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Someone pressed record for once.
Here you go, audio from the Battersea Power Station party.

One for your front room with friends when you get in.
It’s rough round the edges, but it was going off, and so were we. Love from a warehouse in Warsaw. A + T x

GA@BatterseaPowerStation by groove armada

First of all, thanks a lot for all these amazing entries. The quality is right up there. Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you, but I wanted to listen to things properly in my studio where I know the sound, and I have only just got back here and been able to do that.

I don’t like picking winners, because I’ve been on the other side of the fence entering competitions and I know how it feels.

Anyway, I listened to all the tunes several times and below are some thoughts. They’re only opinions – there are obviously no rights and wrongs in music. So you might want to totally ignore it, or there might be some things of interest.

There a tunes, grooves and sections here that are a quick tweak or reedit away from being wicked. But in terms of picking the ‘winner’ I had to chose something that in terms of production and structure was ready to go straight away.

If anyone wants to send over a Version 2 of their remix at any point, it would be a pleasure to hear it. And hopefully play it.

Nice one

andy cato

WINNER! Nooc remix. Dave Clarke business! A big sound here, you obviously know you’re way round all areas of the studio. If I did a reedit of this, I’d make much more use of the beats at the end – around the 4.46 mark. I don’t think you need that first drop. What about building these beats at the top, then bringing up the b-line, and building from there. Get everyone totally locked in, then do the middle drop which works really well. The core groove is so strong, I don’t think you need the little changes you have – like at 1.40. For me it kills the hypnosis a bit. If I was next to the speaker with this playing, I’d want that core groove to never stop.

RUNNER UP! Aïnaka Remix – Great production, nice deep vibe. The structure feels spot on to me. My only thought would be to experiment with a couple of different rythmns on the b-line. The off beat one you have obviously works, but it pushes so much that it makes me feel the track is always heading for a massive Deadmau5 moment. A slight tweak on the bass to something with a bit more of a roll would really cement the deep, late night vibe.

Ear Trumpet Mix Nice sunset balearic vibes – personally I’d have kept it nice and deep on the chords and stayed off the guitar at the end. But a good sound and nice groove. I think you could experiment with some alternative bass notes that make the chords go between major/minor or that create a more hanging, hypnotic feel

Mcnulty. LOVE the groove between 0.43 and 0.57. That simple B line and beats with the pads sounds wicked. For my money, you could groove out the whole track like that – really simple, maybe just adding a few extra bits of top end here and there.

Oliver Bach. 1.32-3.00 minute section is great. Though I think you could spend more time just locked down on the bass and beats groove, which is tasty. Maybe hold down the stripped bass groove longer and fade up the chord stabs. Just the bass and beats would sound great on a system. Then, after the drop, I reckon you could drop right back down to the bass (like it is around 6.42 ish) but with the additional top end you bring out of the drop at the moment. For me the pads thing gets done by the drop, and there’ll be more impact if you come out of there sparse and fat. Less is always more when it’s loud!

Marco Farrantelli. A Claude Van Strokey take on it. Fat sound. I think with the kind of low-slung groove you have, you could skip the massive fill/build out of the drop, maybe bringing the pads up then down into near silence again before kicking back in. Otherwise you’re asking a lot of this type of groove to deliver after a build like that. Also, I reckon that out of the drop you should skip to the 3.36 groove with the ride and hi hat in there. No point in holding things back at that stage in the tune – it’s the moment.

Saks & Teip Nittitalls. Long live the Lately Bass. You’ve got a good sounding one there too. Thing is, it’s such a fat sound why not give it all the space in the world to breath in? A few less of the trippy noises. The groove at 4.04 is Large. Proper old Tunnel Club era jacking style. That’s the tune for me. Roll around that, build the percussion a bit, a few fills on the 909 and you’re off.

Boko remix. Fat groove. Only two thoughts here. One would be not to bring the b-line in right at the end of the big drop – to keep those frequencies back for the impact moment. Two would be to get out of the pad loop now and again to use that 6.46 groove more. Just the b-line with the beats and perc sounds great.

Rizon Remix. Steve Bug vibes….Great sound and groove. Nice use of the original bass in a new context. I reckon you could retweak the drop to use the chord stab sound that comes out of it. If that built then hit the 6.16 groove, it would be a moment. Or rather the 6.16 groove minus the chimes. I think you could lose the chimes in general, and that acid/res sound you have in the drop at the moment. The tune could get late night and intense, and for me the chimes break the spell.

