We’re sitting on the tour bus watching CNN reporting on the Republican candidate debate last night, arguing about immigration. Feels a bit weird as a foreigner working here to hear the depth of feeling about people from overseas and their contribution to the success or to the woes of America, especially given the nature of most of the population here. Let’s face it, since we all left Africa thousands of years ago we’re all immigrants. Not to diminish the power and importance of cultures various, but if you look at things with the perspective of the history of the planet, our nationality is like a postcard; it’s just where we’ve been staying recently.
I’m wading into the blog a little late, I must confess. I’ve been on the road since Boxing Day and whilst the bus is possibly the most welcome addition to the tour party it feels like just one new complexion to what’s already been a long and fascinating journey. We’ve already been posting pictures of the parties and the places we’ve been on our Facebook page and Twitter so this is adding some narrative to those pictures, status updates and brief Tweets.
We started the post Christmas tour in Goa at the Sunburn festival on December 28th. We famously played the first Sunburn festival in 2007 as part of our Goa to Rio tour in celebration of 100 releases on Anjunabeats. The difference between that first fledgeling festival and this year’s was huge. Goa has been a hugely popular tourist destination for years but the audience this year was almost 95% Indian, a big change from last time.
The view from the stage during our set at Sunburn, Goa.
Whilst 25,000 people sounds like a lot of new clubbers it’s a tiny fraction of the exploding population there - there’s no question India will be a major touring destination for us in the future. To celebrate our return to Anjuna we played the acapela from “Home” over “Anjunabeach”. It wasn't the best bootleg as one is F major and one is F minor, but it’s the thought that counts and that was definitely how it was received, Anjunabeach is our spiritual home.
Jono and Paavo had very kindly agreed to do New Year’s Eve in Dubai and allow me to stay in Goa for the holidays.
By all accounts their gig there was incredible, 13,000 people on the beach by the Atlantis Hotel amidst the glittering skyscrapers. Being New Year’s Eve he boys wheeled out our bootleg of the Mat Zo remix of Kyau & Albert’s “Be There 4 U” and Daft Punk’s “One More Time” one more time (!), which has been putting a smile on festival crowds since SW4.
I couldn’t have been further away from the melee - at midnight I was watching transfixed as a Bollywood dancer entertained those of us lucky enough to be staying at the gorgeous Yoga Magic eco-resort in Anjuna (
www.yogamagic.net). Run by an ex record producer from London named Phil Dane (who’s worked with the likes of Paul Oakenfold, Sasha and Digweed) it’s a million miles away from the hustle & bustle of work for anyone. A New Year’s Eve under the stars amidst the swaying palm trees, fluttering Rajasthani silk flags, cow dung huts and Phil’s loyal pack of dogs was just the break I needed, especially when augmented by four days in a beach hut on Palolem beach, further to the south.
A fellow resident at Yoga Magic, Anjuna, Goa
This was the place where Jason Bourne goes for his last free jog in The Bourne Supremacy and me and a couple of mates ran barefoot up and down the beach in the early mornings in honour of our hero: the guy never, ever prevaricates. I had a very interesting night with my friend Dan Hill, who distributes a number of dance labels in London and was very buoyant about the future of vinyl records which comprise the largest part of his growing business. I love having my preconceptions blown out of the water.
Next stop was Thailand and the tourist rich environment of Pattaya, one hour from Bangkok and swollen with thousands of Russians enjoying their extended Christmas holidays. I had a very rare but enjoyable solo gig in a small club called Lima, Lima and decided to extend the set frontwards so I could warm up for myself with some tasty prog. I’ve been aching to play the amazing Pryda mix of Henry Saiz & Guy J’s ‘Meridian’ but it doesn’t fit our normal sets. It’s an extraordinary nine minute journey from a house DJ from Sweden who seems to me to have taken the very best ideas of trance music to borrow from. I even tacked on the opening of Joris Voorn’s “Balance” CD (“Are you ready?”) for the perfect deep club opening. :)
Sunset in Thailand
From sunny Thailand we spent a day travelling into winter and Taiwan, for a gig in the country’s second biggest city, Kaohsiung. The hotel we were staying at had a big Hello Kitty push going on, with Hello Kitty marriages (!), Hello Kitty themed rooms, a huge Hello Kitty shrine on the ground floor and a Hello Kitty car parked outside. She does get about, as we were soon to discover. For our first time in town the gig was incredible, a huge sports arena with 5,000 new fans who danced and sung along like we’d been there ten times before. That night Paavo & I road tested the new Norin & Rad remix of Andrew Bayer, Matt Lange & Kerry Leva’s “In & Out of Phase”, which has added a trademark N&R groove skeleton to the beautiful body of the original. It sounded great and after one or two tweaks the guys did for us over the subsequent week, it’ll be our opener for sure these next few shows. The strings meld perfectly into “Filmic” so we get this lovely musical start to proceedings.
