Mobile DJ

Live Review

DJ ANON
Route 454 Rochdale - Stansfield
13 May 2008

It’s 2003 and every crusty fucker with a guitar is busy staging guerrilla gigs in whatever pub, park or pisser they can find. Crowds gather, eagerly anticipating some sort of cultural epiphany. It never comes. Drifting from the party, the misled sods that paid ten pounds to be allowed near a bandstand realise they have been sorely duped.

Fast forward five years and the guerrilla revolution is still alive and well. Only now the tools of the musical insurgents are not battered acoustics and burnt spoons, but mobile phones.

These days, with some basic MP3 playback technology and a volume level that goes up far too high, anyone can be a DJ. Sets are taking place nightly; on buses, outside shops, even near swings. The parties rattle with an intensity lacking from many of their more organised, four-walled counterparts. The excitement - the frenzy - is tangible.

Tonight’s example is no different. Set up within seconds of leaving the station, this impromptu bus party already feels like a suspension-tester. Cries of “Support the grime!” and, bizarrely, “Socks pulled up to the knees!” ring out as the collected homegoers are treated to a banging-but-tinny mix of bassline and grime remixes. It’s explosive stuff.

One woman - unaware that buses now, far from being places you might expect to hear yourself think, are churches of pure liquid euphoria - tries in vain to hold a conversation on her phone. As the BPM and temperature rise in unison, conspiring to mark the greatest revolution in clubbing for over twenty years, she should heed this warning: phones down, hands up. You don’t want to miss this.

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