Sue Freeman is a sixty-five-year-old grandma who is a professional DJ, playing across Australian clubs, weddings and now, spinning tunes for the Sydney Thunder cricket team.
The announcement of her appointment to the Big Bash team’s decks was made in a hype video posted by both Sue and the Thunder. She nails the dramatic turnaround before they show a clip of Sue in her element - behind the decks.
Sue’s story to spinning stardom is a tale of virality, tenacity, and hating your day job. In 2021 she went viral after she was filmed mixing in public in Canberra.
The sight of a sixty-year-old, stereotypical-looking grandma mouthing the words to Usher’s ‘Yeah’ and Tupac’s ‘California Love’ instantly spread around the internet and led to her being requested by a whole lot of clubs around Australia.
“It’s blown me away,” Sue told The Canberra Times. “I can’t really understand what’s going on.”
“It amazes me how fast something can travel and how many people can get hold of that information… I've been really enjoying it and trying to manage all the booking enquiries myself. I've had enquiries for bookings from Perth and South Australia, Darwin, Melbourne and Brisbane."
Sue started DJing because other DJs just weren’t cutting it. They wouldn’t play her requests and hated seeing on DJ just go on their phone the whole time.
So, in her late-50s, she attended a DJing class with her son who was 14 years old at the time. Now, she gets paid to do it even though she’d happily do it for free #livingthedream.
“For many years, DJing to me was going out and having fun on a Saturday night, making new friends and was a way for me to let my hair down,” she told The Owl.“I was a bookkeeper at the time and I didn’t like bookkeeping. So, the fact that all this has come good in my life now, it really has been perfect timing.”
“Sometimes, at the time, you don’t realise what it’s all about. Then, later on, you look back and think ‘I can see why that happened’.”
