Whose reaching Fabric - London 4th March? Run The Road
- Thread starter jeffthedeaf
- Start date
Yes I really enjoyed it…probably anyway. I was surprised how popular the jungle room was… a great antidote to the main room. I was doing far too much brown-nosing though - ‘yeah I love your productions’ (cringe/puke)…Remedee’s fault for introducing me to people. ‘Headquarters’ is out in April btw
mms said:hmm not as good as last time, rolldeep especially.
sound fucked up too.
good to see semtex the one armed dj altho he went on a bit too long with his selection of crunk anthems.
riko was good when he tried, demon,the ghetto/kano team.
jammer needs to stop getting on the mic badly and leaning on the stage like a production of west side story.
stelfox and luka cleared off to the vip room straight away. (ooHH)
there wasn't a vip room. balcony was open to everyone, always is on a friday. any of you muppets could have enjoyed the view!
sorry we lost you, though. it's just that i'm short and can never see anything at those stage shows if i stand downstairs.
good night, though... totally enjoyable, apart from the getting nutted in the face (entirely accidentally) by a bloke pogoing his heart out to roll deep when i did venture downstairs into the moshpit.
Last edited:
jeffthedeaf
Active member
Big night, too many undeserved reloads tho!
Logan Sama
BestThereIsAtWhatIDo
In regards to the reloads situation.... MC's do have a habit of leaning over and reloading tracks themselves.
jeffthedeaf
Active member
Logan Sama said:
Or the DJs, I saw one hiding underneath the decks who reloaded about half the tracks.
Diggedy Derek
Stray Dog
Agree especially about with what MMS said about this. Good stuff in so many ways, but in other ways the strategy of having loads of MC based PA's wasn't that great. Would have been better to do it like a radio show, perhaps, eg some vocal tracks, then instrumental tracks, then a mic session etc. There wasn't quite enough to dance to I think. On the plus side it was a very mixed crowd and the vibe was grimey.
Dead happy to get on the guestlist, thanks a million Marcus, so a bunch of us white thirty somethings were in a parallel queue to, and moving much faster than, the teenage hoard of a much broader racial cross section next to us. Apparently some of the Fabric people were being a bit snooty about how some people were dressed, saying people were looking too like muggers or something which caused some ruckus. Anyway. In the main room when we got in was some fairly identikit mainstream hip hop- although any opportunity to hear Drop It Like It's Hot is good, and they played that version of Lean Back with Notorious B.I.G. going "where's Brooklyn at? where's Brooklyn at?" which is tremendous. Got the drum and bass room out the way right at the start, which was a good move- pretty hard stuff, but quickly becomes tiresome. The only interest was the odd slice of reggae or vocal samples which works against the two-step grain. Otherwise bit boring. The first grime action came with Bruza, doing a PA of Get Me. Strange rapping style on this PA, his limerick-style tongue twisters belted out at real speed but often not super-tight with the tune. Still sounds great, he's a pure showman.
No Lay was on next and a real highlight: Unorthodox Daughter sounded incredible, what a phenomenal tune that is. Cameo played some tunes afterwards, shamelessly dropping the Forward rhythm after a few minutes silence to get everyone back in the room. Cameo bounces across the stage to rewind it a few times, like a celebrity chef extravagently throwing spices down into the smoking wok. I was dead impressed with Cameo, I've sometimes felt his sets to be a bit too predicatable (I get the same thing with Karnage) but you could tell it's simply because he loves the big tunes so much. How does he rewind tunes like that- is it because they're on CD, and he can be rough on the CD deck without it skipping like vinyl?
Around this time Riko was lurking in the shadows on stage, smoking and feeling the vibes, and I think Simon Silverdollar might have hollered out his name through sheer uncontainable excitement around this time. Riko wanderered on and spat a few bars, and had a bit of a rave-up on his own on stage. Nice one top one! One armed DJ Semtex came on next and hip hopped/crunked it up in impervious style- a faultless set (despite the lack of an arm) but the call and response grime-energy had dropped a bit.
Kano was fantastic. He's so tight with fellow N.A.S.T.Y. bredren Ghetto and Demon, rapping each others lyrics, crouching on the stage with arms round each other's shoulders. Fearsomely tight and extremely good. Even Typical Me sounded dead good actually. Roll Deep PLUS Ruff Squad PLUS Slew Dem all wanderered on stage after- dunno how these 20-25 MCs managed to not rhyme over each other, but despite this near telepathic-politness it was a bit of a mess and they struggled to keep the intensity up. MC ing is like playing football isn't it, you need to get the ball a few times before you get your touch together and start ripping things apart. This was more like a friendly where everyone got a touch of the mic, but but the time it came back to them they were cold again. It went on for ages though, perhaps an hour of the mic being passed around.
Highlights- Wiley spitting about two bars and everyone going crazy- passion! Ears was wicked ("new era hit 'em with the new stylee / we got the flows that are too grimey"). JME's bars sounding very very very clear and strong.
Non-highlights- Jammer was obviously totally smashed, MCing very rubbishly, sitting on stuff when he shouldn't have done, trying to engage a humourless security guard in banter, and dissing DJ Maximum for rewinding a tune. The last bit was well out of order I thought, although certainly in general there were many too many rewinds. Wasn't Logan going to DJ at one point- I think I heard Wiley called for him while on stage.
