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| Introducing NEM3SI$’s new label Infinite Resistance! | | Mindbenderz talk ‘Lord of the Rings’ and fishing, as well as the creation of their new album ‘Celestial Gateway’! | | Iono-Music artists One Function, Eliyahu, Invisible Reality and Dual Vision talk Robert Miles, kids, dogs and vinyl, while we chat about their current releases! | | Luke&Flex talk influences, the Irish rave scene, why Flex wears a mask and Play Hard, their new EP out now on Onhcet Repbulik Xtreme! | | Lyktum expands on his new album ‘Home’ – talking about his love of storytelling, creating new harmonies and the concept behind his musical works. | | Pan talks getting caught short crossing the Sahara, acid eyeballs and tells us Trance is the Answer, plus shares his thoughts on his latest release 'Beyond the Horizon' - all from a beach in Spain! | | Miss C chats about living with the KLF, DJing in a huge cat’s mouth, training her brain and the upcoming super-duper Superfreq Grande party at LDN East this Saturday, 16th September! | | NEM3SI$ - I Live for the Night – talks superficiality, psychopaths, and bittersweet success, ahead of a plethora of evocative, emotional, and passionate upcoming melodic techno releases! | | Psy-Sisters Spring Blast Off! We talk to DJ competition winner ROEN along with other super talents on the lineup! | | Blasting towards summer festivals with Bahar Canca ahead of Psy-Sisters Spring Blast! | | Shyisma talks parties, UFO's, and Shotokan Karate ahead of his upcoming album 'Particles' on Iono-Music! | | SOME1 talks family, acid, stage fright and wolves - ahead of his upcoming album release ‘Voyager’ on Iono-Music in February 2023! | | The Transmission Crew tell all and talk about their first London event on 24th February 2023! | | NIXIRO talks body, mind and music production ahead of his release 'Planet Impulse' on Static Movement's label - Sol Music! | | Turning the world into a fairy tale with Ivy Orth ahead of Tribal Village’s 10th Birthday Anniversary Presents: The World Lounge Project | | The Psy-Sisters chat about music, achievements, aspirations and the 10-Year Anniversary Party - 18/12/22! | | A decade of dance music with Daniel Lesden | | Earth Needs a Rebirth! Discussions with Psy-Trance Artist Numayma | | Taking a Journey Through Time with Domino | | New Techno Rising Star DKLUB talks about his debut release White Rock on Onhcet Republik! | | PAN expands on many things including his new album 'Hyperbolic Oxymoron' due for release on the 14th April 2022 on PsyWorld Records! | | Psibindi talks all things music including her new collaborative EP 'Sentient Rays' on Aphid Records, her band Sentience Machine and 10 years of Psy-Sisters! |
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Review of SW4 - Clapham Common, 21/08/04.
Reported by Shaun
/
Submitted 01-09-04 16:22
It says a lot about the British character that although the UK is one of the wettest countries in Europe it hosts more outdoor music festivals than any other of its European neighbours. For some inexplicable reason the British take to a field with music in it like ducks take to water and we often end up wading like ducks through the puddles that inevitably appear on the day as we enjoy yet another great British ‘summer’s day.’ Heat Events, having already enjoyed trips to Ibiza and Amsterdam this year decided to enter the crowded festival fray and SW4 was born…
SW4 was held on Clapham Common, an area that usually plays hosts to families taking walks, boys playing football and certain MPs getting up to no good… The common has hosted several very successful events over the past few years including the huge Paul Oakenfold event many moons ago and more recently the Groove Armada party, Lovebox and now it was Heat’s turn to transform this pleasant part of South London into a hedonistic paradise.
The promoters of any outdoor event in the UK must have many sleepless nights in the weeks and months leading up to event, desperately hoping for their event to be blessed with good weather. The omens for SW4 were not great as August was a bit of a wash out; in fact the week before the party was particularly dire with below season temperatures, above average rain and unseasonable winds. However, when I arrived in Clapham at Midday on Saturday 21st August, the weather had definitely taken a turn for the best and the sun was out and beaming over the site.
Now that the weather was looking promising I could relax and concentrate on the real reason I had come along to this event: the music! Heat is one of London’s biggest hard dance clubs but in the past year or so has been diversifying its musical content and this has been seen in it’s collaboration in Ibiza with Cream. Having taken Ian Betts onboard as resident, Heat had announced their determination not to be known just as a hard dance club, although this remains the cornerstone of the enterprise. In the current clubbing climate, getting 10,000 people to an event is a massive task and you need to recruit the very best DJs in the world to make it a success. Heat had succeeded in this by making the headliners of the event two of the best DJs the world has to offer: Sasha and Eric Morillo. These house heavyweights were the headline acts on the main outdoor stage along with scene stalwarts, X-Press 2, Lee Burridge and starf*cker resident Marcus Wallis. Tall Paul headlined the Heat tent along with Nick Sentience, Marc French, Rob Tissera, BK, Spencer Freeland and Ian Betts. Also along for the ride were DJs from the ‘Best Place on Earth’ tm – Bora Bora, Ibiza.
I arrived at the start of the day and people were starting to stream through the entrance, no queues which was a good start – getting to big events like this early always pays off! The site was fairly big and had the main stage, the heat tent, bora bora tent, various bars/takeaway joints and a VIP area. I quickly popped into the Heat tent where resident Ian Betts was warming things up nicely with an excellent selection of Progressive trance and breaks - just the thing to kick proceedings off with. Surprisingly Erick Morillo was on at one O’Clock so I grabbed a drink and settled down in front of the main stage to see the man in action.
