REVIEW: Global Gathering [Festival Fever]

REVIEW: Global Gathering

Posted on July 29, 2008 7:14 PM
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Global Gathering 2008
Review by Max Hogg

If DJs were political leaders…

“If DJs were political leaders, what sort of leader would they be?”

Exhausted, sun-baked to within an inch of our somewhat fragile lives, but somehow enormously content; this seemed the obvious topic of conversation whilst waiting in the mammoth queue for a shuttle bus back to the station on Sunday afternoon.

“Digweed would be a dictator” proclaimed Marko immediately. We couldn’t disagree. There’s only way to describe Digweed’s Saturday night headline set in the Bedrock tent. Imagine being shaken relentlessly for two hours by someone holding you by the scruff of the neck. You’re powerless to resist him. It’s not even as if he’s benevolent – he just has total power over you. That’s Digweed playing easily the best set we’ve ever seen of his.

By the time we’d resolved Digweed’s political leanings, we had inched about a metre further down the queue for the bus. This was seriously painful. You could see in people’s eyes that they were mentally crafting their complaint letters to the organisers. I was secretly relishing the power of my press pass, safe in the knowledge that I wielded a secret weapon against the heartless, evil empire of Global Gathering in the form of this review.

But then the saviour arrived. Or, more accurately, the saviours, in the form of a huge crate of hundreds of bottles of ice cold water, delivered for free by some unknown force of goodness (probably DJ Sasha). Suddenly Global Gathering was no longer the evil empire – they were demi-gods worthy of mild worship.

After reviving ourselves with said water, Ivan decided that Dubfire would be a mysterious unknown figure of impeccable authority, never showing his face and yet providing for his subjects’ every needs. A bit like the Wizard of Oz, except for real rather than an old man playing tricks. Dubfire’s particular brand of stadium minimal was one of the surprise highlights of the weekend in Sven Vath’s Cocoon tent on Friday night.

The non-existent shuttle buses were a far cry from the amazingly efficient entrance to the site on Friday afternoon. Although arriving at peak time we got off the train in Stratford-upon-Avon to be met by a bus which whisked us without delay to the festival entrance. The total absence of a queue to get in meant that we were inside the site and setting up our tents within twenty-minutes or so. Our only gripe was the lack of any sign posts to the campsite at all – we just had to follow the crowd and hope.

Once our tents were set up at around 7pm we wandered into the site and picked up a programme only to find that Sasha, the source of all that is good in the world, was on at 9pm. Eek! Apparently his slot had been swapped with Eric Prydz, who was now on at 10.30pm, the time we’d originally been led to believe Sasha was playing. This is fairly unacceptable from a major dance music festival, especially as most of us had come specifically to see Sasha play.

As it turns out, this was just about our last complaint of the weekend.

So, back to the conversation about DJs. We were somewhat concerned that Jordan might have died, so it was a relief to hear her wearily announce that “Tiesto would be like an American president; awesomely powerful but somehow a crowd pleaser at the same time.” Obviously not George Bush then. Barack Obama perhaps?

We'd met Jordan, an Australian girl at Global on her own, at the start of Sasha’s set. Despite being an unrepentant trance-head she was surprisingly normal and ended up sticking with us for the whole weekend. I hope I don’t embarrass Jordan by saying that she exemplified the type of crowd at the festival. We’d expected a load of aggressive drum-and-bass types, an expectation that was reinforced when we met exactly that sort on the train to festival, spilling beer and using the toilet for purposes that were clearly illegal. Instead, for the whole weekend we saw only laid-back, friendly and unassuming punters. (And trance-heads. But I guess you can’t have everything). The crowd was a big relief, and a big credit to the festival.

Etienne de Crecy joined Dubfire on the list of surprise highlights of the weekend. We struggled with how to define him politically, finally settling on a leader of a small but prosperous African nation not known for it’s global power but secretly beavering away to save the continent from the AIDS epidemic. (You can see that our sun-addled brains were getting creative in their descriptions by now.)