Rambla Boys Remix. Great groove at 1.30 and 3.44. Jackin’ disco feel. I think the extra hi hat at 3.44 is a nice build, but the hi-passed cut up stereo bass thing gets in the way of the roll a bit. Reckon you could do without it. The b-line at 0.32 and 2.41 doesn’t have the same roll for me. The low notes a bit too low, and less strong than the simple b-line of the main groove. Don’t think you need the 0.32 section – you could just style out the main groove that starts at 1.36 for longer if you need more time before the change at 2.41.The groove is so strong you could go for ages. At 2.41, I think you could lose the bassline and just go down to the kick. Then the rocking bassline becomes the signature of the track. Simple and large.

Dark Nite mix. Wicked groove. Filthy. Reminds me of the old DJ Pierre Wild Pitch mixes. Couple of thoughts. I don’t think you need to bring in the original bass part that you drop at 2.30. For me it confuses things. Instead, what about a drop just using the cut up chord part you’ve got, work the reverb a bit, keep the people locked in, then when you hit the 3.30 moment with all the white noise it’ll go off. On the production front, watch the reverb on the kick and the compression levels. It sounds exciting on a pair of headphones, but when you’re in a concrete warehouse and it’s bouncing off the walls, you need all the definition you can get. A lot of the tunes that sound the biggest on the floor sound suprisingly tidy in the studio.

K’Lavander remix – Reminds me of my mate Lars (Funk D’Void). I like the opening pre-drop groove, but for me it’s only when the chords come in at 5.10 that all those noises lock in. What about stripping the first groove back to the bass, filtering up the chords slowly from midway through, then adding all the additional parts during the drop so by the time they arrive, it’s all holding together? Then when you bring the beats back, and you end up with the 5.10 groove, it’s rocking.

Cromeo Studio Mix – The change at 3.39 is lovely. The classic major/minor thing that in this context works really well. The remix has been approached from a really musical angle. I’m not sure you need the extra part that appears initally at 0.46 and then again at 4.13. It takes up a lot of space in the middle, and holds back the roll a bit. The opening would make a fantastic drop. I think you could go between that and the 3.39 change initially without the original bass part, just those lovely chords from the opening. Then the second time around, a bit of extra top end and the filtered original bassline. There you would have a peak time Sasha tune.

Just touched down in Brazil. Tight connection in Sao Paolo where they were playing ‘guess the gate’ in Portugese. Straight off the 2nd plane into a radio station ahead of tonights gig in Florianopolis. Mix below.

Back to Sao Paolo tommorrow for Terra Planeta Festival, rounding things off REDLIGHT style after Goldfrapp. If you’re in town, we’ll be playing after hours at Da Edge, starting sometime around 5am sunday.

Buenos Aires on monday and there for most of the week, writing tunes in a penthouse with a built in disco. So if you’re about, look us up. Then it’s back to Sao Paolo for a secret gig to be announced midweek, before heading south once again for Creamfields B-Aires.

On the road bulletins from Korea, an October beach party in Ibiza and Freeze in London last week still to come. Yes it’s a bit late, but, as anyone who as at Freeze last week will tell you, we’ve been busy.

Nice one.

Andy and Tom.

The plan was to get picked up by the crew at Heathrow in a kind of Guetta-mobile – shagpile carpets, tinted windows, big speakers etc. So it was dissapointing to nudge into the middle seat of 6,  in the back of a van about the size of a black cab. The Guetta model was in a laybay billowing smoke, so they’d had to call up the reserves. But we adapted, and did a solid stint sorting the tunes, all the way to the Isle of Wight. By the time we came off the ferry – having stayed in the van on the car deck to finish the music off – it was getting pretty intense in there. Good practise for remaining calm when next trapped in a lift.

The now enormous Bestival site took some threading through. But we finally found our Portakabin, did a couple of photos for an Amnesty campaign, and got ready for the night. I’d been caught off guard by the fancy dress requirements. Tom had metioned he was kitted out as I left the house that morning, and when you’re 6’8″ you need more time than that to pull something together. So I had to make do with a spare wig.

…whilst tom slipped into the white jeans, vest, and tash that Freddie made famous.

We set off for a walk around the site. It was as we stood in the middle of the mainstage crowd that we found out fancy dress was only on Sunday.

