CLUBS

Outgoing Clubs editor Steve D Wright casts his eye back over another hugely momentous and memorable 12 months on the South West clubbing calendar.

As our Top Banana awards recognised, In:Motion dominated the clubland year. But that three-month 'underground music season' was but the icing on the cake – the local scene was as multifarious and many-splendored as ever.

Let’s start at the logical place: the beginning. January saw Massive Attack-owned, BlowPop-run microclub Tube turn out the lights after four years, but there was better news for fans of The Black Swan, whose very vocal protests helped overturn the club’s closure on appeal. Locally filmed telly show ‘Skins’ had a new series to plug, the brilliant result being two solid weeks of free parties at The Old Fire Station. On board were the likes of Mystery Jets, Sub Focus and Toddla T. In February, Italian stallions Crookers landed at Bugged Out to headline what our man down the front Uncle Basic called “a moist musical morsel that will melt in your mouth and maybe your pants” and the Red Bull Music Academy came to town – Theo Parrish, Dixon and King Midas Sound providing “more energy than a billion cans of fizzy energy drink”.

If Weapon Of Choice’s 2010 mission was to bring the great and good of old school hip-hop to Bristol, it was emphatically achieved – Kurtis Blow and The Furious 5 arriving in March and setting the scene for the likes of The Sugarhill Gang and, best of all, KRS-One later in the year. April Fools’ Day was no joke this year, The Greatest Show On Earth reprising its NYE success with Vitalic, Fake Blood, Tiefschwarz and Hybrid (surely this sort of huge, multi-genre Motion party would never catch on). Timbuk2’s Bass Kitchen, meanwhile, picked up a gong at the annual Breakspoll Awards and celebrated with a wafer-thin mint.

May’s guiltiest pleasure was Technotronic (they’ve sold 14million records, you know) pumping up the jam at the Stanton Sessions. But much less pleasurable was the news that Penguin Dance were hanging up their raving spurs. “We’ve had a good run but now we’re too old for this shit,” they told us. “We’ve started going bald and listening to much slower music than we used to.” Their epitaph? “We’d do it all again with more booze.” DJ Johnston defended his crown at the second Bristol Turntable Awards and the annual Unity mega-rave enjoyed its usual Lakota sell-out, providing the ideal finale to the inaugural Stokes Croft Streetfest.

As usual, many of Bristol and Bath’s clubland faces decamped to Pilton in June for some festival or other. Team Love graduated to running the Dance Lounge and rose to the occasion hugely impressively with four days of fun featuring everyone from Boy George to Joy Orbison. Our favourite bit? The pineapple-shaped DJ booth. July saw Dissident bow out after a decade at the forefront of Bristol drum & bass with a stormer at their spiritual home, The Black Swan, and The Big Chill Bar expanded into a second room, meaning twice the DJ action at weekends.

In August, little old Dojo Lounge welcomed its biggest ever guest as US house superstar Josh Wink graced the decks, and one of the record labels of the year, Hessle Audio, joined Crazylegs on board the Thekla for the final bank holiday weekend of the summer. The momentum was building behind our eventual Banana winners Crazylegs, who managed to squeeze 10 headline acts into its second birthday celebrations at Crash Mansion in September, but the line-up remains a secret to this day unless you had a ticket. James Savage and Dave Smeaton, the duo behind The Park and Big Chill Bar, unveiled their latest venture The Bank Of Stokes Croft, with fine food and drink from early and great DJs until late at the weekend. And the renamed Brisfest clocked up a resurgent year, with more dance music represented on site and Rave-on-Avon taking over every club in town for the third year running.

Into October, which brought the aforementioned In:Motion, a hugely ambitious undertaking that was deservedly an equally huge success. Every weekend had something to recommend it, Ninja Tune, BlowPop and the unerring Shit The Bed providing highlights. Elsewhere Play’s time was over, the eight-year-old house night bowing out after one last hurrah with Layo & Bushwacka! on the Thekla, while Club Cosmique added The Juan MacLean to a hugely impressive collection of disco bookings.

November served up a contender for biggest event of the year as DMT took over Lakota and the Old Coroner’s Court next to it (a set-up first used, and to great effect, by Tribe Of Frog for its Halloween Monster Ball) for an EIGHT-room party that, as our own Dick Thornberg put it, “has basically taken on festival status”. In December, Leftfield’s wall-of-bass live show was too much for some of the plaster on the Academy’s ceiling, and James Blake made his second Crazylegs appearance of the year, returning as one of the UK’s most exciting young artists following THAT cover of ‘Limit To Your Love’.

Still want more? That’s exactly what you’re going to get: check our rundown of the best New Year’s Eve bashes for the inside track on the biggest night out of the year, with plenty of parties already lining up in the listings to compete for your attention. Go on, have a look.
 

Copyright Steve D Wright 2010

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