- Line-up: Tiesto, Andy Hunter, Dan Efex
Venue: Spundae at Vision - Chicago, USA
Date: Saturday, October 26th, 2002
Mistress Barbara may use the term frequently, but Spundae redefined relentless last Saturday with a full house at Vision in Chicago. While the three-room seven-story beheamoth of a club is supposed to fit some two thousand people within its walls, the crew counted it closer to three thousand. And I would normally not believe in those numbers, except for the fact that I was literally pinned physically behind the DJ booth for the first fifteen minutes of Tiesto's set, freeing myself only by almost starting a riot with the crowd around me.
First things first. We came in to the event at 10pm with local hero Dan Efex on the decks. I noted that the tempo was fairly crazed to begin with, and the night still had some eight hours to go (thanks to the local daylight savings time). Dan laid down some heavy beats with a Goa feel to them, stirring the pot for the nights activities. By the time that Andy Hunter went on at Midnight, the venue was filled to capacity, or so it seemed. Andy brought back the maddening level down a bit, but still hit the crowd with fairly hard acid trance tracks. Very reminiscent of his new album on Nettwerk Records.
On to Tiesto. While some of us knew that this was going to be a great night, none of us, not even the Spundae crew, was prepared for what was about to insue. The first sign is when I was pinned behind the booth. I hadn't heard screaming like that since Menudo came to our local mall. The last time Tiesto played in town, he played RedNoFive, which only holds some 500 people. You could see the excitement on his face as he started his set, jumping up and down like a happy little schoolboy. The next sign was exploring the rest of the club halfway through his set, and every inch had people in it, taking me almost 1/2 and hour to traverse the whole club. The side room, which was supposed to be for mellowing out, had a wall of TV's in it with live broadcast of Tiesto in the booth, with the set broadcasting all over the lounge. People weren't sitting on the couches and chairs, they were dancing on them! And up at the DJ booth, there were half a dozen people climing the outside of the booth screaming at him.The next level was raised while watching Tiesto from the 4th floor of the main room, he dropped his anthem "Suburban Train". I heard the screams come from the crowd, and said to myself "Oh my god...", realizing that I couldn't even hear what I was saying! For three hours, non stop hard trance. No one left the dancefloor and no one left the room. And I mean no one. At the end of his set you heard "TIESTO, TIESTO, TIESTO...", and he dropped another track. Then a second time "TIESTO, TIESTO, TIESTO...", and he dropped one last track. Dan Efex finished out the night with a much mellower set to bring the crowd down. It was a nice way to finish the end of the night.
It was at the after hours that lots of discussion started up. First off, lots of people had never seen not just one, but two encores for a DJ. And we talked about the women, how they were throwing themselves at him around the DJ booth and after his set. The number of people that showed up was astounding as well. Put simply, people told me it was better than the Oakenfold show in the same space earlier that summer, and they thought THAT was crazy. Tiesto packs the house more than Oakie. What a night. A lot of veteran clubbers said they had never seen anything like it in their lives. Just pure madness.