Searching for a van to get us back up the hill so Freddie could try and slip out of his white jeans unnoticed, we managed to a get a lift with the Graham Coxon team. Behind us was someone’s dad who was having the time of his life. “Rock n roll!” he declared, holding his drink high.

Like everything at Bestival, it’s a lot bigger than it used to be. So the Big Top was actually a tent for 12,000 people. It was packed. What we didn’t know before we started was that a volume restriction had just been enforced in the tent. Not what you need for a stadium style old school house experience. Tunes from RedLight Trax 1 were large however. Word is spreading.

A couple of beers later, and it was back in the van for some more trapped-in-the-lift practise. The highlight was the red dawn as the ferry pulled into Bournemouth. The worse bit was everything from then onwards. We dropped the team at Heathrow, then central london, before passing by Tom’s house then ending up, for me, at Stanstead about 27 hours later.

I had a 4 hour wait, so checked into the airport hotel for a freshen up. It was that time of day when lots of clean shaven businessmen are checking out, and you’re checking in with a wrist full of festival passes, red eyes, and a smell of the night. People generally back off, or look at you with the same mix of wonder and fear that you see around lions at the zoo.

——-

Normally, I stay off the weddings and Bar Mitzvas scene, but this deserved an exception. The 40th birthday of an old friend, and a request to do an ’88 to ’95 history of house. The problem, as it often is, was getting there. France – Heathrow – Paddington – Kings Cross was pretty smooth. Then it started to unravel. There was a leaves on the line moment, and the only option was to get the slow train to somewhere in the right area (Retford) and take it from there. Last time I was in Retford, I was doing a PA of italo-piano tunes alongside K-Klass. They’d just released Rythmn is a Mystery, one of the original anthems, and I suspect it was the best night in Retford’s history.

There’s money to be made as a Retford cab driver. I called all 5 companies who’d left cards by the payphone. 4 were on holiday and the 5th was ‘having lunch’. It was 6pm.

Outside the station, I started offering money to any drivers who passed by. Noone was keen. I wasn’t helped by two Polish lads, who had either been up all night or had got cracking far too early. Both had cans of special brew. One sat down on the kerb, head between his knees. The other staggered and pirouetted around the road, laughing hysterically. Every so often, he’d stop, point at his mate and say to me “He’s the MAIN MAN. That’s how f***ked we are” and then he’d be off laughing again.

Finally, someone pulled up who had time, between their holidays and long lunches, to do a bit of driving. The wealthy Retford cabbie theme continued when  I gave him the address, a stately home quite a way away, more in hope than expectation. “Know it?” he said , “I play golf there 3 times a week”.

I’m in the wrong game.

It was a stately home for hire, with the important difference that it was owned by a lovely couple who were 110% up for it. To the point where they’d shipped in a couple of thousand glo sticks and luminous bracelets. One girl got into a routine of a fairly formal presentation of another bracelet every second tune. By the end of the set I looked like a glow in the dark Morten Harket. The old vinyls sounded lovely. Hands in the air euphoria mingled with memories of daybreaks and roadtrips.

It was late, and I needed a bed, an alarm clock and a cab number. What I kept getting were Sambucas. In the end, I set myself up with a Barcelona FC clock from a kids’ bedroom and got my head down. 3 hours semi-sleep later, it wasn’t until I was downstairs and heading for Birmingham that I realised Xavi was 55 minutes fast.

It was another rave-on-a-plane Ryan Air flight to Ibiza. You can’t knock it. I just wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t helped by the manically happy adverts telling me to treat myself to an in-flight cocktail and “chillax”.

As normal, we set up in the hotel to put things together for Space. A lot of new tunes and edits have filtered in over the last couple of weeks and the RedLight sound is finally where we wanted it. Down at the club, there was time to say hello and goodbye to the usual back stage mavericks and troublemakers before doing it for the last time this summer. And it was The One. The best Redlight set of the year.

Lights went up, arms went up and the terrace cheered. Nice one to everyone who’s been there and done it for us, Space 2011.

Andy Cato

Driving back from a free party somewhere near Nottingham, I had a friend with me who was in a bit of trouble. It got to a point where I could only reassure her that we really would keep the Good Shepherd warm by pulling over and buying her a bag of charcoal. The night before, there had been 3 cross-legged lads by the decks counting invisible snails into invisible pots. It should have been recorded for science. As they made sure no one stood on the snails or upset the pots, it became clear they were all seeing exactly the same thing.

