When I get DJ Rashida on the line, she's coming off a busy week that saw her play a birthday party for Stevie Wonder's son and a GQ cover party for Chris Paul and the LA Clippers.

She's also been Prince's tour DJ since 2004, and her other clients include Jay-Z, Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. How did a humble LA girl end up breathing in such rarefied air?

“I had a residency at this place called The House Of Blues,” she explains, “a legendary live music venue here in LA on the Sunset Strip. This was 2004… [Prince] was doing his private parties in the room next door to where I was playing. I got a call one day… he requested me to play one of his parties. It was super fun, we totally hit it off, and it was just on from there.”

I'm not sure this computes. Surely one can't just “totally hit it off” with Prince? Surely even now, almost ten years later, she occasionally finds herself in slack-jawed awe of the great man?

“Well, he and I have since become friends,” she laughs, “and I'm very close to him. It's never going to be like he's just a dude — he's a brilliant human being — but I definitely look at him as family and as a friend.”

Of course, DJing for an eccentric character like Prince comes with its own special challenges.

“When I first started touring with him - and this is when I was still using vinyl, pre-Serato - we were on tour in the States and he just, out of the blue, started having me open the shows. Up until that point I had just been doing the private parties… The crazy part is, I [only] had vinyl, so if he took longer than two hours or whatever, I would start running out of party records!
“There was this one show where he took forever. It got to the point where they were tired of me and I was tired of me! I didn't want to hear me no more, either… the crowd was just like, 'c'mon, you're cute, you're cool, we had fun for the first hour, now we're over it'.”