DJ Teta
mathematician · musicologist · DJ · alchemist · strategist
“Music isn’t just what you listen to.
It’s what you’re willing to become in order to understand it.”
DJ Teta’s Weekly Song
One song a week. Not the most famous, not the most recent. The right one — for reasons only Teta can explain the way he does. A new one every Sunday.
Midnight Oil wrote Blue Sky Mine thinking of the blue asbestos miners of Western Australia: men who for years breathed dust in exchange for a wage, while those who knew kept quiet. Many fell ill, and not only them. The mine closed long ago. The question it left behind did not.
I’m not a preacher, I’m a DJ. But I’ve learned that the most beautiful music isn’t the kind that makes you forget the world: it’s the kind that helps you see it better. Behind everything we hold in our hands there are someone’s hands, lungs, days.
I’m not asking you to change the world tonight. I’m asking for one small gesture: this week, at least once, ask yourself who made what you’re buying. And when you can choose, choose those who treat people well. That’s how you turn up the volume on dignity.”
- The price of a wage: the blue asbestos mine at Wittenoom, in Western Australia, where the dust made workers and families ill for decades.
- Profit before people: the silence of those who knew, and the courage of those who, years later, asked for justice.
- A band that doesn’t stand still: Midnight Oil have always stood up for the rights of Aboriginal Australians and for the natural environment. Singer and frontman Peter Garrett, former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, later entered Parliament and served as a minister in the Australian government, first for the Environment and then for Education.
“The lyrics earn a full 5: a true story of injustice, told with clear-eyed anger and a chorus you sing at the top of your lungs.”
How Teta scores
Each song gets a score from 1 to 5 on six parameters, half points allowed. A 5 is rare: it means excellence, not just “I like it”. The final score is the weighted average, multiplied by 2.
- Melody · 25% — How beautiful the melody is, how it stays with you, how well the harmony works.
- Richness · 10% — Arrangement, instruments, changes, harmonic choices. Simplicity is not a flaw: what counts is whether it works.
- Lyrics · 15% — Depth, imagery, storytelling, how words and music fit together.
- Emotion · 25% — How much it moves me and draws me in. The most personal parameter, and I say so openly.
- Performance · 15% — Voice and instruments: credibility, expressiveness, the personality of whoever plays.
- Originality · 10% — Does it have something that makes it recognisable among a thousand? An identity of its own?
The radar shows the six raw scores; the weights only count in the final score. This is one DJ’s personal judgement, not a sales or streaming chart. Teta scores songs, not people.
Teta’s note
Ian Broudie wrote The Life of Riley for his son before Riley was born: words for someone he hadn’t met yet, but already loved. I never wrote words like those. Perhaps that’s why, every time I hear it, something stings behind my eyes.
Then I think of those two kids chasing my clues across half of England. They aren’t mine. And yet, some evenings, I catch myself hoping Isacco will let me be a father to him, even just a little. And Sofia — I’ve taken Sofia to heart, and I think she knows.
Sailing blind, not knowing where you’ll land, with only one certainty: that it will be all right. It’s the most courageous thing I know. Listen to it, and then tell someone you love that it’ll be all right.”
Meaning and scorecard
- A father’s wait: the emotion, anxiety and wonder of welcoming a new life into an unpredictable world.
- Sailing blind: the start of an unknown road where nothing is certain, held up by hope and the trust that everything will be fine.
- A title with a double meaning: “the life of Riley” is an English saying for an easy, carefree life; here it is reread through the pure eyes of a newborn looking at the world.
“Melody and emotion get a 5: the first notes are enough to take you somewhere else. The voice is gentle rather than powerful, and that’s right.”
Teta’s note
Waltzing Along by James is one of those songs that don’t ask your permission. They take you by the hand and lead you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go.
That’s what music does when it truly works — it doesn’t accompany life, it decides it. For three minutes and forty-six seconds, at least.”
Meaning and scorecard
- Letting go: the courage to move without asking permission, even when you don’t know where it will take you.
- Lightness as a choice: a crooked, cheerful waltz that turns uncertainty into movement.
- Manchester, late nineties: James at their brightest, a band that always put the person before the pose.
“Not the most perfect song in the archive, but the one that gets you out of your chair. To me, that matters.”
The Manifesto Note
Every month Teta takes one of the sixteen words from his Manifesto and puts it to the test — in the journey, in music, in real life. What the sixteen words are — and how they fit together — you’ll discover in the book.