One of hundreds of flashbacks from 20 years in DJ booths, it came to mind as I was thinking that, whist I’d seen most types of parties in most types of places, heading to the 30th day of a 30 day festival that had ‘no to sex tourism’ written all over its website may involve seeing something new.

Getting there was not easy. After a 4am start, I wasn’t in the mood for the Frankfurt immigration man who had discovered a slight tear around the photo of my passport. In pointing out the problem, he doubled its size. To the point where there was a big enough gap to slide a new photo in. It looked pretty dodgy and made for a nervous wait in front of the humourless guards at Simferopol airport. Once I saw them, I began to understand why the cabin crew’s sign off speech had ended “goodbye and good luck”.

Sure enough, when I got to the front I was told I couldn’t enter the country or travel further on this passport and the guard walked off with it and my driving license. After a while he came back, and said to Jonny (lights)  ”tell him to change passport”. Jonny told me. The documents were returned, and I was in. But would I get out? The idea of being detained by these boys haunted me until I was a good halfway to Ibiza.

We should have been able to swerve all this. In a very unsocialist system, the Mercedes owning classes of lots of republics out east have set up VIP airport areas. If you have the money, you get taken from the tarmac to a private lounge, with no security checks or other inconveniences. Apparently we were all set for this treatment, but the man who came to get us put the wrong name on his board.

As a result, Jonny went off to get the lighting gear stamped by the regular customs officials. There was a problem with the papers. In a white plastic office (for some reason the whole airport was partitioned into mini Everest conservatories) , Jonny asked them what they were going to do about the problem, or in fact what the problem was. “We are thinking”, they said. 6 of them thought about it for 2 hours. After 2 hours, a plan emerged. The plan was to get the boss. An hour later the boss turned up, and thought about it too. His idea was to disregard the papers. But this could only be done by replacing them with other papers. So, safe in the knowledge that no one would ever read it, Jonny filled in pages of information about his lights.

We got in the car with an hour and a half journey still to go. Time was getting tight.

“Lets go” I said to the driver.

“Wait” he said, and made a phone call. Then, “ten minutes”.

“Who are we waiting for now?”

“Nobody”

“So why the ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes”.

“For god’s sake lets GO”

“He say ten minutes”

“Who’s he?”

“Yes”

“Please just go we’ve been here 3 1/2 hours”

“Ten minutes”

Maddening.

We waited ten minutes, then set out on the road to the Black Sea. It was slow going. If you want to reduce traffic speed, forget speed bumps. Regular potholes are the answer. We passed through little towns of grinding, tumbledown poverty followed by vast, desert-like fields. Finally we arrived at what looked like Detroit-On-Sea. At the end of a dirt track of buildings that were either half built or half falling down was a pair of big gates and a hotel with a lot of black cars outside. The Kazantip team were waiting. Up there with the Exit crew as the nicest festival promoters in the world.

Jonny went straight onto the gig to see if we could put the RedLight lighting rig in place. But it was too late – the stage was already in action. Meanwhile I tried to download an essential bit of software that had become corrupted en route. I had an hour, and the download should take about 20 minutes. Then the message came up “time remaining, 17 hours 3 mins”. I got a tip from the receptionist to try the courtyard behind the kitchen where you could sometimes pick up a faster connection from the neighbours’ wireless. She saved the day.

Walking through the small iron gate onto the site at last, I wasn’t expecting to find the most amazing electronic music festival setting I’ve ever seen. Huge Greek like temple buildings surrounded the main stage courtyard. A row of palm trees crossed the dance floor. Lazers everywhere. Right behind was the sea and sand. Up and down the beach, a 20 feet high walkway connected 15 or so other stages. There were robots the size of houses, latticed domes 15 stories high, igloo like buildings dotted across the sand, a Bedouin tent the size of the Ministry of Sound, camp fires burning along the shore, a huge canvas speaker billowing flames into the sky. It was Mad Max without the violence.

Back on the main stage, the booth was high up above the crowd, on a kind of castle wall. The view was flames, 15,000 people, lazers, then sea. Jonny took control in the lighting booth. From the opening tune – a new one from RedLight Trax Vol. 1 – it was electric. Every half hour, the pilot of a micro light waved as he flew past a few feet in front of me dropping silver confetti on the crowd.

