aaamusic | On 12, Aug 2013

…SMS Festival 2013 Review Continued. Click here for Thursday & Friday (Part 1)

Saturday

Saturday, feeling a little worse for wear, I got to the mad queues, yes the only queue or hectic-ness you’ll see at Stop Making Sense, for the boat party. S**t. 2pm is too early, hundreds of people is too much, but Appleblim, Will Saul and Midland are playing and maybe, maybe, I can get it together enough to sit up and listen at least. There’s a quiet shady bit at the back of the boat, maybe someone will see my yellow face – I’ll tell them of my near death experience and they’ll let me sit. Half an hour in…. they smashed it. I mean smashed it. Appleblim took us from his dark seedy underbelly of post-dub bass hidden in his menacing house to some high state of future garage upfront house, with Will Saul and Midland killing it in equal measure. There were people climbing the masts, jumping off each other into flight, it seemed, people spraying water and booze all over each other. The boat seemed like it would collapse – that ship must have seen a few storms but nothing, nothing compared to what these cats did to it. No perfect storm can make an old ship creak the way the mother-loving house heads stomped on its decrepit oak floors ‘til it had had enough. When it finished we all looked at each other like we’d been on some trauma together, we hadn’t we had just been – and most people on that ship will agree – basically the best party we’d ever been to. As I walked off I heard the old ship crew man say “I’ve been working on this ship six years and that was the best party I ever saw”. Yes old ship man, yes, yes it was.

After a wee nap back at base, we set off to ‘Barbarella’s’, the club night about 15 minutes away from the festival site. Always a bummer having to drag yourself there unless you take the boat, of course… like a boss. What we saw and heard that night was like an Alejandro Jarowosky movie. Lindstrom and Orlando Boom DJs all in captain hats back-to-backed the most obscure sinister musings of a one eyed pirate gone mad. Their dark house seamlessly dipped into MJ Thriller moments and obtuse references to Prog Rock without batting an eyelid. You know that moment at the party when everyone starts to look weird – this was it. Orlando Boom DJs had ferried out that cult figure Asian guy – those of you who watch enough Boiler Room will know who I’m talking about – the skinny Asian guy who dances like he’s being mastered by a puppeteer; like a bad guy in Thunderbirds; like he’s just waking up from the paralysis fishbowls in the Matrix and learning how to use his muscles again; like some feral dance child never been exposed to beat nor rhythm before. He was in the booth and just making everything weirder. As small as SMS is though I managed to find some stuff out about him. This Andy Warhol groupie throwback from another universe sent to educate us in the language of arrhythmia is called Alan. Yes, Alan. And he is an accountant. Of course he is.

Sunday

Sunday came all too quickly but my boat love hadn’t ended and I in fact needed to take this profound and sacred love to the next level. You can’t put a ring on a boat, so between seven of my new found friends we rented a speed boat/ dinghy with a motor and tied a lilo to the back of it, rode it out as far as we could go, lay on the lilo and drove back. Now if you need to tie a lilo onto the back of a boat you may come up with some difficulties but I recommend you buy the type with handles on the side, then take the anchor rope and push it through the handles a number of times, then tie a sailor’s bow knot in the middle so the rope is tort from the centre of gravity and the lilo is facing the boat. You can fit about four big, drunk louts on one of these things and even stand up. I suggest you tie your captain’s hat on tight though as once it flies off you are not getting it back. A trip like that will set you back around £6 a head between a group of friends which last time I looked was the price of a pint at Glastonbury or a collective pub in Hackney Downs.

So after buying my replacement captain’s hat we made a pit-stop at the woods stage where Bristolian duo Pardon My French were getting things going with some minimal beats to chase the daylight away. Not sure everyone had been told the party had started though as we arrived to see a lonely guy in a dinghy in the centre of the dance floor swinging an oar around his head. Someone must have missed the boat party. Radio Slave were soon to follow and they really got things thumping with their masterly Detroit style control of building to a crescendo that you just can’t help but freak out to. Then for potentially the most anticipated act of the festival we headed back to Barbarella’s for Innervisions present Ame and Dixon. Even in my decrepit third day state I could hear the ingenuity in their record selection. Their intelligent house kicked off the party until 6am, except it was less like a party and more like the last day at summer camp. A tight set with some dizzying rhythm and blues throwbacks, enough to make you keep searching deeper and deeper for that last ounce of energy to see you through the night.

I’d gotten to know most people at the festival; we all had, it was just that small. Alan and his twisted moves, DJ Laizi (always there), the guy who never knew what time it was, the girl with whom we’d always argue about the size of frogs in Puerto Rico, the girl that just didn’t stop dancing on podiums or rocks for three whole days… So sad to say goodbye to them all, so the last stragglers made it down to the beach stage and watched the sunrise to some more house music… why change a winning formula. So as my last bottle of red wine fermented in the hot sun and my last kuna were spent on a G and T, I laid my captain’s hat down on my lilo – Laura – and slowly fell asleep as the last partiers pushed me from side to side along the SMS beachy marina.

…Click here for Thursday & Friday (Part 1)

Review: Del Newman

Photos: Luke Gould & SMS