We hadn’t expected much from him, going to see his hour-long live set on Saturday night only because we were stubbornly refusing to follow Jordan to see Armin van Buuren. (Best DJ on the planet?! You’re having a laugh.) So anyway, we wandered into the Global tent (confusingly, a different tent from Friday night’s Global tent…) to see the most amazing stage set-up for a dance music producer. Ever.

Bear with me while I describe the stage – I promise it’s worth it.

Monsieur de Crecy was playing in the middle of an enormous cube. This enormous cube was split into nine smaller cubes, 3 across and 3 high (imagine a Sudoku puzzle, if you’re that way inclined). So the DJ booth was actually about 10 feet above the stage, taking up the central cube. Around the edge of each of the smaller cubes was a line of LED lights, so that throughout his set there were white snakes racing around him, interweaving with one another and moving in time with his mixer. To add to this, two projectors from the back of the tent projected onto all but the central cube, with all manner of colours and projections.

Things got better. As the set came to a thundering, acid-house tinged climax, the projections changed to pulsate in 3D in time with his tunes (or possibly the roar of the crowd – the whole tent was in utter adoration) so that it looked as if the DJ booth was repeatedly coming out in the crowd and then retreating back to where it should be. We did our best to convince ourselves that this was just a trick of the eye, but it seems far more logical that Monsieur de Crecy is in reality a sorcerer of the highest order.

This just about sums up the lighting rigs for the whole weekend – consistently magical.

So much more could be said about this festival; about the bleak setting of Long Marston airfield; about the lack of any sustenance except ‘Gourmet’ (yeah right!) burgers; about the complete absence of shade on the hottest weekend of the year so far; about the main stage that had nothing worth watching (Jordan sealed our approval by spending the whole weekend in a home-made vest top on which she’d scrawled ‘WHO INVITED KANYE?’ Couldn’t agree more.)

But the thing is, this festival is about the DJs. And with a line-up as good as Global’s, everything else pales into insignificance. It does mean that it is an incredibly intense two days, and not for the faint-hearted – Ivan can attest to that by nearly dying at around 5am on Sunday morning. (The less said about that the better – his mother may be reading this.)

It also means that I’ve fallen in love with the place. It’s messy, it’s going to take about a month to recover, but I will be back next year come hell or high water. As we emerged on Marylebone station from the return train journey, remarkably reminiscent of the hordes of incompetent zombies in ‘Shaun of the Dead’, a refrain from an old psytrance track by Infected Mushroom popped into my head. In the anguished tones of someone with only a tenuous grip on reality, the vocal goes:

This isn’t real
None of this is real

Perhaps it was all a dream. After all, Sasha’s set on Friday night was so incredibly good that I can’t believe it actually happened. Which reminds me – what sort of leader would Sasha be?

I answered this one myself, without hesitation. “He’s the Dalai Lama. He’s the source of all wisdom and inspiration in the world. If only he was in control, world peace and unending bliss would prevail.”

It’s probably best he didn’t grant me an interview. The adulation might have been too much for both of us.

Day one highlights:

DJ Sasha: Indescribably good.
Dubfire: Minimal as it should be. None of this M_nus wonkiness.
Tiesto: Oh all right then. I’ll admit it. Tiesto was actually brilliant. Even though he’s a trance DJ.

Day two highlights:

Martin Buttrich: Highly talented producer.
Gui Boratto: Likewise – apparently he used to be an architect. I can hear architecture in his music (I think?!)
John Digweed: I am fully under this man’s control. He told me to write him in as a highlight. I have no choice.
Etienne de Crecy: French has never sounded so good.

David Guetta: This man can make cheese better than the Cheddar Gorge. The most euphoric crowd of the festival, singing along to all his tunes. Well that’s what happens when you play us Prodigy again after all those years.
Francois K: Ummm…this man suspends time and loses you in his beats. By this time the sound in Bedrock was terrible. But it somehow we didn’t notice.