(RJ’s Theme – taken from Red Light Trax EP 1)

Afterwards, various people wanted photos, one of them being the Defense Minister. He had sausage dog balloons around his neck so hopefully it’s not a nuclear power. The president had a photo too, and poured me a drink.

Back at the hotel, I had time for an half hour lie down before departure time. I was woken by a Ukrainian girl, which might be a good thing in some situations, but not in this case. She told me that the hotel alarm system hadn’t worked and I should have left 45 minutes ago.

At the airport, over tired and nervous about the torn passport, my only option, to get through security in time and avoid a 12 hour wait in Simferopol for the next plane, was to go down the ‘crew’ channel. This manoeuvre is becoming a bit too regular this summer. I should stick a captain’s blazer in my suitcase. But it was a little scary this time, given the number of guns and batons. A proper piece of luck meant there was a shift change just as I got to the front. It created enough of a window of confusion for me to filter through amongst the stewardesses. Given I was more or less twice their height and I’d forgotten about the glowing octopus someone had pinned to my T shirt the night before, it’s surprising that no one asked more questions.

Andy Cato

It wasn’t a great weekend to be an englishman on the road. Burning cars and stolen widescreens were on the front page of every european journal. Cameron and friends were quoted showing the same mix of surprise and disgust for the urban poor as someone who has found rats in his kitchen.

It didn’t help either that by the time I left home, I had the kind of cold with broken-glass throat that would definitely justify phoning in sick if I had a proper job. The turnaround on that one came in transit, when a Frankfurt chemist , who understood that the show must go on, pulled something special from under the counter.

Zurich was a challenge. We were expecting a nightclub but found ourselves in a proper gig situation. It was back to the old band days of quiet warmup music and platters of ham in a strip lit dressing room. The crowd seemed to be expecting Black Light continued with the full live team on stage. There was pretty wild cheering as show time approached.

It must have been a shock if you were expecting I Won’t Kneel and instead got a supersized warehouse rave. But everyone seemed to adapt,  and we had a good party.

Post gig, the Frankfurt Chemist’s potion was wearing off, so for the first time possibly ever, we headed straight back to the hotel.

There the barman reluctantly came up with one last drink, but insisted we drank it in the foyer so he could get the hoovering done. The talk by the revolving door was of how to spread the message of the new RedLight sound. It’s going to get a lot easier with the arrival of RedLight Trax Vol. 1.

We tested the EP1 masters on the Zurich system and they sounded tasty. As did The Pleasure Victim (track 1) when it got it’s first play on Tong’s world famous radio one turntables. The first time I hear a new tune on radio is as special now as it was it was in 1991.

Actually, it’s already all eyes on EP 2 this end as we’re roadtesting a tune from RL Trax Vol 2 that is family sized. It’s out styled the 2011 revamp of Superstylin’ every time we’ve played it.

During the morning flight to Zagreb, we put the finishing touches to a RedLight Phase 2 show design. If we can pull it off as planned and avoid bankrupcy , it will take the roof off.

From Zagreb onwards it was a plane version of the Coastal Hopper. We touched down at various places, the pilot shouted the name of the stop and people shuffled on and off.

When it was our turn, we were met outside the airport by a couple of black windowed Mercedes.  It reminded me of the Kings of Leon, who, it would seem from the recent USA tour cancellation, never really recovered from shutting us out of the shower block. (for more details see Kings of Leon blog from last year)

We arrived in a beautiful, unspoilt coastal town, with promoters who were the perfect hosts. The sunset beer window closed as the plan to merge a little of Gat Decor’s Passion with some odd Berlin grooves took longer than hoped. But it paid off at 3am.

The club was white and sparkly ; not a natural setting for a warehouse vibe. But we went for a it and nailed a 2 hour journey from acid house to ibiza 2011.

As always, it was all go in the booth. At any one time there were 2 or 3 tunes in the mix, a lighting controller on the go, realtime visuals being sorted , CO2 cannons being operated by knees and elbows. But it was seamless. A judges panel would have reached for the 9.9s

Not so for the lad who ran over afterwards to get the first photo. Once he’d got his pic he told me that he was also a DJ. He thought the mixing was ‘ok’ , but listed various areas where I needed to improve.

