Posted in: News | Нет комментариев | 29 Июль 2010
On Saturday 24 March, Laurent Garnier hosted one of his bi-monthly musical masterclasses at The End.
The club is very much his regular London abode, was witnessed by his regular appearances, and of course the fact that the management often let him play well past the 7am closing time. He’s also guaranteed to expand upon his love of music of all types; if you’re a purist you may be disappointed, because he’ll drop drum and bass, electro and even rock tracks next to his beloved techno (his own tracks mixed seamlessly with other people’s – and we really mean seamlessly, just watch his hands blur as his face remains stoic, apart from the occasional grin when a classic peaks, of course).
Nowadays DJs like Erol Alkan are well-known for rocking club dancefloors with guitar tunes, while producers like 2manyDJs started out in the music world as a band called Soulwax, but Laurent was playing random bits of rock, if we may call Nirvana’s ‘Smell’s Like Teen Spirit‘ such, long before London’s indie DJ don was playing a load of ‘Trash’ (his famous indie-electro-dance night, that also resided at The End) and anyone had heard of two Belgian brothers who wanted to play Dolly Parton alongside Vitalic.
However, we digress. Laurent’s all-night-long set was the usual concoction of tunes, with early highlights being Liquid’s ‘Sweet Harmony‘ and Technotronic‘s Pump Up The Jam. Both resulted in early hands-in-the-air moments for many a clubber, plus a quite a smile from M. Garnier himself. The nu-rave people may be playing these tunes ‘ironically’, but it takes nerve to pull these out of your record bag at a club as well-known as The End, ex-Hacienda resident or not.
If there’s one criticism that could be made, it’s that a fan who’s seen Laurent DJ on several occasions can hear the various ‘sections’ in his set i.e ‘the high NRG section, the drum and bass section’ etc. But that’s a small price to pay to see house heads lose it to classics like Lil Louis’ ‘French Kiss‘ mixed into what was revealed to be Jimmy Sommerville‘s highly camp disco classic You Make Me Feel, only to run into Dan Hartman’s original version of ‘Relight My Fire‘. Laurent was a DJ way before house music, back when the term ‘dance music’ meant disco – and way before Saturday Night Fever was made to cash in and simplify the complex melodies that real disco produced – and there’s no way he’ll ever let us forget it. True, if you’ve heard Laurent play at The End before, these tracks aren’t new to you, but they still get so little attention that it’s good that a stalwart of the scene rinsing them out for the masses.
The variety never really ends either, with a breaks version of Blur’s ‘Song 2‘ dropping around seven am, and finally ending the night playing the kind of epic techno that is rarely see in these minimal-loving days. So, see you in two months everybody?