Dancers from our show in Taiwan
From Taiwan we took our first flight in a Hello Kitty plane, bound for Seoul and branded outside & in with the cute cartoon cat and her friends. Later in the flight I did a double take when I stuck my fork in a slice of carrot only to discover it was shaped and embossed with Hello Kitty’s face. She tastes of carrot.
Hello Kitty bound for Seoul
Seoul was definitely back on winter time so we all pulled out our winter coats and scarves. Our previous two trips to Seoul had all been quite short so it was a real treat to have some time to explore the city. The gig was a double headline with Justice, who finished their set on another stage in the huge Kintex Convention Centre as we waited to go on. Like in Taiwan, our rather intermittent touring policy seemed to have gone unnoticed by the faithful fans who were out in force and as excited as we were by our long overdue return. Getting a rather unexpectedly big cheer on the night was the fabulous Jerome Isma-Ae groover ‘Speed’, our lighting guy Neil’s favourite track at the moment. Jerome’s groove’s are legendary and ‘Speed’ is no exception, relentless and nagging and deceptively simple it has everything you need for a instrumental club track, well made, well mixed and really well arranged.
Seoul at night
After a day of exploring Seoul’s restaurants, shops and clubs with our promoter JC we left Korea to travel into yesterday, flying backwards across the international date line to sunny Los Angeles, where our tour manager Seamus was waiting in a big SUV for the drive to Las Vegas.
On the road to Vegas
We stopped to pay homage to In & Out Burger on the desert road and arrived in Vegas at nightfall, a city of neon and 24/7 party madness.
EDM has really taken a hold in Las Vegas and most of the top DJs have residencies there now, pulling in big crowds of high rollers. We’re like the new Elvis. It’s a well known fact that in the casinos and bars of Las Vegas you can’t tell whether it is day or night, and as we made our debut at Lava on a Tuesday night it struck me you wouldn’t know what day it was, either: it felt like Friday, Friday, Friday!
One of the new tracks we we played that night was the lovely Duderstadt remix of Marcus Schulz’s ‘Gypsy Room’. I love this one, it has an old fashioned breakdown with some old fashioned gorgeous chords and a simple but beautiful melody that just gets under your skin in a most welcome way. And the Duderstadt boys have nailed the mix, it works almost anywhere in the set and combines the intensity of the 2012 soundscape with a great musicality.
From Vegas we flew to balmy San Diego for two sell out shows at Fluxx.
Approaching San Diego
Southern Californian crowds are among the most vocal and enthusiastic anywhere in the world, and nice to look at, too. :) We’ve been coming there for a few years now and it’s been growing for us so quickly, I think we’ve sadly outgrown Fluxx. But it was a rare treat to do two shows in the same town, chance for a lay in and a haircut and to dig a little deeper for the two different shows. Wednesday we aired Matisse & Sadko’s ‘Amulet’, one of Paavo’s recent favourites and a really great club record. It’s another one of those prog records from recent months that seems to have the real soul of trance living inside it, genuinely uplifting with a wicked drop that had us both jumping around the booth - and the audience as well. Thursday we pulled out the Signalrunners remix of Oliver Smith’s ‘Restless’, a track from 2009 that was so ahead of it’s time. It fits perfectly in between tracks from today and it’s always nice to give another spin to one of our deep Anjuna catalogue gems.
Friday we were in the orange desert glow of Scottsdale, Arizona.
We’ve played Axis Radius many times and it’s alway a treat to climb through the funny hole they have between the back stage area and the DJ booth and stand up, with as much dignity as you can muster when rising from your knees, in the middle of a sea of excited faces. You feel a bit like Alice going through the rabbit hole. You’re so close to the people in this club, you can hand them drinks or a towel to wipe their faces without moving your feet, and also experience their singing at full volume. We were particularly struck by how well known the (many) lyrics to ‘On My Way To Heaven’ seem to be getting, with a good many rapturous faces singing along in full dramatic effect that night in Scottsdale. I think there’s talk of it being our next single, which is a surprise as it was never seen as a single when we wrote it.
