Tagged: clubbing

PREVIEW: SebastiAn, Surkin, Unicorn Kid @ Koko, Camden

Once upon a time, long before I wrote a fashion blog, I used to be a music reviewer-cum-DJ-cum-club promoter. My coup de grace was convincing a then semi-popular minimal techno producer called Kanio to play at a house party I was helping to throw. Not that throwing a house party on Manor House Road required much ‘help’ – it was more of a case of ‘play music, and they will come’. My career as a DJ was fairly shortlived – I played a few parties and opened for a few friends with names much bigger than my own. Most of the clubs I performed in (and I’m hoping this is a coincidence rather than a direct result…) have since been shut down. The truth is, I was more a fixture on ‘the scene’ than anything else. Like a 21st century Bez.

However, one thing I (usually) managed to do pretty successfully was predict where music was heading – I was listening to French electro and minimal techno, albeit most of it culled from the collections of DJ friends, long before Urban Outfitters played it instore and I’d already seen Deadmau5 twice before his oversized head ever popped up on Radio 1′s Essential Mix. Two artists I maintain never really got the credit they deserved are SebastiAn and Surkin. While labelmates like Justice and Uffie soared to the top of the charts, it took a long time for SebastiAn and Surkin to become much more than ‘cult favourites’. I’m massively excited to see them bring their ‘weird but it works’ blend of dirty, bass heavy electro and DIY punk/metal aesthetics to London next weekend.

I’m also hugely excited to see my homeboy Unicorn Kid, who I’ve previously written extensively about bring some homegrown talent to what is otherwise a very French stage. This gig will be one of the first at which Sabin is playing ‘live’ rather than just mixing, though whether this means he’ll be bringing out the modded Game Boys remains to be seen. Judging from his latest single, Feel So Real, a mash-up of his own Chrome Lion with Love Decade’s So Real, the Kid clearly knows how to make something fresh and exciting out of tracks both old and new.

Tickets are now on sale here – http://bit.ly/PWOhyl. In case I haven’t convinced you yet, you can find some choice cuts by some of the acts performing below. Oh, and if you do end up buying a ticket, let me know – I’m currently going stag. That’s how much I love these guys.

Disclaimer: Because I’ve previously written about Unicorn Kid, the guys putting on this night invited me down to check it out for free. Don’t be crazy enough to think that that compromises any of what I’ve written above.

REVIEW: Little Mix at G-A-Y, 17/12/2011

Note: this was originally published here

‘Are you gay?’ is the first question a girl in a flowery dress at the bar asks me only a couple of minutes after I get into G-A-Y at Heaven. ‘What do you think?’ I reply. She pauses and looks around at the throngs of sweaty (some already shirtless) men before answering ‘You don’t look very gay.’ I tell her that I’m not, and she says ‘So what are you doing here?’ And it’s a good question. This is my second time at G-A-Y, having come down to see Janet Devlin just a couple of weeks ago. Last time I came down with an old friend, but this time I’ve ended up here on my own. And it’s totally surreal.

The cheering is deafening when the band finally come on stage, though a few do people leave the dancefloor muttering about how they’re ‘like so cringe’. Something that didn’t always come across on the live shows is just how much energy the band has – they bounce around like a bunch of five year olds who’ve just been told they’re going to Disneyworld. Being in the same room really does intensify their qualities; Perrie’s huge voice seems even stronger, Jesy and Leigh-Anne seem even sassier and Jade is even more utterly adorable.

Even more amazing is how smooth the band seems already – they open with the sublime Don’t Let Go, already their signature song, which feels like it could have been written for them. They then break straight into club anthems Don’t Stop the Music and Super Bass, the latter of which Jade introduces – ‘apparently it’s funny when you say it in a Geordie accent, so next we’re goin’ to play Soopa Bass.’ The group already move completely in sync, and their vocal harmonies are only getting more polished. This is nowhere more evident than in their final song, which is (of course) their first number one single, Cannonball.