Back in the dressing room, I was fighting with the reality that it was time to leave straight away.  Tour Manager Jamie had been ducking around the DJ booth keeping the whole ball rolling whilst checking other flight options. But the upshot was that to get back to Toulouse, I needed to begin the journey home straight away, or spend most of the week in town waiting for the next plane.

2 hours and 20 minutes after playing the last record, I was standing outside the doors of Trieste airport waiting for the cleaners to finish mopping and open the doors. As I waited, the check in and security staff filed in with the grey faces of people who’d got up in the middle of the night and had an 8 hour shift to go.

In Munich, waiting for the last leg, the freshly turned out morning travellers were a reminder that I looked like someone who’d come straight from a nightclub. I tucked myself out of the way in a corner by the gate.  A bloke in a T shirt with an explanation of “Why Beer is Better Than Milk” sat next to me and fell asleep. He drifted down on to my shoulder. Whilst it was pretty much the last thing I needed, once someone’s started dribbling on your T shirt, it’s a difficult situation to get out of. Too tired to come up with a plan, I was eventually saved by some kids who ran over his feet with a suitcase.

If you’re heading to Kazakhstan next saturday, I’ll see you there.

Andy

The rain didn’t help the look and feel of the hotel either. Amid beautiful countryside, they’d decided to build next to a couple of steelworks. They layout was a central hotel surrounded by hundreds of bungalows. The red brick of the identical cul de sacs, the size of the perimeter fencing, and the names  - Block 1 to Block 153 – all combined to make it look like the kind of prison Jeffrey Archer gets sent to.

We set up the speakers as the rain lashed against the hotel window, and tweaked a few tunes whilst wishing, not for the first time this summer, that we could swap the mainstage for a tent.

But an hour back down the road at the site it wasn’t too bad. This was mountain weather that changed quickly, and the large LED screens and even larger PA of the Aquasella festival were suffering no more than a light drizzle.

A super helpful team meant that the portakabin soon had everything you might need for a saturday night. We finished a few tunes off, although you could only work when the warm-up DJ’s tunes reached a drop and the walls stopped shaking.

A strange green flicker appeared on the super sized screen just as we were about to kick the redlight cameras into gear.  Our visuals never really use the colour green, so quick as a flash Tour Manager Jamie came up with a work-around. “Take the green out of the screen feed, take the green out of the screen feed”, he shouted. It passed down a line of translators and came out the other end with the green staying on. So it was Reddish/GreenLight that night.

Later, Sven Vath, who was sheltering in the portakabin next door, pulled out a bottle of high end Tequila. We talked Cocoon, The Guetta Effect and Frankfurt.

Carrying out most of the RedLight DJ booth in a suitcase, I gave a little smile and a ‘nice one’ to the security guard by the dressing rooms then wiped out completely. Flat out with my head in the grass among a surprised group of ravers, the lesson learnt was don’t cross wet steel bridges in Converse with a heavy bag.

Most of Sunday was spent in Palma, waiting for a Niki airlines connection to Ibiza. It was a trade off; a power socket for the computer if we could take the heat by the fridge fan outlets of ‘Quick Bar’. The 5 edits that came from the Quick Bar sessions were all large at Space later, so it was worth getting a sweat on.

We were left with a sociable hour at Es Torrent before heading off to El Chiringito to play at a Teenage Cancer Trust party. Island legend, Simeon ‘The Shop’ Friend. had worked his usual magic and turned the restaurant into one of the best equipped dancefloors on the island, complete with an unecessarily large lazer he’d borrowed from Amnesia and surround sound.  It turned into a legendary party and raised a fortune. With the world’s 4th richest man having a drink behind the booth, we were always on to a winner with the finances.

A change of T shirt later and it was off to Space. A big line up this week featured yours truly and 2 Many DJs on the terrace, with all the techno heavyweights inside. The big news was that we had the screen we’d been trying to get hold of for weeks. When the Redlight went on this time, the combination of Kinetics and In Booth Lights and Lazer control was electric. The music wasn’t bad either.

One of the 2 many boys walked into the booth and said “jesus I’ve never seen it like this before”. A lad at the front held up a banner saying “this is mental.”

A good night.

Afterwards, we took the fatal decision to go to Es Vive. Jason, the owner and one of the islands’ finest hosts , was holding court. From that moment, you know you’ll be heading straight from the bar to the airport.