Roll Deep were unquestionably grimy though, hoods up, tripping over mic chords, getting countless rewinds. They were, in therms of "form", a bit unsatisfactory, but in terms of "vibe" pretty awesome. The too many MCs issue does point towards a central problem with Roll Deep though- everyone gets involved, too much material, sometimes a lack of an ability to say "that's the album" / "this is the crew". Instead everything gets endlessly pissed around with.
Essentials were on for a bit after that and were good, but my cold was catching up with me by that time and I needed to go to bed. On the way out I saw Wiley running across the road eating a pie (he has written a song about pies, "pies" as a metaphor for money), looking for his car and shouting across the street to his DJ. I went back, sober by the way as I wasn't really drinking the whole night, and found a mate who'd lost his key sleeping in my bed. Gutted.
Dead happy to get on the guestlist, thanks a million Marcus, so a bunch of us white thirty somethings were in a parallel queue to, and moving much faster than, the teenage hoard of a much broader racial cross section next to us. Apparently some of the Fabric people were being a bit snooty about how some people were dressed, saying people were looking too like muggers or something which caused some ruckus. Anyway. In the main room when we got in was some fairly identikit mainstream hip hop- although any opportunity to hear Drop It Like It's Hot is good, and they played that version of Lean Back with Notorious B.I.G. going "where's Brooklyn at? where's Brooklyn at?" which is tremendous. Got the drum and bass room out the way right at the start, which was a good move- pretty hard stuff, but quickly becomes tiresome. The only interest was the odd slice of reggae or vocal samples which works against the two-step grain. Otherwise bit boring. The first grime action came with Bruza, doing a PA of Get Me. Strange rapping style on this PA, his limerick-style tongue twisters belted out at real speed but often not super-tight with the tune. Still sounds great, he's a pure showman.
No Lay was on next and a real highlight: Unorthodox Daughter sounded incredible, what a phenomenal tune that is. Cameo played some tunes afterwards, shamelessly dropping the Forward rhythm after a few minutes silence to get everyone back in the room. Cameo bounces across the stage to rewind it a few times, like a celebrity chef extravagently throwing spices down into the smoking wok. I was dead impressed with Cameo, I've sometimes felt his sets to be a bit too predicatable (I get the same thing with Karnage) but you could tell it's simply because he loves the big tunes so much. How does he rewind tunes like that- is it because they're on CD, and he can be rough on the CD deck without it skipping like vinyl?
Around this time Riko was lurking in the shadows on stage, smoking and feeling the vibes, and I think Simon Silverdollar might have hollered out his name through sheer uncontainable excitement around this time. Riko wanderered on and spat a few bars, and had a bit of a rave-up on his own on stage. Nice one top one! One armed DJ Semtex came on next and hip hopped/crunked it up in impervious style- a faultless set (despite the lack of an arm) but the call and response grime-energy had dropped a bit.
Kano was fantastic. He's so tight with fellow N.A.S.T.Y. bredren Ghetto and Demon, rapping each others lyrics, crouching on the stage with arms round each other's shoulders. Fearsomely tight and extremely good. Even Typical Me sounded dead good actually. Roll Deep PLUS Ruff Squad PLUS Slew Dem all wanderered on stage after- dunno how these 20-25 MCs managed to not rhyme over each other, but despite this near telepathic-politness it was a bit of a mess and they struggled to keep the intensity up. MC ing is like playing football isn't it, you need to get the ball a few times before you get your touch together and start ripping things apart. This was more like a friendly where everyone got a touch of the mic, but but the time it came back to them they were cold again. It went on for ages though, perhaps an hour of the mic being passed around.
Highlights- Wiley spitting about two bars and everyone going crazy- passion! Ears was wicked ("new era hit 'em with the new stylee / we got the flows that are too grimey"). JME's bars sounding very very very clear and strong.
Non-highlights- Jammer was obviously totally smashed, MCing very rubbishly, sitting on stuff when he shouldn't have done, trying to engage a humourless security guard in banter, and dissing DJ Maximum for rewinding a tune. The last bit was well out of order I thought, although certainly in general there were many too many rewinds. Wasn't Logan going to DJ at one point- I think I heard Wiley called for him while on stage.
Roll Deep were unquestionably grimy though, hoods up, tripping over mic chords, getting countless rewinds. They were, in therms of "form", a bit unsatisfactory, but in terms of "vibe" pretty awesome. The too many MCs issue does point towards a central problem with Roll Deep though- everyone gets involved, too much material, sometimes a lack of an ability to say "that's the album" / "this is the crew". Instead everything gets endlessly pissed around with.
Essentials were on for a bit after that and were good, but my cold was catching up with me by that time and I needed to go to bed. On the way out I saw Wiley running across the road eating a pie (he has written a song about pies, "pies" as a metaphor for money), looking for his car and shouting across the street to his DJ. I went back, sober by the way as I wasn't really drinking the whole night, and found a mate who'd lost his key sleeping in my bed. Gutted.