Boogie Nights and Odo at Motion
Posted on: 2017-01-20
Our rating:
Retrospective party Boogie Nights takes a leap forward with a wholly enjoyable evening at Motion in a collaboration with Odo.
A lot has changed since the first instalment of Boogie Nights. The event, a shared venture between fledgling party-throwers Methods and Studio 94, had its humble beginnings at Blue Mountain on a cold evening in February 2015, which saw the likes of Medlar and Alexander Nut spinning the funkiest cuts of disco and house below the Desert Island Disco takeover upstairs. David Cameron had only fleetingly mentioned an EU referendum and David Bowie was still alive.
Fast forward nearly two years, via a series of follow-ups at both Thekla and the adopted home of the Old Crown Courts, to an even colder evening in January 2017 and Boogie Nights, even by its sheer scale, is unrecognisable. The girthy queue for their collaboration with Odo at Motion on Friday night, which begins before you can even see the skate park, is alone enough to pack out Blue Mountain twice over. This exponential increase which reflects the calibre of the selectors who have been invited along for the evening, who, in George FitzGerald, Dan Shake and Tom Trago are house honchos less renowned for their disco credentials.
So long is the queue, in fact, that we miss the chance to catch the first of these, as Jasper James has just rounded off his 90 minutes as we spill into the main room just after half 12. Testament to the quality of his set, however, is the mood in the room immediately after its close, with plenty of love being passed around for the Glaswegian who enjoyed a formidable 2016. Benefitting from this afterglow is this evening’s headliner, Man Make Music bossman and all-around hero George FitzGerald (pictured, above). He begins in the vein that much of his production operates in: melodic and around 100 bpm, rarely straying into the funkier territory that the name of the night might suggest.
Curiosity leads us towards the Tunnel, where Admin, a Bristol-based favourite who has been busy over the past 12 months hosting Slix Disco, is throwing down fire to the sweating assembled. Perhaps the set that is most in keeping with the ‘boogie’ theme, his choices hinge around grooving, disco-infused house, with a particularly cathartic highlight arriving in the form of Floorplan’s classic ‘Tell You No Lie’ - a telling premonition of the coming of Robert Hood, who is to headline here for Just Jack the weekend after next.
With the quality of the system in the Tunnel and the intensity that the closeness to the stage engenders, it would have been tempting to stay put for the duration, were it not that Dan Shake (above) was incoming over in the Marble Factory. The much more cavernous expanse of Motion’s second room allows a proliferation of space in which to dance, a welcome increase given how infinitely moveable Shake’s output is. Keeping it 130 and laying down classic Chicago vocal samples over his trademark bongo rhythms, the Mahogani man keeps it grooving way until the lights come up at the close of his three-hour stint in the mix.
On tonight’s evidence, Boogie Nights is unrecognisable from that nascent evening at Blue Mountain less than two years ago - it is also ready to take a justified position in Bristol’s big league.
Article by:
An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
