- fabric's 18th birthday, which took place in two chunks last weekend, was a celebration of the venue's formidable legacy. Friday's party took in the best of jungle and bass music—sounds the club supported when few others would. Saturday's party, which stretched for 30 hours, brought together top-tier house and techno, with Ricardo Villalobos, who's played a starring role in six of the last seven birthdays at the club, as its central figure. I saw him arriving at 2 PM on Sunday sporting baggy, sequinned sweatpants. He looked like a man ready for the long haul—in the end, he played for more than nine hours, turning in yet another vintage performance.
It's easy to forget that fabric was closed this time last year. The club's birthdays have always had a festival-like atmosphere—the crowd and staff both wear fancy dress—but this one had a special gravitas given the recent struggles. At 3 PM, Villalobos and Raresh settled in for a six-hour back-to-back session in Room One, firing through a mind-boggling array of DJ tricks. One minute, Villalobos was cutting in a track seemingly at random while a droning noise played on the other CDJ. The next, Raresh was chopping between tracks and dropping curveball acapellas like Dennis Ferrer's soulful house banger "How Do I Let Go." The duo looked ridiculously relaxed throughout—at one point, they embraced for a full minute while two tracks were locked in the mix. Villalobos has been pulling these kind of shenanigans for more than a decade, but somehow they still sound fresh. It helps that fabric's system is primed for the kind of high-fidelity minimal these DJs favour. There was also space to dance, which is not always the case when Villalobos plays. All in all, it felt like the perfect environment for these two.
Ben UFO followed. Weaving seamlessly through the genres, he kept the energy levels at a constant peak. A high point was Joe's "Tail Lift," which emerged from a string of techno records. (Surely a contender for track of the year, I'd heard Hunee play it a day earlier at The Pickle Factory to equally impressive effect.)
At midnight, Villalobos and Raresh returned to the booth. They began with Villalobos's "The Contempt," a 22-minute odyssey that's one of his strangest and best. Raresh mixed a record into it for a few minutes, then took it back out again, before Ricardo stepped up with a third record. At some point I drifted into Room Three. It was great to see the space, which has recently been underused, back to its best. Unannounced guests like Jackmaster and Midland kept the cosy dance floor popping.
The birthday was as good as London clubbing gets, but what the future holds for fabric is perhaps still uncertain. With Craig Richards stepping down from his weekly residency, change at the club is inevitable. The challenge will be to keep the regulars coming back while attracting a new generation of loyal fans. If fabric is to thrive, it needs more nights like this.
Photo credit /
Anna Wallington