One of the most striking things about the evening is the cross section of the fanbase it reveals – as well as the gay twentysomething guys and straight teenage girls dancing and cheering, I also spot thirty something drag queens, mothers out with their daughters and the odd straight guy who has been totally swept up by the experience (though I bet a lot of them will still insist that they hated it and their girlfriends dragged them along). I could make a lame pun about there being a great ‘little mix’ of people right now…am I better than that? Clearly not.

‘God, this place is going downhill,’ slurs a bleached blonde skinny guy at the bar. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask him. “They used to play Patrick Wolf and Robyn, now it’s just X Factor and whatever other over produced commercial shit they can find.” I cautiously tell him that I only came down to see Little Mix and the expression on his face mirrors the groups of guys who retreated to the bar as soon as Little Mix came onstage. “Well, each to their own, I guess. But they’re far too kitsch for me.” And with the revelation that my new favourite band is too camp for a gay guy wearing a Madonna t-shirt ringing in my ears, I order a bottle of water and jump in a taxi home.

REVIEW: El Tropico @ Old Blue Last, 26/08/2011

I have to be careful when writing this post. Old Blue Last is Vice’s pub, and as you’ll see on the right my blog is part (albeit a tiny, insignificant one) of Vice’s Blogging Network. So I’m now faced with the balance of writing a post that carefully balances cynicism and apathy with the fact that I did actually have a fairly enjoyable evening.  Too far in either direction and they’ll probably get the coffee boy to write a snarky post about me on their website, where everyone will agree that I’m incredibly annoying and should pretty much never go outside again.

It’s important to note that before I went to OBL I went to Cargo (no sign of Bongo Bob this week), where I drank a lot of tequila, so everything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt. And a slice of lemon. I also went to a bar that was running a night called Cher, which turned out to be a gay night (should have guessed from the name?), and another that resembled a velvety boudoir but was full of ageing skinheads. But that’s not so relevant.

The music is pretty diverse, ranging from groovy house to Rihanna, who (if I’m to believe her lyrics) wants to be ‘taken in the night’ like a common thief snatching a handbag and  relishes the idea of being the only female survivor in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Weird. It’s all fairly danceable, but is barely audible anyway once one of the organisers hands out multi-coloured whistles to the crowd. Imagine one drunk person with a whistle. Multiply that by fifty. It was as pleasant as you imagine.

What made the night really enjoyable was the people. Take Steve the organiser, for example, who was MCing for his birthday with a naivety and sense of enthusiasm that I presume means he doesn’t have to do it so often that it’s crushed his spirit. Or the girl who didn’t hesitate to tell me that one of my classic moves, which involves shaking imaginary dice above my head, looked like I was ‘wanking off Hagrid’. There was also a couple comprised of a guy who looked like Louis Theroux and a bootylicious black girl krumping at him (not ‘with’, definitely ‘at’), but I don’t think there’s a way of putting how funny that was into words.

A downside to the night is that the staff refused to sell me the stuffed armadillo behind the bar, and were unable to direct me to an all night taxidermist where I could purchase one of my own.  I’m willing to overlook this, and might even go again.

REVIEW: Cargo & Callooh Callay, 22/07/2011

Callooh Callay (stock photos- useful when your camera sucks.)

I toyed with a number of headlines for this article, including Stuart Bradley and the Unknown EMI Artist, but all of them sounded as much like rejected Harry Potter titles as the above example.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty much the best I can do, as the event I’m reviewing was several weeks ago and I wasn’t even meant to be there – I got in by claiming to be a tech reviewer for a national newspaper who was writing an article on social dynamics within the electronic music scene.  An elaborate story to construct sober, let alone after a heavy evening of after-work drinks, I credit being able to blag entry to the gravitas of this lie.

The above paragraph is a pretty good introduction to my life – a relatively new addition to London, I am a serial blagger and a have a passion for music and writing.  On nights out I tend to do first and think later, which usually (I hope…) makes for an entertaining read.  By the time I get to Cargo, I’ve been hanging out in the VIP area of Callooh Callay for several hours.  I don’t mean the bit through the wardrobe, there’s another bit you need a key to get into.  I didn’t, and still don’t, have a key, and I’m not sure if I’m even supposed to be talking about it or everybody already knows about it. Oh well.  The cocktails at CC that night are named after girls and accompanied by a caption that describes both the girls and the drinks, which is undeniably a pretty cool touch.

