New two-day opening weekend spectacular Words ALLAN MCGRATH & JOE ROBERTS
W
hen it comes to staring out at bloodshot, sleep-starved eyes at 6am in the morning, We Love… resident Paul Woolford has got more experience than most. Although, even
for a DJ as well schooled as him, this scene is a new one. For as he presses play on Carly Simon’s unlikely Balearic anthem and infectious pop-reggae ditty ‘Why Does Your Love (Hurt So Much)?’ he’s not stood behind his familiar turntable abode on the Space terrace, but in a prosaic departure lounge in the middle of London to promote the new BA routes from City Airport.
What does Paul Woolford playing in London City Airport have to do with mighty Ibiza institution Space, we hear you ask? Well, in this instance, he’s the warm up before the main event. BA have assembled this spectacle as an aperitif to whet our appetites, before they ferry us through the skies, and to our ultimate destination of the Playa D’en Bossa superclub. This special early flight to celebrate Space opening weekend is just a taster of what’s to come. Although this spectacle is perhaps a bit bemusing, the new BA service is everything you’d want it to be; convenient, comfortable, quick and easy-to-reach for most central London dwellers, with enough leg room to prevent even the most vertically-endowed risking deep-vein thrombosis.
Spectacle, of course, is something that this weekend’s Space opening always has in abundance. And this year, it should have more than ever. With IMS week now bringing an early
influx of Ibiza rave troops, the club has stretched its curtain- raising opening party out over two days for the first time. Whatever the intentions, a little magic spark is missing from Saturday’s opening party. On our 6pm arrival, the electric buzz, piling queues and carnival spectacle are all notable by their absence while the centrepiece of any recent Space opening party – the sprawling festival frenzy of the open-air carpark arena – is on standby until tomorrow’s big bang. Instead, the only proper arena open – the sunset terrace – is ringing out to an utterly diabolical R.E.M. cover, which has followed an electro-house remix of Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way?’ Oh dear. Thankfully, things switch up a gear nicely when the main arenas — the imposing cavern of the Discoteca and the famous terrace — open their doors. A British answer to Boys Noize, Burns takes on the mantle of charging up the Discoteca with surges of riotous electro, punky disco and rave techno as hallucinogenic projections send 3D alien images flying across the room. Over in the terrace, there’s a wave of Balearic rushes flooding the famous space as Groove Armada’s Andy Cato (the lanky one) flips up his chunky tech-house funk with the classic piano house of Rozalla’s ’91 anthem ‘Everybody’s Free’. And in that one euphoric, unifying and nostalgia-inducing moment, the magic is back. From there the night disappears in a familiar hedonistic blur with John Digweed’s epic wooshes, Fatboy Slim’s noisy,
kitchen-sink electro mayhem and random chatter with pan- European clubbers all merging into one.
Come round two, and General Carl Cox is in a towering pill-box overlooking the carpark, firing rounds of techno tracers and house howitzers — like Armand Van Helden’s rudeboy classic ‘U Don’t Know Me’ — into a jammers crowd ready for rave war in neon face paint. After yesterday’s semi-subdued antics, it’s clear that Sundays in Space still exert an irresistible gravitational pull. Later, Steve Lawler teases the riffs of Moodymann’s ‘Shades Of Jae’ in and out of heavily layered tribal beats before midnight signals the end of the ball, at least outside anyway. Spoilt for choice by Space’s multi-levelled, multi-capacity selection of dancing spots, it’s the underground cool of Kehakuma on the Terraza that draw us in to hear a succession of acts, including 2000 and One, Nick Curly, Tiefschwarz and Radio Slave, bashing out the kind of pumping tech-house that’s replaced minimal as the flavour du jour, its hissing snares morphing in our feverish late-night imagination into a particularly rhythmical snake.
Guy Gerber is still playing past what we foolishly assume is a 6am finish time, cold ceiling mounted ice cannons, which in the hands of unscrupulous dictatorships are probably used as a crowd control weapon, ironically igniting the rammed dancefloor into greater cries of ecstatic arm-waving. It’s the kind of riotous send-off that such a weekend
www.djmag.com 067
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