international news _ 26th July, 2006

DJ Jolie Escapes From Beirut

Text by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)

UK garage star DJ Jolie was evacuated from the Lebanon on British battle ship HMS York this week, some seven days after she was stranded there after flying in to DJ at the Crystal Club in Beirut.

The stranded Essex house star wrote a number of blog-style diary entries from her Beirut hotel before escaping, in which she described her emotions of being stranded under aerial attack.

‘Last night the bombings were quite bad,” she reported on Sunday 16th, “One of the telecommunications towers next to my hotel was hit. It shook the whole place, including my heart. Throughout the night I could hear the bombs going off in the South. I'm in the North and in a 'safe' area. Hopefully I can get out of here soon,” she wrote.

By Monday she was becoming increasingly irritated by the slow response of British authorities, yet was also noticeably calmer about the ever present threat.

“It is kind of bizarre now, you get used to the bombings, and just think, 'oh not another one!” said Jolie, “I came over here alone to DJ in one of the biggest and best clubs Beirut has to offer, I was really looking forward to it too. It's just turned out very wrong. I don't know anyone here, but have made friends with the guys at the BBC who have been interviewing me and so on,” she said.

As well as appearing on BBC 5 Live she was later interviewed on Wednesday for the BBC’s main news website just after being told she had a berth on the British warship and compared the entire experience to ‘living in a dark cell’.

“I'm very, very happy, really happy – I can't believe I'm getting on today,” she said, "The Foreign Office told me that I shouldn't come today, I should go in the morning. But I don't take any notice of what people say, so, yeah, I'm happy."