You may or may not know this, but I it's fair to say that the Britain's, and probably the world's most famous house DJ is Sasha. Together with John Digweed he defined a new sound and continues to push it forward. Over the last month I've been lucky enough to see two of his prodigies, James Zabiela and Sander Kleinenberg, at different venues in London: Turnmills and Ministry of Sound respectively. In each case I wasn't exactly looking forward to it because I really like small venues and friendly crowds, but I'm happy to say I was pleasantly surprised, if only once.
First, James Zabiela at Turnmills. To date, I've never had a good night at Turnmills, and I think unless someone is having a party there I won't be going again. The queues, even at just gone 11, are massive and the door staff are unfriendly and in some cases hostile. Despite having bought tickets we were told to wait at the end of a very long queue, which turned out the be the queue for people without tickets. The vibe in the club isn't especially friendly either; my suspicion is that it's because Turnmills is so close to Shoreditch, Farringdon and other trendy drinking spots. People go out drinking on a Friday night and when the pubs close they hit up Turnmills and keep drinking. Certainly there were a lot of beer glasses about the place - something you rarely see in a clubbers' club. There's also nowhere to relax; there's a kind of cafe-style area with lots of tables and chairs, but the air-conditioning is too strong, people are threading in between the tightly packed tables all night and the chairs simply aren't comfortable. The last thing you want to do when you come off a sweaty, heaving dancefloor is to freeze your arse off in an uncomfortable chair while a stream of people push past you.
As for the music, JZ was wicked. Sadly his set was from early o'clock to 2:30am, so the place was rammed because the drunks hadn't got tired and gone home yet; instead they were all on the dancefloor being malcoordinated and annoying, but he was nearly good enough for them not to matter. To be honest, I don't think Sasha would have been good enough to counteract the extremely strong bad vibes I was getting from the club. Despite my best efforts, I didn't even enjoy my sweeties, although I felt their after-effects on the Wednesday as usual when an assisted error at work wiped out an afternoon's work sending me into a dark grey funk. But I'd like to say one more time that James Zabiela was awesome, Hybrid, who was on afterwards, was awesome, and Eddie Halliwell whom I saw only briefly because I was pissed off (which is pretty hard on 3 and a half pills) was also awesome. It's a shame that Turnmills sucks, because that would have been an amazing night.
Next up, last Saturday, was Sander Kleinenberg at Ministry of Sound. I am extremely happy to say that this was the gig that confounded expectations and which has a place in my top 5 gigs of the last 10 years as well as one of the best nights out I've had, all in all. I don't think you can compare JZ with SK in terms of style; they are completely different, with JZ focussing on twisting the tracks into new shapes and SK aiming to augment already amazing tunes with a smattering of audio wizardry. JZ was amazing, but Turnmills took the shine off. SK blew the roof off, received a well-deserved ovation and 3 encores, and Ministry made it enjoyable! Somehow he managed to pick banger after banger after banger, no cruft no fillers, just pure musical class, and the atmosphere was so good I enjoyed it to the full.
What was so good? Well for one, the club's layout is pretty nice; bar, chillout and a few little snugs upstairs, dancefloors downstairs. The sound quality is great but canal-crushingly loud; unless you are on the podium in the middle you are never more than a few metres from a speaker stack the height of your house. The punters, too, aid matters greatly by being hugely up for it and really friendly. I think like at The Key or The Cross out in the deepest darkest edges of Kings Cross, if people are at Ministry it's because they've decided to travel out to Elephant and Castle to go clubbing, and this makes a difference. All these good things were augmented brilliantly by the fact that it was George's leaving party and Olly, Matt, Kiran, Paul, Noriko, Annie, Una, Marie Claire, Chris and Dimes all came out to dance and celebrate, and thus did George, who has only been clubbing with serious intent since Halloween 2003, get the send-off he deserved.
Finally, a mention for the staff; the search staff outside were friendly and professional, as were the security throughout the night, the bar staff and the cloakroom staff too. As a testament to the friendliness of the staff, Alky Dimes managed a discount on his triple vodka-redbull of £7 - from £15 down to £8!
Posted by Oxygenik at March 7, 2005 1:05 PM