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For once not rammed to the rafters with freshers and with a positively chunky line-up to boast, The Old Firestation in Bournemouth is playing host to a night of pounding dance music from those Belgium rockers turned beat-freaks Soulwax.
Most people in the busy main room have no idea who the weird looking guy hunched behind his laptop is when Vitalic takes to the stage, but by the end of his set his name is on everyone’s lips. Unfased by the fact that the crowd are waiting to hear Michael Jackson mixed into Basement Jaxx or the like, he sets about bashing out some downright filthy techno and electro without shame, and The Firestation collectively hits the roof for the next forty-five minutes. Dropping in odd tunes from his debut LP, ‘OK Cowboy’, much of Vitalic’s set is based around build-ups, pushing his tunes higher and faster until bringing them crashing down around the audience in true destructive fashion. By the time set closer ‘La Rock 01’ drops, it’s heart attacks all round, and suddenly Soulwax’s night doesn’t quite belong to them.
When the ‘wax boys do appear though, everyone seems to have forgotten who was on before and the dancefloor has become something of a mosh-pit, beer flying everywhere, sweat running down the walls – the perfect atmosphere for some dirty live electro-rock-crossover-hybrid type shit. Rather than the normal Soulwax gigs we have been getting over here for the last year, instead the band have taken their remix album, ‘Nite Versions’, on the road and they proceed to knock the crowd for six with a relentless set that sounds like ‘Any Minute Now’ chucked into a blender and served up in pill form.
You can hear a chunk of ‘E Talking’ getting tweaked and stretched into a hypnotic beat that becomes ‘Miserable Girl’ before dropping down into their cover of ‘Funky Town.’ There are times when it gets tricky enjoying the music over the constantly being shunted and blinking the sweat out of your eyes, but then a few minutes later another storming crescendo comes in, everyone’s hands go up, and you forget that everything smells like the armpits of the kebab shop owner down the road.
Following on almost straight away in the DJ booth across the other side of the room, two of the Stefan’s from the band hit the decks and carry on the same music policy as we’ve been getting all night. The tech-house and electro they start dropping as 2 Many DJs is all good, but having seen them do the same music better live just minutes before, it’s easier to leg it to the bar and take some time out. You get the odd bootleg, as ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Teenage Kicks’ get the 2MDJs treatment, but most of the set pales in comparison to what came earlier. It’s not until the end of the night that they hit the spot with their record dropping, moving slickly from a brutal cut-up of ‘Song 2’ into the Pendulum remix of ‘Voodoo People’ by The Prodigy, running it right into the lights coming up, with a sweaty mass of people screaming for one more tune.
Some people are certainly reacting with an almost evangelical passion as they cheer, and it’s understandable when Bournemouth has had such a drought of good music coming to it’s shores. When a line-up this well thought out rolls into town, it’s always gonna provoke pretty intense behaviour. Let’s just hope it keeps up eh?
