I thought it was excellent as well, though I wouldn't go as far as saying the best ever.
I arrived a bit late, having seen in the New Year in the comfort of my own home with my girlfriend. Upon arrival I was glad to discover very friendly joking security, loads of massive heaters, no trouble getting in and some mate of Rachel's spinning UK Garage. Upstairs, and first stopping port of call, there was Rick Wilhite, which sounded a bit pedestrian due to a very quiet sound system (at that time, anyway, it improved by the time KDJ appeared). He was playing a greatest hits of Carl Craig set, or so it seemed. I remember at the 3 Chairs night Rick played the most Detroity of the 3 sets. We grabbed a beer each and investigated further. Down the stairs and... f**king hell! A massive aircraft hanger sized derelict room with a massive crack down the side and a live version of Amazon like I have never heard before in my life! This was Agent Chaos, I have since been told, and it was damn impressive. The 30 quid entrance was worth it for that alone. After that the DJing in there was a bit of a let down, there was some pretty bad echo coming back off the far wall if you were on the stage (behind which the Djing was be done from) which maybe didn't help, but I would imagine the monitoring would be up to scratch, nothing appeared to be done half heartedly when it came to things like that. Still, the tracks were a what's what of classic UR (Final Frontier, Stardancer, Mirage, a lot of Octave One stuff) - anyone know what the track directly after Stardancer was? The whole thing was interspersed with UR folk appearing silhouetted in cracks on the wall doing what looked like some pole dancing without the pole. Moved up to catch the end of Moodymann's set (we'd been up earlier and heard "If You Should Need A Friend", which is a favourite of my girlfriend's). That seemed to be very good. In advance I wasn't really that fussed about Kenny playing, having seen him DJ and be blown away by Theo Parrish at the 3 chairs night. So it came as a surpise to find this set to be very good indeed. The move to a half DJ half live set was very canny - gets a bit more of his personality across, which he can only do partly by DJing with his own records. I don't know who it was that Djed after, but they weren't nearly as good - they played that awful gimmicky 7" remake of MAW's "To be in love" - most of it was alright, though. Here we remained until we left at around 5am, not having the, err, stamina of some others. It was good to meet, albeit briefly, with John (who'd come into the shop earlier in the day and pick up a copy of "Gravitational Arch", which I had missed) and Otto (who confessed to being as bad a trainspotter as I was being!). It was a very friendly crowd, and the staffing was excellent too - the bouncer as we left commanding the mini cab drivers to give us a good price for the journey home. Well done Freddy Ranx - a very good way to start the year, I thought. I can imagine, however, that if you missed Amazon live and Moodymann it would seem a bit pedestrian - you couldn't help but be blown away by the UR room (that seems a ridiculous word for it), though, which was well suited to their sound. I didn't miss either and I loved it. Take care, Jonny.
