Sultans of spin

`Yes, folks, it's the final of the vinyl," declares the MC, skipping across the stage with insouciant athleticism. "And it's not a tea party. It's a battle . . . " Well, this is hip-hop, after all: lean, mean music with a reputation for controversies about misogyny, violence and general nastiness, packaged in a sleeve stamped "Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics". But reputations can be deceptive. At the finals of the 1999 Irish Technics DMC DJ Championships, the entrants may have names redolent of chaos and urban decay - DJ Taz, Cool C, Del Diablo - but when they get down on those decks they look uncannily like concert pianists in action. One hand keeps a thumping bass in order while the other, fingers articulating furiously, allows the cross-rhythm to flow in and out with breathtaking precision. Records fly on and off turntables and turn over like pages of music; hands cross in mid-air; just as in Beethoven, everything stops for a second of significant silence and then hurtles towards the explosion of kick-ass, show-off skills which, in Beethoven's day, was called a cadenza.

That's the first surprise. The second is that the crowd is as clued-in as any clique you'd be likely to come across at La Scala or Covent Garden. These kids haven't just come to booze and bop: certain moves, too fast for the untutored eye but instantly recognisable to the initiated, are greeted by a burst of appreciative cheers, whistles and applause. Backstage, the competitors are nervous on each other's behalf and delighted when their rivals pull off ferociously difficult stunts or weave some wry, sly samples into the mix.

A great wave of goodwill greets Frank Sinatra's golden-tonsilled introduction to New York, New York, which becomes not only a paean of praise to the home of hip-hop but a knowing reference to the venue for the world finals of the competition at the Hammerstein Ballroom on September 15th, whither tonight's winning DJ will be winging his way, courtesy of sponsors Ericsson and Hobo. Minuscule sound-dots of The Edge's unmistakable guitar send flickers of joy sparking around the darkest corners of the room; a wicked giggle goes up as one dextrous DJ exchanges his woolly hat, at lightning speed, for a tri-coloured Santa number with, I swear, a bell on the end of it. Lean and mean? You have to be kidding. The atmosphere in Dublin's Temple Bar Music Centre last Friday night would make a scout jamboree look moody and dangerous by comparison. But all these positive vibes are par for the turntablism course, according to DJ and television presenter Donal Scannell. One of the prime movers behind this year's event, he professes himself delighted with the standard of competition not just at the final, but at preliminary heats in Cork, Limerick and Galway as well - especially when you consider just how small hip-hop is in the overall musical scheme of things. "OK, it's very popular in terms of record sales and so on, but it hasn't crossed into the mainstream the way, say, dance music has," he says.

"So if you take hip-hop and then you take scratching and mixing, that's a sub-genre within a sub-genre - a very small kind of musical world. And to be able to organise an event on this scale gives us quite a sense of achievement. It shows that people are interested, that they will show up and support us. Which is heartening, really." Equally heartening, he says, is the interaction between audiences and competitors. "People see the tricks and although they mightn't know what they're called, they still know that it represents something very difficult. "When you see someone like DJ Spiyce crossing his arms and mixing across the faders very quickly, you know it's not something he was born with. You know it's something he spent hours practising in his bedroom on his decks. And when the crowd roars, at one level they're roaring appreciation for the commitment that that person has put into perfecting their craft."

The craft isn't called mixing for nothing. It's not just about visual acrobatics like spinning around or doing stuff behind your back while high-kicking like Tom Cruise in Cocktail, although if you can do all that, you're obviously off to a flying start as a DJ. But what the judges are looking for is someone who can take a selection of beats, cross-rhythms, breakbeats and snatches of spoken dialogue (known as "a cappella" but pronounced "ey-cappella"); mix them with high-tech special effects such as "transform" (flicking a switch on and off so the sound resonates in a different way) and "the crab" (are you ready for this? Bringing the cross-fader over and back with the fingers of one hand in a crab-like motion) - and, while keeping a constant eye on the crowd and its reaction, combine them into a smooth, seamless, six-minute piece of music. It's undoubtedly awesome - but is it art? "It is creative, of course it is," says Scannell. "One-third of the marks in the competition go to the creation of new sounds, and you can hear how somebody might have a record which just has a tone on it - a single, steady tone - but by manipulating the speed of the record and scratching, they create a tune from that tone.

`This may be a small part of the clubbing scene, but it's a big part of the story of what Ireland is really about. And it's important to understand what motivates this world. It's not just about hedonism, it's about self-belief and self-improvement. It's a sad commentary on this country that there are so many things that young people are doing which aren't deemed worthy enough to be considered `artistic'. If we went looking for an Arts Council grant for this event we'd be laughed out of it: and if you were an alien landing in Dublin in your spacecraft, you'd swear that The Corrs had culturally enriched us all."

Sorry about the rant, he says, but if it weren't for the sponsors, tonight wouldn't have happened: simple as that. "Respect to Ericsson. Everybody I know has got a mobile phone and spends a fortune on mobile phone calls - so I decided the mobile phone people should put some money back into youth culture." The practitioners of the same youth culture, meanwhile, are producing a startling variety of performance styles out of what might seem like a strictly limited sound palette. While one DJ will be a bit of a shoe-gazer, head down in his own private world, another will dance around with alacrity; another will provoke a roar of approval by playing the first line of the national anthem and then exploding it into a million anguished, fractured beats. Still another will open a tin of baked beans in mid-scratch, eat a couple of forkfuls and lift an extremely cheeky leg in what one can only interpret as a culturally mature reference to the celebrated campfire scene in Blazing Saddles.

In the hope of extracting some of the mysteries from the mix, The Irish Times hovers backstage and demands explanations from the emerging contenders as they finish their sets. They prove, however, to be men of few words. "You mark the records with white tape - and, well, that's it, really," offers Red Setta from Cork. "I've only been doing it for a year," says a somewhat dazed DJ Mayhem, "but I practise for six hours a day." DJ Leigh is dying with the 'flu, and DJ Spiyce, despite a dazzling performance in which his hands moved faster than Dmitri Alexeev playing Prokofiev Two, is convinced that a fault on one of the decks caused his needles to skip. The judges agree, and he is given another turn, which allows him to do it all again even faster.

Spiyce is finally placed third, behind new kid on the block Mayhem. But the clear winner is old-timer DJ Mek, a wizard in a woolly hat and red beard who entrances audience and judges alike. "A genius," an English-accented fan in the crowd had assured me, hours earlier. "No muckin' abaht." The chairman of the judges, DJ and mixing guru, Mark Kavanagh, puts a slightly different spin on essentially the same theme. "Where he stood head and shoulders about the rest, was that whereas some of the others presented six minutes of tricks, his was a six-minute journey into the music." Here's hoping his journey to the world finals in New York in September will be equally satisfactory; and that in the first finals of the new millennium, the term "DJ" won't apply exclusively to the male of the species.