- Sometimes it just comes together. It's not often. In fact, it's pretty rare. There are so many nights that feel like work: You go, you put in the effort, you dance, shake your hips and try to make the most of what is, in all fairness, an excellent DJ in a great club. However, something's missing. It's a chore. Tiring. But, on this night, we knew that that "something" was definitely not missing when we heard the thudding, pounding 4/4 coming through the brick walls of the Union Car Park (christened, on this night, the Shake It! Warehouse) in Southwark.
Photo credit: Vickie Parker
I remember one of the first techno nights that I went to in this city. It was a Lost party, put on by Steve Bicknell, and Jeff Mills was the headliner. It defined my appreciation of a "proper" techno party in the capital. Walking into the Shake It! Warehouse, I was straight back there. A cavernous arch housing the bar; some absolutely minimal lighting, and round the corner, sending tremulous, electro-charged waves of air through the venue, a second, bigger arch housing a festival-scale Funktion One rig. And, in between the stacks, there was Laurent Garnier starting a set that went places I could never, ever have predicted. I sweated. I danced like a man possessed. I made faces no one should see. Garnier combined totally seamless mixing and a capacity to read the crowd, while simultaneously playing whatever the fuck he wanted. Jazzy, floating Detroit started things (reasonably) mellow, but following an extended, warped and drawn out remix of "I Feel Love," things turned decidedly dark and techno.
From one strain of the genre (think Hood, Detroit, 1994) to another (Berghain, 2008), Garnier took us through varieties of stripped bare, raw, Detroit-led minimalism. It was a journey - not really anywhere specific. Nothing temporal—no timeline here. But a journey into unexpected musical realms that kept you thinking: Where on earth will he go next, and how the hell will I keep up dancing with him? This was diverse, distinct stuff. But never once did Garnier lose sight of the floor. And, in all fairness, neither did we. He held our attention and our poor, dishevelled dancing bodies, till late, late in the night.
None of this is to take away from room two, hosted by Layo and Bushwacka. This steamy, hellish (in all the right ways) den of iniquity was intense beyond words. Half the size of the main room, but easily equalling the energy, its size gave the well tuned speakers a punch and intensity with the duo's blend of tribal-tech with dance-inducing minimal and hard-edged tech-house keeping the room frenzied from the moment we called in, to the moment we called out. Trying to switch between the two rooms was no chore: It presented an exciting change, a complementary mixture of two ages, approaches and styles of dancing your ass off that created a menu of electronic music perfectly suited to dancing all night long.
Photo credit: Vickie Parker
What was so refreshing about this night (aside from the fantastic sound quality, great crowd, flawless organization and amazing venue) was the faith it restored in me for London's clubbing scene. There have been too many amazing line-ups playing at mediocre nights with no sense of atmosphere—driven by a commercial imperative, hiding behind a façade of (sometimes genuine) musical love. But this was not one. This inhabited those spaces, those brick arches, dirty-floored warehouse type places that are integral to London's fabric in the South, and brought us a party of sublime, superb and stunningly exciting Techno—with a capital T.