After an initial, wonderful moment of realization: ‘We don’t have work tomorrow! Can we get drunk?’, there comes a strong sense that the usual soggy roast and brain-squeezing pub quiz should be sacked off in favour of something a bit more, shall we say, special? And what could be more so than Dagger’s Bank Holiday Hot Wuk – a jubilant, innovative and vibrant showcase of the biggest bashment tracks out there.
The Heatwave DJs roll up and down the country, taking their compilations and mixes to various venues, demonstrating in their own words ‘how dancehall is the root of jungle, garage, grime, dubstep and funky’. This month it was LIFE’s turn to play host to hundreds of young, beautiful partygoers eager to fill their cups with things they shouldn’t and get as low as possible to the floor of the King’s Road Arches. And this venue is exactly what it needed to be: large enough to squeeze in the line of impatient teenagers, but intimate enough to reduce the possibility of spending a significant portion of the night looking for the people you’d lost when you went for a cigarette. The king of garage, Richard ‘Sticky’ Forbes, remained in the DJ booth and dominated the playlist with what seemed to be Sean Paul’s back catalogue. I’m not sure if this is what we were expecting, but it did the job nicely.
It seems that these one off club nights hold an energy that the weekly ones just cannot muster. Perhaps it’s the anticipation or novelty, or just that the bank holiday had instilled a recklessness in its crowd that just isn’t there in the week. Either way, look out for the next Hot Wuk, and make sure you don a gold chain, slip in an hour or two of thigh stretching and stumble down to an evening of Sean Paul, vodka and magnificent, inappropriate dancing.
Molly Taylor
