There are now an extraordinary number of things you can add to a wedding. Inflatable lawn games. Photo booths. Giant illuminated letters. Sequin walls. Audio guestbooks. Neon signs. Magicians. LED dance floors and starry backdrops. I recently realised that if you booked enough of this stuff, it would be entirely possible for a wedding guest to spend eight hours at your wedding without ever having to speak to another human being. They could move methodically from giant Jenga to photo booth to audio guestbook before finishing the evening beside a six-foot glowing word LOVE. This may be exactly what you want. But it isn't really what I do.
Partly that's because I'm a DJ, and I've always thought that was quite enough of a job. When you book me, I'm thinking about music, the room, where the energy is, what the couple actually like and why that group near the bar has suddenly started singing along to something I hadn't planned to play. I'm thinking about whether to push harder, change direction or leave a record alone because everyone is clearly enjoying it and I have no useful contribution to make for the next four minutes. I like that the job has a fairly narrow description and an almost absurd amount going on inside it. I've never felt a great urge to expand sideways into supplying garden games, light-up furniture and a box containing oversized novelty glasses.
I also think wedding guests are more capable of entertaining themselves than the industry sometimes gives them credit for. There seems to be a mild anxiety that unless something has been arranged for every twenty-minute stretch of the day, people will simply stand motionless beside the bar waiting for further instructions. In reality, put a hundred people together who know each other to varying degrees, give them food and drink, and they tend to find things to do. They talk. They wander outside. Old friends catch up. Families meet. Somebody discovers they get on unexpectedly well with somebody else's uncle. Later, with the right music, many of them dance. Some of the best things that happen at weddings are precisely the things nobody organised.
The same applies to photographs. I have nothing against photo booths, and if you genuinely love them, get one. I merely suspect that your most memorable photographs probably won't require a feather boa, a plastic moustache and a sign saying TEAM BRIDE. Weddings are already quite good at producing ridiculous photographs naturally. Give it enough time and somebody's father will end up wearing sunglasses indoors, three old university friends will attempt some dance choreography they haven't performed since 2006 and someone who seemed extremely respectable during the speeches will become almost unrecognisable by midnight. You don't really have to manufacture this. Human beings, particularly human beings at weddings, are perfectly capable of becoming props themselves.
I think that's the larger point. More stuff doesn't automatically make a wedding more fun. Sometimes it just makes a wedding contain more stuff. If you've always wanted lawn games, have lawn games. If the photo booth is genuinely one of the things you're excited about, brilliant. There are loads of excellent suppliers who specialise in exactly that stuff, and I'll happily point you in their direction. But before adding something simply because weddings appear to come with an ever-expanding catalogue of optional accessories, I'd ask whether you actually want it. Personally, I'd rather put the money into good food, good drink, good music, a room full of people you love and enough space in the day for something unplanned to happen. And if you're looking for someone who's going to obsess over the music, take the pressure off you, read the room and create the kind of dancefloor nobody particularly wants to leave, now we're talking.
I'm not interested in filling your wedding with things to do. I'm interested in making it somewhere you want to be.
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