People on drugs at Cargo (another stock photo...)

Anyway, Cargo.  I’d only been once before, with a friend and a minor league celebrity who insisted that we film a ‘music video’ on her iPhone.  On playing it back the next day, we were dismayed to find that we looked like extras from Requiem for a Dream.  Free entry before 10pm – that’s always a good sign.  Another good sign is that there were enough good looking women to ensure that a very drunk, very ‘play the numbers and you’re bound to have success’ friend was able to disappear for about an hour before we found him attempting to chat up two eastern European girls and very messily eating a burger from the BBQ outside.  I got a burger too…it was actually pretty amazing.  Satiated with meat, I switched back to cider after blagging my way into…uhh, someone’s EMI launch party.  Much to my dismay, he was playing drum and bass.  I know, like it was 2005 and everything.  I didn’t have much time to mope though, because the VIPs (oh, and me) got turfed out at 1am.

What makes Shoreditch nightlife really interesting is the characters you meet while you’re out.  An example that springs to mind is the middle-aged programmer type we met who was wearing red jeans, a red Hawaiian shirt and an Indiana Jones hat.  After introducing himself as Bongo Bob, we asked him why he was dressed like that.  ‘Because I feel like it, man’ he replied.  Respect.  Now I’m writing for Made in Shoreditch and I might get press passes to lots more things like this, I dread to think of the rabbit holes I’m going to find myself waking up in.

REVIEW: Whatever happened to P-Rock?

This blog is long overdue an update, so here goes.  Also, you may notice the URL change; I figure this reflects what I’ll be writing about, i.e. my [mis]adventures in London, rather than a random obscure song title…

Ok, so two weeks ago (ish), I went to Whatever Happened to P-Rock?’s second birthday party at The Macbeth.  WHTPR is a niche club night that celebrates a niche music channel that existed for like 9 weeks and then disappeared into the ether.  For those who haven’t heard of it (conservative estimate – 90%), they used to play stuff like this -


i.e. stuff like old school Blink 182 before Tom Delonge started to think he was Jesus.  The above song is what I told my date the music would be like, and it was actually the song played when we finally arrived at 1am.  She made an unimpressed face both times.

I wish I could tell you I remembered what we were doing until 1am, but I only remember it involving trying to sneak into the Trocadero as it was closing, being called a parrot (or possibly Poirot) and watching a boy wearing an inner tube around his neck propose to a girl on a bus.  She didn’t say yes.

Highlights of the evening also include an overly defensive American who took every joke about his homeland far too seriously (but we all apologised because he looked like the type of guy who might carry a knife), two Indian guys rolling a joint in front of a bouncer while having a chat with him and my date tugging on someone’s beard.  I gave beard man my business card, but haven’t heard anything from him.  Shocking.

We left about 3.30am before it all kicked off, because a girl who was crowding the stage was trying to rustle up enough of her scrawny seventeen year old friends to rush me. Apparently I spent the walk home telling my date I could have taken them all and punching inanimate objects.

And that’s what you missed on Glee.

The Try-fecta.

The confusion strikes me a few moments after the snappy Russian promo girl hands me the flyer – I’m sure she said ‘free entry’, but the flyer I’m holding indicates ‘exclusive £3 entry for our friends’.  Is it possible she was standing on the corner yelling ‘three entry’?  We step into Grace Bar and no-one seems to expect any money to change hands, so we grab a couple of drinks.  I’m wearing an American Apparel hoodie and a Gap dress shirt, just about acceptable given that this was an unexpected night out (we’ve just dined at Ed’s Easy Diner which, incidentally, was pretty good, and decided to take a wrong turn into Bat Country).  There are a lot of Barcelona fans around, some of whom are intently scrutinising every slo-mo replay of the trophy ceremony on a large screen at one end of the bar, while others are performing a dance routine that looks surprisingly well choreographed given the amount  of empty glasses on their table.  While finishing our second drink we play ‘guess what decade’, which involves watching how someone dances and analysing their technique to figure out what decade they were born in (lots of arm motion = 70s, swaying = 80s, shoulder bouncing = 90s, techno fingers = 00s), then we head down to the club in the basement.