Music, Leadership and People
Before becoming a DJ Alchemist, Teta led teams, ran organisations, managed people in complex settings. Music and leadership share more than you’d think.
A conductor plays no instrument during the concert. And yet determines how everything sounds. What can Bernstein teach a CEO?
Here’s a fact that always surprises people the first time they hear it: a conductor, during a concert, produces zero useful decibels. They don’t play. They don’t sing. They wave their arms in the air, often with a little stick, in front of people who in many cases can read music better than they can. And yet, change the conductor and the same orchestra, with the same notes, sounds measurably different. It isn’t magic — it’s the management of relative time: the difference between ninety professionals each playing their own part correctly, and ninety professionals playing their parts in the same emotional instant.
It’s often said — and Leonard Bernstein showed it better than anyone — that the podium’s hardest task isn’t keeping time — a metronome does that, and it costs twenty quid. The task is deciding which voice should emerge, and when, without ever playing an instrument with your own hands. It’s the exact opposite of “I’ll do it myself because I do it better,” which is every manager’s favourite trap once they’ve come up through a solid technical background — this writer included, before learning the lesson the hard way.
The operational paradox: the better a leader is, the less they should play. If you still catch them at the first violin, they’re probably not conducting — they’re simply refusing to leave the stage.
Feedback doesn’t work when it’s too loud. It works when it’s at the right frequency — at the right moment, with the right words, to the right person.
Behind the decks there’s a distinction every DJ learns in their first week, and one that oddly few managers ever learn: volume and frequency are not the same variable. Turning up the volume of a piece of feedback — saying it louder, repeating it more often, writing it in capitals in the email — doesn’t make it more effective. It just makes it more annoying, exactly like a bassist who thinks he can fix a poor mix by turning his own knob all the way up.
Feedback that genuinely changes behaviour isn’t the kind that’s shouted. It’s the kind that arrives at the exact frequency that person, at that specific point in their career, can actually hear — which sometimes means quieter, not louder; sometimes means waiting for Tuesday instead of Friday afternoon; sometimes means a single sentence instead of a three-point speech nobody will remember past the first point.
An equaliser doesn’t turn everything up. It cuts the useless frequencies and lets the ones that matter breathe. The best feedback I’ve ever received in my life lasted eleven seconds. The worst, forty-five minutes — and I don’t remember a single word of it.
Jazz lives in improvisation. But the best jazz musicians know theory better than anyone. Freedom and structure aren’t opposites — they presuppose each other.
There’s a widespread myth about jazz improvisation worth politely dismantling: the idea that the musician steps on stage and “lets the genius flow”, with no net beneath them. In reality, whoever improvises best is almost always the one who knows the scales, the chords and the harmonic theory so deeply that they can consciously forget them for the three minutes of the solo. It isn’t freedom from structure. It’s freedom inside a structure internalised so well it becomes instinct.
It works the same way in teams: many managers mistake “let’s give the team autonomy” for “let’s provide no framework whatsoever and hope for the best”, which is a bit like asking someone to improvise a solo without ever having taught them the scales. The result isn’t jazz. It’s noise, with more meetings.
Real autonomy is built the other way round: structure first — clear, shared, almost boring in its precision — and only then, and only then, the space for improvisation within that structure. When Miles Davis seemed to play at random, there were years of study behind it: he just made that work invisible.
Sixteen words born from music. They work surprisingly well in managing people too — and in how you build something that lasts.
I didn’t write the Manifesto with leadership in mind. I wrote it thinking about a DJ set that wasn’t working — too much energy too soon, no patience, no reading of the room. Only afterwards, looking back at the teams I’d led before this life behind the decks, did I notice the mistakes were exactly the same: coming in too hot without tuning in first, pushing the volume instead of finding the frequency, mistaking structure for a cage.
The sixteen words remain reserved for those who’ve read the book — that’s a deliberate choice, not an editorial whim. But I can share the principle that holds them together: each word describes, at the same time, a moment behind the decks and a moment in the life of an organisation. It isn’t a metaphor forced on after the fact. It’s the exact same mechanics, observed from two different rooms.
If you lead people and haven’t reached the end of the novel yet: good news, the framework works even halfway through. Bad news for the British efficiency in me: I won’t shorten it for you.
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