Dedbeat 2 - Friday Review

Dedbeat 2 2002

Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th February 2002
Vauxhall Holiday Park, Caister, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England MAP
day tickets only left @ £55 - call 0870 1611 626

FRIDAY REVIEW
Saturday review
Sunday review

Dedbeat? That was exactly how we felt after 3 days of indoor festival hip hop machine funk mayhem.

We arrived at Vauxhall holiday camp around five on Friday, to find a faintly tacky 70's style Hi-di-hi setup. Checking into our "chalet" (an uninsulated portacabin/caravan which slept 6), we just avoided the rush before the majority of other Dedbeaters.

We settled in, cooked ourselves some dinner, and wandered off to the music around 9. There were 3 rooms, the "Beat Ranks" (hip hop & funk), "Pulse Ranks" (electro & beats) and the "Slump Ranks" (all sorts). The Beat ranks room was by far the largest, a cavernous low-ceilinged ballroom with record and clothes stalls on one side, a giant bar on another and loads of slumped Dedheads on the other.

The weekend's host DJ Prone kicked off with signature uptempo hip-hop before making way for rising Brighton star and phathead Quantic's funk selection. He niced up the crowd for Keb Darge's band The New Master Sounds, a nine piece live act fronted by two singers who could have stepped right out of the JB's. Their hard funk was perfect for the many breakers spread around the room, throwing down without letting the potential for carpet burns stop them.

Wandering over to check out the much smaller Pulse Ranks room, we caught the beginning of the Haywire Sessions with Silicon Scally playing a (lap)top set of melodic electro breakbeat. The Pulse Ranks was generally much busier than the other rooms and got a lot sweatier, and consequently smellier, than the other rooms. Bass Junkie then followed with a fairly minimal electro set, so we got some of the very reasonably priced drinks in and headed back to the main room to catch the experimental Munich funk of the Poets of Rhythm. Their Teutonic lineup included a suited and bearded flugelhorn player and despite looking like they'd got lost on the way back from the bierkeller, they played some wicked space soul and it was easy to see why DJ Shadow was so keen to sign them up to his Quannum label.

By this stage (1am), the crowd was ready to really get down and so the Heavies, minus modern beatbox genius Kela, stepped up. Consisting of hip hop scratch DJ Plus One, rapper Rodney P and the Jungle Drummer (who did exactly that) they played a blinding jungle set, rinsin' classic drum n bass tracks with complex live drum patterns, slow paced rhyming and conventional MCing. The music was out of the top drawer and had the whole crowd, ourselves included, going bananas. 4 Hero obviously had a hard act to follow, but chose to play a pretty ruff set, keeping the punters happy and dancing.

Meanwhile, the Pulse Ranks room was rocking to the clanging electro beats of the Dexorcist, before the two lone swordsmen Radioactive Man and then Andrew Weatherall took over. Radioactive Man played a live set, keeping the Detroit funk robots happy with some electro stormers from his recent LP. Weatherall rounded off the night with some bass-heavy electro and techno. Retreating to our luxury chalet, we discovered we'd made a massive mistake - turning the heater off while we'd been out had left the caravan practically Baltic, and we were forced to sleep fully clothed. Nonetheless, it had been a brilliant start to the first festival of 2002.

review by: Ill Will

photos by: Ill Will