BLOC Weekend – Butlins Holiday Camp, Minehead – 12/3/10 [DAY ONE]
4/5
By: Jack Howe, Corin Faife
In a small, silver car hurtling down the motorway towards Minehead, an excited group of travellers are discussing the origins of BLOC.
Still a young whippersnapper on the festival scene at 4 years old, the official story is that the first BLOC party was in a Pontin’s resort in Hemsby – but veterans of the Norfolk rave scene (of which two make up our passenger load) will tell you that it started with a series of distinctly unconventional parties in the East Anglian countryside, not least of which a memorable 5-floor rave in a National Trust listed windmill. It was these early parties that brought together the core of the BLOC event promotion team and, growing from strength to strength, the BLOC festival burst onto the scene in 2007 and hasn’t looked back since.
Much the same could be said for your intrepid reviewers who, due to the constraints of a ‘real job’ were forced to depart after work finished, and so are arriving at BLOC at 11.30pm after the 5-hour drive from the Midlands. Laden with food and booze we screech into the car-park, having almost been run off the road by a homicidal taxi driver, doubtless pushed over the brink by hours of inane chit-chat spouted by the hordes of ‘city folk’ he’s been ferrying from the train station. Inside the Butlins compound there’s a feel of the carnival-esque in the air, where girl gangs with hotpants and party hats skip provocatively along the winding avenues, jostling with fluoro-jacketed, tight-jeaned scene kids or sports-branded lads, streaming into the wide central thoroughfare past trees decked with garland lights.
At this hour there’s no time to be wasted, so we make a beeline for our chalet, dump the bags, knock back a quick sharpener and then it’s off to see Roots Manuva. Cutting a dashing figure in a tailored black suit and shades, the 37 year-old Rodney Smith is intent on taking his music back to its roots, infusing the songs with heavy dub and bashment flavours despite the increasingly electronic angle of his new material. We’re given a complete retrospective of his work, from the early lo-fi depth of ‘Movements’ through favourites like the ever poignant ‘Dreamy Days’ (“Now who in this crowd has never had a broken heart?”)to the uplifting synths of ‘Let the Spirit’, and, credit where it’s due, the sound engineers do a great job of balancing the bass and percussive punch from a HUGE soundsystem with the need to keep Roots’ vocals crisp and intelligible throughout.
Tight timing between acts doesn’t leave much room for an encore, but the on stage banter still squeezes as much as possible out of the lead-in to a sharp-edged version of ‘Witness’ which puts smiles on faces and gun fingers in the air. All in all, the first act we’ve seen will be a tough one to follow.
Speaking of acts taking it back to their roots, Ms Dynamite gives us a performance every bit as explosive as her name suggests, spitting the ragga-garage hybrid with which she made her name on the underground. For a such modestly-sized lass, her stage presence is enormous, a fact brought home all the more when her set finishes and she’s replaced by a team of five lycra-bodysuited dancers, not one of whom commands a fraction of the same attention from the crowd. Dynamite manages to channel a huge physical energy without the aggression so commonplace in the grime scene, and by the end of her set seems as happy to have performed as the crowd was to watch her; I’m left feeling like a fool in the photography pit, because everyone else was ‘being professional’ whilst I’ve been bobbing my head like the Churchill dog on crack.
Having been blown away by Ms Dynamite earlier in the evening, Boy Better Know crew’s 2am performance leaves us underwhelmed. Though the poster promised a full line-up, only Skepta, Shorty and Frisco actually make it to the stage, and disappointingly JME is nowhere to be seen. As soon as the first bars drop, the previously respected smoking ban goes out the window and the smell of skunk fills the air, putting a middle-finger to the twee holiday camp aesthetic.
A freestyle session in the middle of the set delivers some impressive improvisation as the 3 MCs spark off one another, but in the second half they lose steam, spitting verses over dubstep classics rather than their own material. The performance is frankly uninspired, and considering that BBK represent some of the biggest MCs in the grime scene, the same set could have been delivered by any one of numerous and far less prestigious crews. Maybe the crowd senses this or maybe there’s another big-name act on, but either way by the end of the set the crowd is clearly thinning out.
By the time we see Ellen Allien we’re, shall we say, a little too ‘high spirited’ to take an objective view (or any coherent notes), but suffice to say she and Adam Beyer keep us dancing till the early hours with what we can only describe as very, very, very good techno.
Click here for an exclusive mix for Rockfeedback of artists who played at BLOC 2010
Words: Corin Faife and Jack Howe
Artists in this article: Roots Manuva, Ellen Alien , Adam Beyer , Ms Dynamite, Boy Better Know
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