Ed Banger 6½ Birthday Party at The Coronet

Ed Banger 6½ Birthday Party at The Coronet

13 July, 2009
by: Rose

It’s 3am and Busy P is on the decks at The Coronet theatre, celebrating his record label Ed Banger's 6 (½)th birthday party. He has been playing a minimal blend of punishing electro and deep techno for about an hour. I look around and everyone's got a march on, their heads down, their faces pained, stalwartly stomping as if they've got a job to do.  No one looks happy, but they are... blissfully so. After a torturously protracted breakdown everyone pauses for a few breathless seconds, waiting for the drop to explode out of the silence. Busy booms: ‘Bonjour Londres'. The house lights go up, revealing two thousand pairs of hands in the air. He waits many seconds before speaking again, ‘London is fucking sleeping baby. Last night we were in fucking Manchestair. Now London, show us what you've got'. Then he drops ‘Yeah Yeah' by Bodyrox and there's a veritable petite-mort on the dance floor.

I had arrived at 12:30am, spending half an hour getting my bearings in the massive plush Coronet, complete with original gold stucco and red velveteen seats. The DJs populate the stage under the massive proscenium, and are sporadically lost amidst clouds of dry ice and dramatic lighting production. Two enormous disco balls hang over our heads. At this point the floor is already sticky and the air is hot and sour, but no-one seems to care. Nor does anyone I ask seem to know who it is that's DJing. I think it's Krazy Baldhead, but it could be Feadz, as the music is classic Ed Banger brand electro. What is discernible though, is the mood of the crowd, which rolls in waves from intense broody insularity to euphoric testimonial palm-bearing. I realise that this type of DJing isn't just about mixes from track to track, or about the breakdowns and crescendos contained within songs. It's perhaps not even about which DJ is playing. It's about layers of feeling, built up over many hours. It's tantric.

Several cigarette and bar breaks later it's time for Busy P to ascend, and, as I have already hinted, he doesn't disappoint.  At 3:30am he passes the baton to SebastiAn, who ushers in a dazzling set with his characteristic synthesised bass triads, lacing them through an electro remix of MGMT's ‘Electric Feel'. There's sweaty rapture on the faces of crowd, faces which soon contort, hulk style, into wild grimaces when SebastiAn lays down his signature tune, ‘Ross Ross Ross'. There's an increasing number of revellers on stage, who throw health and safety to the wind, tossing records into the crowd. Busy hands out sparklers to the front rowers, whilst SebastiAn gets onto DJ Mehdi's shoulders. It's a group effort by now, a multi-turntablist love-in. Someone drops a remix of Rage Against the Machine's ‘Killing in the Name of' which brings the audience to its crisis.

I'm looking at a perversion of Da Vinci's ‘Last Supper', the semblance is almost eerie: a linear arrangement of bodies behind three sets of decks, with the light catching the tall and long-haired Busy at the centre, his hands outstretched on the turntables.

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Rose