Jo and Nick’s wedding at The Walled Garden

The wedding

Some venues do half the work for you. The glasshouse at West Wycombe Walled Garden, hung with pastel balloon clouds and framed by exposed brick and rolling Chiltern hills through the glass, is one of them. Good Frequency is based in Saltdean, East Sussex, but we’ll travel for the right party, and this was absolutely the right party.

But a beautiful room still needs someone who knows how to read it, and that’s where Jo and Nick’s day actually got interesting.

Before a single track played, half the guest list was gathered round a laptop propped up on the wall. The football was on. It’s the sort of thing that could easily pull energy away from a wedding if left to its own devices, suits and dresses hunched round a nine inch screen instead of mingling.

Instead it became part of the warm up, a shared bit of nonsense that had people laughing together before they’d even reached the dancefloor. By the time the match wrapped up and the music properly started, the room was already primed.

Good Frequency supplied full production for the evening: PA, lighting and DJ set across the garden’s glasshouse space, for a mixed crowd of around 120 that ran from grandparents to school friends to the odd toddler who refused to leave the dancefloor.

The brief wasn’t a genre or a playlist, it was a feeling, so the set was built the same way every Good Frequency wedding is: a proper conversation beforehand about who was in the room and what would actually get them up, not just a request sheet ticked off in order.

It worked. By mid-evening the floor had Nick’s nan next to Jo’s mates who “never dance,” all in the same crowd, all still there at the end of the night.