Andy Cato

Bad start. DJ Chucky in a car park in the rain. Not even Mc Ambush could get the oversized pointy fingers in the air.

It wasn’t until later that we realised the real action was indoors, with a succession of conference halls and storage rooms hosting a good spread of DJs.

Back in the car park, red light was slightly dimmed by the burger van lights and dampened by the rain. Drying off in the dressing room, things took a turn for the worse.  Paulus (lights) took a tumble, and upended the table with all the drinks, computers and speakers on it. As he reeled back in shock, he took down the partition wall. By the time security arrived, it was a scene of destruction. Jeigermeister and Vodka glugged into the carpet, Paulus nursed a head wound, Jamie was towling the worst of the liquor off the computers and tom and I were picking up the furniture. They weren’t happy.

Yellow card for Paulus.

Nice trip to Brussels on Austrian Airlines , who served cups of tea in the kind of sunday-best china your nan keeps in a special cupboard.

Tomorrowland is a Belgian festival that’s gone from 10,000 to 180,000 people in 5 years. They’ve found a good site, with a huge natural amphitheater.

An odd decision from a marketing department somewhere meant a group of girls spent the day dancing around Coca Cola surfboards to music I can’t begin to describe , played through car stereo speakers.

Everywhere else it was banging. Big pop tunes reworked into supersized drops.

The main stage itself is as big as a small village, and high enough to parachute from. Whoever’s got the scaffolding job on this one must be on the same annual schedule as the painters of the Forth Bridge.

Jamie and Paulus had rolled over straight from Vienna to spend the afternoon fitting the RedLight booth into a space about half it’s actual size. Then someone fell off a podium onto half of it. A bit of gaffer tape later, and we were in shape.

As we waited back stage, a version of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams kicked in next door. Lazers came out of a dragons eyes as it started looping up.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.

Sweet Dreams Are

Sweet Dreams Are

Sweet

Sweet

Sweet

Sw Sw Sw Sw

Sssssssssss…….

Cue the CO2 cannons, a couple of fireworks, and jets of water from the giant toadstools.

‘In the beginning, there was Jack, and Jack had a groove. And from this groove came the groove of all grooves. Let there be HOUSE! and house music was born’.

Pretty sure Jack never saw the toadstools coming.

Andy Cato

Check out the Edit of the Weekend.

The week after was spent trying to work out ways of getting it even better. Seems like we’ve got the A Grade solution in the pipeline for August.

But for this weekend, we knew we’d be working with the same setup as week 1. Which is why Tour Manager Jamie was on the phone until 2am Sunday when he finally got confirmation that all the screens would be in place as we’d tweaked them the week before.

Sunday 4pm. Arrive at the club. No screens and, extra bonus, no projectors.

6pm Pedro and the We Love team arrive. Time for some speedy solutions.  Pedro started taking down projectors from elsewhere around the club and various people drove around the island trying to get the screens.

7pm We had reclaimed a couple of projectors but the screens were not going to happen. RedLight  Visuals were going to have to take a back seat.

7.30pm Asked the Lights and Lazers team if they could give us anything extra. Within the hour they had 20 mirrors across the front of the booth, meaning our lazer controller could hit every corner of the room. And the all new, crash proof, in booth lighting controller was in place and working perfectly.

We had something to work with.

8-10pm Setup the speakers round the back and fine tuned edits, reedits, and a couple of new RL tracks.

1am A bit of food and trip to the Rock Bar later, we were back on the terrace to hear Joris Voorn’s percussive workout.

Then it was lights, small amount of camera, action.

There was less room for a musical build this week, given the 3am start and Joris, on before us, wasn’t messing around. So the Redlight Mothership had to kick into gear at full pace from the off.

Tune of the night was our merged version of a Mr Freeze tune and a Rubin track. Even by Space standards, it’s family sized.

Monday.

A message comes in asking if we’ll play some music with Bryan Ferry at Valentino’s Chateau outside Paris. It’s an A list charity event organised by supermodel Natalia Vodianova in aid of Russian Children.

Tom was having the night off to blow out his birthday candles.

So I found myself sat next to the Queens’ hat maker in Valentino’s Winter Wonderland, complete with falling snow and chandeliers the size of small villages.

A cup of tea with Johnny Marr the morning after, and the weekends’ work was done.  Just in time to leave for EXIT festival.

It’s the big one.

Andy