Get Familiar at Fabriclive
Fabric is a bit of an odd one, being the huge, famous London club you might actually want to go to. If you don’t have to queue for too long and it's not too rammed, you won't be thinking, "weird, I’m at a super-club." There’s actually some sense of intimacy in there. Maybe there are similar establishments that think they're magically alright now they're out of the mainstream eye, but no. Putting on David Guetta or some random funky house DJs still isn't the same as making Craig Richards your resident or getting Villalobos to play, however the demographics cross over.
Sinden and Switch did their bit to help make Fabric better than other monster clubs by bagging Dexplicit, Toddla T, DJ Funk and DJ Assault for the line-up at their Get Familiar night. When we went down both good things and bad things happened immediately. Good: we didn't have to wait long to get in and the place wasn’t completely packed. Bad: we realised we'd missed Toddla T, who's recent mixtape has loads of great dancehall, hip-hop, bassline and garage tracks on it, and Dexplicit. Dexplicit is one of the guys running the Niche or bassline house scene at the moment in the north of England. It's a big mistake to fail to see him play when he's in London, and it's a double-big mistake to fail to see him play over a perfect soundsystem with a vibrating dancefloor.
So Sinden was on, with his musical collaborator Hervé, which seemed to make quite a lot of people want to take off their shirts and dance on the stage. Their new UK house sound is cleverly produced and has some interesting influences, like baile funk, grime and Baltimore club music, but it modifies them with a populism that makes the result something very different.
After they finished the crowd thinned out more, which left some space to do stupid dancing when DJ Funk came on. He's the overlord of the booty house scene, which basically involves sped-up Chicago rhythm tracks with extremely rude vocals over the top. To start with a few Sinden fans looked pretty mystified: even though booty’s been around for ages, nothing similar has ever really got popular in the UK. It seemed like everyone warmed to DJ Funk pretty quickly though. It's hard not to, because his music's a lot of fun, unless you're uptight about rude vocals. Most people would probably find it hard not to enjoy anyway. Most of his bass comes from low-pitched, booming kick drums, which are great when you can feel them through your feet. DJ Assault was next, and was almost as good. His ghetto-tech sound is similar (still with the naughty lyrics) but closer to purist Detroit electro.
The overall result: the same kind of happy, tired feeling you get after a full day out with lots of activities. Maybe Fabric is a bit like the Tower of London for people who get up late, and maybe that's what big clubs in central London should be about.