Leaving Arizona
Then it was back to Las Vegas for another packed Saturday night at the Marquee Club in the gorgeous Cosmopolitan Hotel, our favourite on the strip. It has beautiful rooms with balconies overlooking the choreographed fountains of the Bellagio.
The view from the Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas
And the Marquee Club is something else. It’s still amazing to me that we can pull 6,000 people into that place time after time, it really shows the power of Vegas in our world right now. If you’ve not been, make a date for 2012, you won’t be dissapointed. We played a three hour party set full of the hits from 2011 and before, and made a slightly tweaked mix of the Cosmic Gate remix of ‘Sirens of The Sea’ for the occasion - Bossi had been with us that week as he now lives in Las Vegas. Like us, the explosion of EDM in the USA has meant he’s touring here so often now it makes more sense than staying in Germany.
Las Vegas party people
After Vegas, Paavo flew home to be with his family and his new piano and the rest of us flew to Boston to join up with Jono and the bus. I have a lot of family and friends in Boston and the show at the Royale was extra special for me. For some reason, after 12 years of being in Above & Beyond and playing Boston half a dozen times, the penny seems to have dropped and they turned out in force for what was a great start to the bus tour. The whole crowd was so emotionally involved in the show, there were tears flowing left and right and a great energy in the room. The gig left us all so breathless we put on the beautiful Floris de Haan remix of ‘Satellite’ at the end to help us all cool off as we chatted to friends, new and old, in the crowd. Then it was back to the bus for drinks and photos. That sentence is laden with untold delight: Jono has described what it’s like to be on a bus instead of flying elsewhere in this blog, suffice to say it’s like the best bits of travelling and staying home at the same time; we love it.
Boston - the bus awaits
The bus rolled out of Boston at 10.00 am Wednesday morning, out west on the Mass Pike. Our destination was the gorgeous old Webster Theatre and our second ever show in Hartford, Connecticut. Its always a thrill for us Brits to see our name on the marquee over the door of some of these old American venues, there’s so much history there, so many famous names have been spelt out in the re-used plastic letters it makes you feel humble.
The Webster stirs into life
On this occasion a gig by a band called ‘Drugs’ just two days before added a surreal note to the picture, but the thrill was not diminished. We parked the bus right outside the venue and the local crew and our on-bus team, now swelled to five by the addition of a merch guy called Alex, a video tech called Carson and our UK based production manager Simon began rolling our Above & Beyond branded flight cases out of the trailer and into the theatre. Rock & Roll! The gig didn’t disappoint, a sweaty room full of jumping clubbers oblivious to the fact it was, in fact, a Wednesday night. We road tested a new track from Nitrous Oxide that’ll be on the new Anjunabeats Worldwide CD which he is mixing. With a cheeky modern groove and a great, musical breakdown it showcases exactly why Krzysztof Pretkiewicz is one of our most enduring artists on the label - it went down great on its world debut.
After our 8.30 am start, we were glued to the Weather Channel on the drive to Syracuse. The weather has it’s own channel in the US and the novelty of it (“Flooding in Texas!” “Allergic to Cold?”) meant we were actually paying attention when they told us it would snow just as we arrived in town. And right on cue the snowflakes began to swirl as we parked outside the entrance to the Westcott Theatre. Another marquee guarded the door, which we shared today not with Drugs, but Crystal Method. (Is there a theme emerging here, I wonder?)
Syracuse. How's it all going to fit?!
Our first gig in Syracuse won’t be our last, the crowd were totally up for it and sang along like they’d seen us lots of times before. Going through many incarnations over all these gigs was the excellent Heatbeat remix of Parker & Hansen’s latest masterpiece, “Afterthought” which we played an early version of at TATW 400. Parker & Hansen always make the most incredibly beautiful music and ‘Afterthought’ has this Thomas Newman-esque piano theme which you simply can’t get out of your head; we love it. Over many incarnations the Buenos Aires based Heatbeat boys have been steadily grafting their quirky groove ideas onto the track and right at the end of the process nailed the chorus section completely. It’s really nice to hear a remix coming together and see its growing effect on the audience, and in Syracuse when we played Version 5 we knew it was finished - people cheered, danced and screamed at the right moments. :)
