If you like to dance, really dance - not one foot on the dance floor and one off - then you have to experience the Bhangra night at the Carnivore.
DJ Happy - who gets his stage name from the laughing face he had as a baby - works the controller while two dhol (double-headed drum) players, seated on the stage, accentuate the rhythm of his music with their beats.
Together, they whip the crowd into a frenzy punctuated by the dhol beat and the energetic voice accompaniments of hoi hoi hoi, balle balle and chak de.
“It drives the person crazy,” DJ Happy, whose real name is Hirmeet Singh Sond, says.
Dressed in black with thin side-burns, DJ Happy is a study in contrasts. He works in an environment that is enhanced by the social consumption of alcohol but is a teetotaller.
He plays music to get a crowd’s blood pumping but, in his own time, prefers to listen to more melancholic Hindi songs from the ghazal genre.
He follows a strict vegetarian diet but exhibits a large scorpion tattoo on his right forearm.
He started his musical career as a bhangra dancer, then choreographed his own group of eight dancers which won various local bhangra dance competitions, and then became a fusion DJ.
“It’s the music,” he says, explaining how the intensity of bhangra has shaped his life. “Once I had the taste of bhangra music, I just carried on.”
DJ Happy mixes bhangra songs with the Western genres of techno, trend and house, thereby catering to the tastes of an eclectic and cosmopolitan Kenyan social crowd.
But that doesn’t prevent him from adding some bhangra favourites, what he calls the “evergreens”.
An auto mechanic by day and deejay by night, he learnt his art from Kenyan singer Rafiq Shinwari and Kenyan bhangra singer Gupz. The key to DJing well, he says, is achieving the right beat and mix.
Carnivore introduced bhangra nights eight years ago but the trend was discontinued until March this year when DJ Happy revamped the concept to include a combination of live musical performances with recorded tracks.
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