A fairly terrifying experience, in the space of five minutes we brush shoulders with a man who looks like Andre the Giant (and is gurning spectacularly), a diminutive Akon lookalike wearing a zoot suit and a very tired looking older lady wearing a bright pink sash that reads ‘mother of the bride’.  It’s as she sits down with what looks like a cup of tea that we decide to leave.

The Yard - it's definitely NOT a boy girl thing.

You would think that the sentence ‘I saw a load of really extravagant cross dressers go in here when I was out with my parents’ would function as a warning, but because we’re a couple of drinks down I decide it’s a great idea to head to The Yard.  As we walk through the dark entrance corridor, which is lit with a number of a rainbow coloured fluorescent tubes Sarah whispers in my ear ‘I think this is a gay bar.’  The naked statue of Zeus around the corner gives this statement a bit more credibility.

A gay bar it may be, but the music is the best we’ve encountered so far; pulsing techno mixed with the occasional dance remix of a show tune (I would say ‘trust me, it works’ but we aren’t exactly sober by this point).  It takes a lot to make me uncomfortable, but a picture of a naked Abercrombie model-esque guy above the urinal will just about do it.  We finish up our drinks (two pints of Gaymers, the irony is not lost on me) and then it’s onward and upward.  Oh, and a young man named Andrew asks ‘what brings us to The Yard?’ while he’s hitting on me.  ’Oh, you know, just here for the crack.’  ’Oh, me too! I love the crack!’ he replies.  I’ll bet he does.

Having been to a ‘hen night bar’ and a gay bar, we decide we’ll visit the Ice Bar and try to make it a trifecta.  However, they want us to buy tickets for an hour and a half from now.  We’re just not ready for that kind of commitment.  We come home and watch It’s a Boy/Girl Thing on BBC3 or something, which frankly seems like an infinitely better choice.

After Hours Athletes


I hate the word ‘athlete’, not as much as I hate people who pronounce it ‘atherleet’, but still quite a bit.  It conjures up two images in my head – the first is one of those anorexic looking Kenyan runners pronouncing words wrongly (which in turns carries its own connotations of trying not to laugh at the breakfast table because your stepdad is a politically correct wanker and he’ll call you a racist) and the second is some ginger twat from public school who looks like an over inflated Prince Harry, wears deck shoes even when it’s snowing and starts most of his sentences with a laugh that sounds like a frog coughing up blood.

Enter VICE and Puma to  shatter these stereotypes and bring sports back to quote unquote normal people like me, who only go to the gym to pick up women and even then would rather sit around writing articles for zines about how much of a dickhead Russell Brand is.  The dynamic duo are throwing two parties, one in London and one in Manchester, featuring a host of events like beer pong, cardioke (trying to do karaoke while on a cross trainer…maybe some steroid fuelled chavs will gatecrash and cross train themselves into oblivion while MCing to new monkey) and something to do with eating pizza without using your hands.  Obviously that’s the one I’m most excited about.  Of course, there’ll be so much hip facial hair that everyone in attendance’s faces will smell of pizza for days.


Puma and VICE are doing a bunch of other things with bands and stuff, one of them being Is Tropical, who are currently opening for Mystery Jets. Kind of a shame that means most of the punters will be queueing for £3.95 pints of Carling while Is Tropical are playing, since they’re better than Mystery Jets.  Expect to hear them on like…series 9 of Skins, since that’s how long it takes good music to filter through over there.  I guess this where I should talk about how Is Tropical fuse the artcore aesthetic of bands like The Antlers with the raw energy and ‘foot tappability’ (vom.) of The Drums, with an edge of the Klaxons but not new Klaxons stuff, their old stuff.  Just got a phonecall from NME, I start next month.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, parties. DJs. Fun. The possibility of free pizza. Booze. Girls.  You’d be a fool to miss it, a damn fool.  The London party goes down on 10th Nov and the Manchester party is on the 30th November.  More details on how to get tickets (free…) at http://viceland.com/afterhours/index.php