build some trust. Watch what people do. Follow the interesting bits. Save things for when they'll matter. Five hours gives you plenty of time to get somewhere good.

You don't have to arrive there in the first twenty minutes.

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