Gig Review - Cream Club Classics Night, Aylesbury Waterside Theatre

Aylesbury Waterside Theatre, 27th July 2013
K-Klass supported by Marc Fuccio

Anyone who has ever been to the Aylesbury Waterside when the seats have been moved out of the main theatre would be struck at how perfect it is for a club setting. With its high ceiling, large stage, and raised areas around the dancefloor, one can imagine a crowd of clubbers, arms aloft in a haze of lasers, euphorically dancing to a pounding dance track. So it was with some glee that I found out that the theatre had booked K-Klass to come and bring the legendary Cream Tour to Aylesbury.

K-Klass’ support was DJ Marc Fuccio, who is also an organiser of the Cream Tours. His set was diverse, spanning old school classics from Todd Terry’s staple, ‘Keep On Jumpin’’, Groove Armada’s ‘Superstylin’’ and iiO’s ‘Rapture’, through to Axwell’s ‘I Found You’, and right up to recent releases such as Martin Solveig’s ‘Rockin' Music’, Alex Clare’s ‘Too Close’ and, of course, Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’. Sadly the number of people in the theatre was low so he largely played to a sparse dancefloor. This was really unfortunate because his set was fantastic with great mixing and drops. After topping off the set with Avicii’s ‘Levels’, two members of K-Klass (Paul Roberts and Russell Morgan) sneaked onto the stage and picked up the mantel.

To a backdrop of hypnotic graphics and flawless lasers the duo took it in turns to ride the bass and treble filters, and to deliver a set full of some of the best known dance classics (Faithless’ ‘Insomnia’, Liquid’s ‘Sweet Harmony’, Da Hool’s ‘Meet Her At The Love Parade’, Tomcraft’s ‘Loneliness’, Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ to name a few), amid some more questionable choices (such as OneRepublic’s ‘Apologise’ and Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’). This resulted in some slightly frustrating moments where the pinnacle of the clubbers’ euphoria vanished down an imaginary plughole in the middle of the dancefloor, and the clubbers were left a bit exasperated (one complained to me as the ‘Fix You’ organ echoed around the dancefloor of baffled clubbers). But in the DJs’ defence, most DJs play off the atmosphere and euphoria from the clubbers, but because the numbers in the theatre never really increased beyond about 200 people, and those 200 people were lost amongst the vast space of the theatre, K-Klass’ job was that much harder and their set suffered for it. The best reaction was to Swedish House Mafia’s ‘Don’t You Worry Child’, which saw almost everyone in the venue with their arms in the air as it dropped.

Whilst Aylesbury Theatre’s first club night did not go as well as expected, I think this was probably down to the fact that the publicity for the event was very low key. I heard of the event completely by chance the day before it was happening, and speaking with some of the other clubbers it was a similar story with them. However they agreed that a club event such as Cream would have been huge if more people had been aware.

So with a bigger publicity drive to the surrounding area and across the county it would be surprising if a similar event (either another Cream tour, or another tour such as Godskitchen, UKF Bass Culture or Hospitality for example), was not sold out next time, particularly given the reasonable price of the tickets. I know that I, along with a lot of other clubbers, would be really pleased to see another club night at the theatre.

Were you at the Cream Classics Club Night? What did you think?

All photos have been kindly provided by Houndscape - for more information visit www.houndscape.co.uk. © 2013 Houndscape. All rights reserved.