- Walking into Battersea Power Station is quite a surreal experience. At first it's hard to register that you're actually there. Since it's due to be developed into residential and entertainment facilities, it feels like a rare treat to party in its raw, massive innards, with the crumbling brickwork, concrete and exposed structural ironwork around you. For last month's party with Solomun, it was completely gutted and open to the air, giving an astonishing view of chimneystacks that climbed 100 metres into the black sky.
The dance floor and bars themselves were inside a large plastic tent. This was very probably due to the risk of the building sustaining acoustic damage. All the same, it was a shame not to actually be raving underneath the stacks. The projection mapping, as well, didn't live up to its promise: it was a faint series of moving patterns, rather than an eye-popping morphing of the wall.
Solomun's set kicked off with some solid tech house, and once he'd grabbed our attention he went a bit smoother and deeper. But if his initial intent was to take things on a subtle course, he soon changed his mind, instead going through a medley of very immediate crowd-pleasers. No doubt this was to cater for a clientele who, with tickets starting at fifty pounds and going up, looked like they had been turned away from Pacha for just being too damn swish. Remixes of "Emerge" by Fischerspooner and "Lovesong" by The Cure, plus his own remix of "Around" by Noir & Haze, all got the reaction that he surely knew they would. But to his substantial credit, he balanced this out with the kind of tightly hewn and respectable grooves that kept the heads in tow as well.
There are all kinds of techno, bass and house that would have fit elegantly into Battersea Power Station, and to be honest this wasn't really it. Still, the simple experience of dancing inside such a monumental landmark was enough to trump pretty much anything.