Sankeys is a hard-shelled haven I thought I was going to be abusing on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I've not slid in there over half as much as I should have because it hosts some absolutely cracking lineups and houses the kind of dark, compact club layout I really love. Luckily it's part of the job description and I was back in there for a bit of an exclusive one for its Wednesday We Love hostation.
For the folks who still don't know, We Love was a Sunday jaunt held at Space and became one of the longest enduring parties. Sankeys stepped in to inject it with a dosage of its progressive music policy and Ibiza Spotlight was right in there from the lairy launcher before it crashed into the full season with flavours of house, tech-house and drum and bass. This week's We Love stuck the progression spoon in with two special appearances for a carnivorous chopping of drum and bass in the form of deities, Andy C and Goldie. For Andy C it was going to be the first and last time he was to dice with Sankeys VOID soundystem and for Goldie, it was his only gig this season on the Isle. On that note of exclusivity I wasn't 100% or even 50% sure what I was going to find in there. Drum and bass isn't the modus operandi of many ear bashed victims out here but Sankeys is the kind of place that can lure the numbers in regardless of whatever taste of paste they claim to lather on first.
No getting away from the fact that the head count at the core of Andy C's set wasn't on the swarming scale, but that isn't necessarily a negative. It's drum and bass and with the kind of dust this guy kicks up, which I also got a sniffing of at Amnesia's Together, being smashed up to every other clubber's skull would be a total hindrance to your abilities to get in there and give it some, which this guy's set lastnight asked for…believe me. If fatigue relief tabs could contain some derivative form of the energy Monsieur C ignites, there'd be utter carnage with finger jabbed yawn rapes extinguished to extinction. The MC ordered “We don't shuffle, we step-out.” Thank f**ck for a start, because that dance is tragic, although it's absolute nails to master so fair play on that point. Steppin' out was coming in from every corner to a tracklist which transferred from High Contrast's If We Ever to Sub Focus's Turn Back Time and to his own remix of Major Lazer's Get Free. He cut it thick and he spread it out for an extra heavy handed hour. No complaints there then.
Rounds of cheers flew in and by 5am, it was the hour for gold incisored bass bastion, Goldie to get on it and layer beeatz on beeeatz. At this hour, the only place likely to get busier is the hospital emergency room so he had a crowd already tempered by Andy C to session with. He kept the pace with doom laden bassline brutes, thunder charged groovers, crashing snares and basslines which reared their heads from basslines. By 6am, Sankeys had died down a fair whack, but the step-out troopers that were left were there because they really wanted to be. Not because they were hangin' off a speaker which may as well have been a plantpot. Of course, you'd want a decently sized army following your command but I'd imagine that when you see that individual energy wasn't in danger of dying down, you'd consider it a done job nonetheless.
Four dates left for this one, whet your appetities with its line-up here.
WORDS | Aimee Lawrence
