Oxygen Thief

Musings on Events

I have recently resurfaced after a big night out at a giant psy-trance, techno and hard dance party at Alexandra Palace, North London. It was a huge party, with stupid numbers of DJs, live acts and album and single launches. Such a massive party needs a massive venue, but the organisation wasn't really up to the task. A few failures took the shine off an otherwise awesome night.

As soon as you walk through the doors at Ally Pally, you are aware of the immensity of the venue. The atrium has giant palms growing and the celings just seem to get higher as you get further in!

Almost immediately we found the chillout room, which doubled as the merchandising area. I had brought a whole bunch of glowing necklaces, bracelets and so on on the cheap at Maplin intending to sell them in the venue, but I soon realised the market was flooded with UV goods, so I got them all going and gave them to my friends, who turned from common clubbers to glowing trancers before my eyes!

The major part of the music happened in the Great Hall - three stages separated by audio baffles and a fairground ride! Above the main stage was a giant Pink Floyd inflatable teacher stretching right out over the crowd. The ceiling was, oh I don't know - up there somewhere. Behind the baffles were the second and third rooms, hosting techno and hard dance from all over Europe. After a brief circuit we decided to get some drinks, divvy up our goodies and arrange some meeting places. Aside from being gouged two pounds for 500ml of water, there was nowhere in the bar to sit. You had to find a wall and lean against it. Looking round, there were no seats anywhere, which was something of an oversight for an 11 hour party for 7000 trancers, many of whom (probably over half) had come from other countries for this event.

The bar's lighting was very bright strip lighting, as was the lighting everywhere except for the party rooms, so it wasn't easy to relax anywhere - there was either very loud music or very bright lights in every location except for the chillout room, where there was still too much white lighting. And of course everywhere suffered from the lack of seats. I should mention the one really really good thing about the venue - there was reception for (at least) Orange and T-Mobile so despite the vastness of the place it was possible to find people with phones very quickly, which relieved the fast-acting paranoia which often accompanies these kinds of gigs.

Nik bumps into Jenny

The fairground ride was amazing. Flying through the air with lasers being shot at you and pounding pounding techno music thudding through your soul... it has to be experienced!

However, there were more problems. Whether it was the venue's rules or a decision by the organisers I don't know, but there were white lights everywhere. Not bright like in the bar, but in every single place except the VIP room there were celing mounted white lights. I'm sure it made it harder to lose things, but it also diluted the effects of the otherwise proficient lighting, which was sad as special lighting is an important part of a big show like this one. It seems that, 'otherwise,' and, 'however,' are the watchwords for this review.

Litter was a problem too - there were plenty of bins, but in all the wrong places! There should have been litter pickers on the prowl through the dance floors, because many people were basically camping out in groups to see their favourite DJ and the dance floor was so covered with plastics, fag packets and worn out glowsticks it wasn't pleasant to dance. And where people spent their time sitting against walls at the edge of the hall litter built up too, making it pretty difficult to find a pleasant environment to sit, even ignoring the fact the floor was un-covered tarmac.

It was also difficult to know who was playing when and where - there were a very small number of A4 timetables stuck up around the various stages, but this meant that if you wanted to know what was on at any one time you had to walk to five different rooms and build up an aggregated timetable in your head. And even then the timetables were just plain wrong; I missed the headliners - and their last date in England for over a year! - because they came on a full hour before the timetable indicated.

Nevertheless we all of us had a great time. I had a chance to have a really long conversation with my ex-colleague Jenny's wonderful boyfriend Matt, spent a long while chatting with Olly and had lots of hookups with strangers. Admittedly I was wearing a 30cm tall bright orange wig and half my face was covered in fluorescent green latex! Actually, my dressing up backfired somewhat: I now know, thanks to the many many people who told me, that my wig is actually for a character from an anime series, and the fluorescent latex on my face didn't show up because the organisers forgot to put UV lighting anywhere apart from the chillout room! You could buy fluoro stuff by the bucketload if you liked, but once you walked out of the chillout room your purchases looked totally ordinary. I got a bit sick of having people come to me saying things in Japanese like "omae wo korosu" and so on. It was depressing to come down from thinking that I had a cool wig to realising everyone thought I was an anime otaku (although don't believe the outdated assertion that 'otaku' is highly derogatory - it is becoming cooler, as are geeks everywhere) indulging in a spot of cosplay. I took it off.

Olly, Jenny and Matt at 5:55am

But at 6am the lights went up. No encore, nothing. We were cleared out of the hall to the front where the cloakroom was so horribly overloaded they couldn't cope with the number of people in the queues, so we were kept in the venue while they slowly let people out of the main building into the atrium where the cloakrooms had been set up. By this stage people were getting pretty fractious; they had closed the main hall, and with it the toilets, yet we weren't going anywhere because they didn't think the cloakroom system through. During the night they cloakroom bosses moved a lot of the coats and bags to a different area, presumably thinking they could open more desks and get a fast throughput, whereas what they actually did was make it so that nobody knew exactly which of the three desks their stuff was actually behind. Result: people queuing for 45 minutes to get out of the main building and into the atrium, then queuing for 20 minutes at each of two desks as they get bounced around.

During all this I got interviewed wearing my big orange wig by a very pretty woman with a microphone and a TV camera. While chewing my lip off and with my pupils about 20km across, she asked me if I'd had a good night and so on. And then:

Interviewer:

So, are you a pretty big psy-trance fan?

Me:

Not especially, no.

Bzzzzt! Wrong answer! She asked me how I found out about it, and I said from a colleague at work. At this point, my brain, which has been not so much coasting through this interview as floating face-down in the river, perks up and screams in my head, "Please don't let her ask where I work cos I'm not capable of lies or dissembling just now! Don't let me be on camera, looking utterly ripped, telling the world who I work for. I don't think they'd like that very much!"

Thank god she looked merely intrigued but decided not to press it! She was really hot though - I'd have told her anything!

Finally we got out, got our stuff from one of the two desks serving 7000 people, and made our way outside to find no shuttle buses or cabs big enough for 5. We walked to the station as packed buses went past.

No, that's not camera shake - the world really did look like that.

It took about 4 hours for me to get in, but I did stop in at the cafe to get a breakfast which didn't taste of anything. Of course it didn't taste of anything - 12 hours later it's 10 in the evening and I still can't taste anything. I just tried 5 of those wafer gel mints to check, but I couldn't really taste them either. At the cafe I spotted my mother buying some tea - I wasn't sure if I could deal with her, because you can bullshit your way through a chance meeting with your friends or something, but your family always know. In then end I ran out the door after her and we had a brief chat. She knew.