I initially thought that it was far too early for him to play as there weren’t many people there at one O’clock but luckily he was delayed for a bit and when he arrived at 13:30 to start playing there was a reasonable crowd built up that then built up very rapidly so by two O’clock there was a heaving mass of people grooving to the very best house music around. Morillo has to be the biggest house DJ on the planet right now and with very good reason – he is fantastic! Having seen him play for the first time at Godskitchen Global Gathering in July I was very excited about seeing him again and he did not disappoint. Morillo is the consummate showman and started with a rather elongated acapella of Ultra Nate’s Free before launching into some silky smooth Latino house. Then it was full steam ahead as Morillo guided us through 2 and a half hours of just the best house imaginable. From the sexy ‘How Many Times’ by Gadjo to the classic ‘Strings of Life’ by Soul Central to the downright rude ‘Dancin’ this was a set to please all house music lovers. The atmosphere was superb as thousands danced away in the warm sunshine to a DJ at the top of his game. Morillo has now moved to playing on only CDs and there were many times during his set when myself and Dom Pardey looked at each other in a ‘how the f*ck did he do that’ way in response to the tricks Morillo was pulling off. As well as his CDJs he also made great use of his FX unit and it created a set that was a wonder to behold. He finished with the weird, wacky and wonderful ‘Rocker’ by Alter Ego (surely, the most f*cked up tune you’ll hear this year!!) and then, somewhat surprisingly, with ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana. This tune certainly divided opinion in the crowd with many people, like me, not being impressed with the invasion of the mosh pit to house music and others happily bouncing along. Certainly was a memorable end to the set though, the pace had been sent early on and it was only four O’Clock!
I took this time to have a look around the other two tents and was pleased to see that they were completely packed already with Tall Paul in one and DJ Gee in the other – all you could see from outside them was a sea of smiling faces and hands in the air. Tall Paul was playing his now customary techy house style and Gee Moore was spinning the kind of tunes that befitted a day such as that – summery, happy and joyful house music.
X-Press 2 were next up on the main stage and with their six decks, two mixers and FX units provided the thousands strong crowd with some quality bass driven tech house including their monster tune ‘Smoke Machine.’ The day was now really in full swing and the site was packed with revellers – must say I was very impressed with the sell out crowd at the event, best I have ever seen at such a big party with none of the usual ‘nick your phone’ brigade present that seem to inflict themselves so much on other big dance events in the UK. It made for a brilliant atmosphere over the whole site.
With the Heat and Bora Bora tents still buzzing (in fact the Bora Bora tent was the most energetic all day from what I could see – Oliver Lang’s set in particular making the tent a den of pumped up pleasure!) I made my way over back to the main stage to catch the second highlight of the day for me…. Sasha is one of my favourite DJs and his appearances in the UK are usually limited to the big festivals and a couple of gigs at Fabric and Godsktichen per year. The reason for this is due to the demand for him the world over, not just a superstar DJ he is an Uber Dj! Sasha is the leading DJ in the progressive house stable and is seen by many as the best DJ on the planet as demonstrated by his continual placing in the top five of the DJ Magazine Top 100 chart. After an excellent warm up set by Lee Burridge, Sasha began with one of his trademark intros which seem to go on for an age teasing the crowd and ramping up the anticipation before playing the most lush proggy house and at times proggy trance. As usual, I hadn’t heard of the majority of tunes but they all contained fantastic basslines, gorgeous melodies and at times delicious vocals. One of the hightlights of his set was when he played the biggest house tune of the year ‘Flashdance’ by Deep Dish – wow! The main stage in the darkness looked fantastic and soon there were a cacophony of lasers beaming out from the stage into the darkness of the London night backed by some truly brilliant visuals. A true spectacle it was and the set was the perfect soundtrack. By this stage there must have been about 5,000 people gathered around to watch the closing set from Sash and the atmosphere was electric. Over in the hard dance tent BK was rocking it to some seriously hard beats and the Bora Bora tent was continuing in its unrelenting pursuit of house hedonism. I had to leave before the end of the event unfortunately but was told that Sasha bought it to a close with his superb remix of ‘In A State’ by UNKLE, which seemed to me a fitting way to end the day.
Any event can provide great music, and this certainly did that but where an event ultimately fails or succeeds is in the logistics of the event – get those wrong and no matter how good the music, people will not be impressed. After the shambles of Lovebox in July I did fear the same problems at SW4 but thankfully these weren’t repeated. The queues to get in were reasonable, the toilets were adequate and the bar prices reasonable. Although the sound system was a little on the quite side, it was enough to set alight a crowd of thousands and the whole day just worked like clockwork. There were problems with water supply but after some frantic running around this issue was resolved by the Heat team.
The problem with large events usually is that you have to travel ages to get to them, the weather can put a dampner on the whole thing, you get annoyed by queuing and the crowds leave a lot to be desired. SW4 managed to avoid all of these problems and it was an absolute pleasure to be at a sunny event, 25 minutes from my house with no queues and the best crowd imaginable. Add to this the talents of great DJs as Sasha and Erick Morillo and an amazing atmosphere and this event definitely made it into my top five events of 2004. An absolute storming success and an event that I just didn’t want to end (although I did keep the flame alive by going to the filthy Telegraph after party) – an all too rare feeling now for me in clubbing. Fantastic music, fantastic people, fantastic sunshine – this is what summer was made for!
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Other Features By Shaun:
Nastydirtysexmusic, Interview with Tim Sheridan and Smokin' Jo
The Big Three in Ibiza reviewed: We Love Sundays at Space, Subliminal Sessions at Pacha and Cream at Amnesia...
Interview with Tim Davison.
Review of Cream, Amnesia opening party.
Interview with Riley and Durrant
The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable.
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