Another weekend has been and gone and as I lie on my sofa on a Monday morning swearing to myself to have a quiet one next Friday/Saturday I took 5 minutes to review what went on over the previous 48 hours.
On Friday OOFT! music came to town to play Polaroid - the whole Ooft/Revenge/6th Borough Project sound has been filling my ears with delicious sounds for a good year now and if it wasn't for a 6 hour University workshop at 10am on a Saturday morning (what in the world were they thinking putting a lecture on at this time!) then I would have been there with bells, cymbals and hi-hats on. My housemates ended up venturing down to Wire around 1am after only going out for 'a couple of drinks' and the sight of them on rolling around on the living room sofa the following morning when I dragged myself up for my lecture was not an unexpected one! Apparently it was a real cracker from start to finish, Ali Ooft was on the money and I hear from good sources that Ste Roberts was on top form playing the final set too... Polaroid has it bang on for me at the moment and their lineups over the next couple of months mean I must try and make more of an effort to get down to their parties.
In the meantime, you can check out the Ooft! blogspot if you haven't yet done so which is full of info on new releases as well as the odd occasional edit you get to download for free - check it HERE
Saturday night came around quickly and the anticipation gathering around the city for the impending arrival of Locodice at the Mint Club was feverish - there was even talk of someone buying 3 tickets on ebay for the night for £80 EACH - are they for real?! System have really entered the Champions League of club nights with their booking policy for the first part of the year (Locodice then Luciano in Feb/March, followed by Villalobos AND Sven Vath on the Thursday and Sunday over the April Bank Holiday!) but the £20 plus ticket prices for these events that go hand in hand with booking guests of this calibre might put me off if I didn't work behind the bar!
I arrived for work just after 9pm and there was already a queue of at least 100 people waiting to get in; I knew I was already in for a long night at this point. Cormac was on warm up duties and although technically a very good DJ, I do find some of his tune selections a little questionable at times; who honestly thinks playing a 130BPM techno track as the first record of the night, followed by 'the best of Johnny D' ('Orbital life' followed by 'Sliding Away' in a twenty minute period), constitutes a good warm up set? So much for building the music up! Guti and Tini came on afterwards and both put in solid performances with some groovy house/techno and when Locodice came on at just after 3pm the club was probably the most full I have ever seen it in a long long time; Cracking atmosphere but I do question why the massive hype surrounds Locodice? This was the first time I've seen him play and I can't grasp why he has this god like status in the techno community; his set was fairly average (6/10?) and there wasn't really any musical notation to any of the tracks he was playing save for the last hour when he started knocking out a bit more deeper stuff. The previous 5 hours of music seemed very basic to these ears and stayed on the same level throughout; the 'drill' consisted of the following pattern - incessant kickdrum and snare, zero melody, beats drop out and breakdown kicks in with average baseline, crowd start screaming/whooping/raising hands in the air, loud as fuck kickdrum drops back in, ice cannon blasts out for 10 seconds, strobe flashes and then process repeats itself approximately every 5 minutes...
The crowd weren't the typical System crowd either - there was a lot of vest tops and sunglasses on show and a bit more attitude than I had experienced at previous System nights. I guess a lot of the crowd were the Ibiza/DC10 sort and that is why Locodice commands such a reputation in the UK because of the number of people that go to Ibiza and spend 2 weeks being 'converted' to house and techno after a couple of garys and a session in DC10/Zoo Project. I seen one guy with a white vest top with the slogan 'Ket, Ibiza and Sex' - how very fucking cool you are.
Despite my moaning about these things, the night was actually quite enjoyable and although it did drag on until well past 9am in the morning by which time I had lost both the ability to serve any more drinks and the will to live, System definitely did itself proud by the production of the night and the staggering amount of people it managed to attract. You can't question Locodices' quality as an entertainer either - he played for more than 6 hours, literally had to be dragged from the decks at the end of the night and danced and jived away in the DJ booth with the best of them for the duration of his set. I do look forward to the upcoming System nights over the next couple of months; Lucanio for his latino/spanish house and techno thing, Villalobos for being a bit of a living legend and Sven Vath simply for his entertainment value and party techno vibe - when he last turned up at the Mint after Cocoon in The Park last year he had to be carried out of the club without playing a record as he was so wasted!
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