What's up?

[Elzerk]

Crack crack crack nigguh.

[ApeCat]

Yeah, let's all get together and feel alright!

Who's Jimmy?

[ApeCat]

Still got two tickets to Shogun thing in Bournemouth if anyone's interested, free of charge and whatnot.

[logikz]

so youre not going? what happened?

[ApeCat]

Holy Fucking Shit!! - or - Heaven and Hell: a journey through drum and bass culture.

You guys. You have no idea how lucky you are. Apart from any of you who happen to have to bar your doors and windows at night because you happen to live in a cesspit goes by the name of Northampton. What a complete and utter fucking shithole that place is!! Like, you see the lineup on the flyer and it's all Sigma, Mampi Swift and a million other names on there and this guy your brother used to know says he's going and he went last year and it was amazing man but more on that later.

LDN.

London was wicked. Bare walking around all day looking at this incredibly bombastic architecture that just never seems to end, getting drunk underneath this bridge and then heading off to the pub meet a few local twonkers smoke a few spliffs in the beergarten it's all good. Off to Hidden depths of Hospital in the evening, saw this one DJ who was good, played a lot of classics and some stuff I didn't know. Check out the upstairs area for a while, boring derpstep and people looking like they'd rather be somewhere else really, go back downstairs to see Fred V and Graphics they play more stuff i know and some that I don't and there's been quite a bit to drink in the meanwhile so things are going a bit crazy, shirts are coming off and all.

Then it happened. That thing that I'd been getting the most excited about in advance. The heavy heavy sounds of the mighty Photek, like a digital samurai transformer from future Hiroshima beating up drums I'll never be able to pronounce the names of, putting on his ugliest most menacing warface speaking in tongues, shitting out balls of fire. The place just went off. This big bloke kept whipping me in the face with his ratty dreadlocks but I was all "I grew up on spiky leather vest anarcho hardcore krust punk, mate, I'll be damned if I can't cope with this shit!" and danced my tits right off. So that was pretty intense..

The thing is though.. High Contrast might have been even better.. I mean, I enjoy me a bit of dark and dangerous stuff with the beats that make you concentrate taking you somewhere deep down inside yourself for a bit, but yeah, High Contrast actually did manage to top it all. Can't remember who was MC'ing, but whoever he was he knew when to keep his fucking mouth shut and his mike was never louder than the music so it's all good.

Then we went to Plastic People to see Icicle who is a total bro and a total badman and I even enjoyed his techno things which he was playing in the start but he went on way too late and I didn't enjoy the house stuff they started off with very much so I got a little drunk and he didn't play long enough but I guess it was only a Thursday so it wasn't too bad was it. The Korean girl we dragged along from the hostel seemed to be having an alright time as well, but Koreans seem more interested in like doing the "right thing" instead of doing their own thing and she didn't drink very much and looked pretty lost most the night. She was also serially horny and didn't know which of the Amazing Norwenglish Brothers to give her female attention to so she split it up fifty fifty and ended up sleeping alone in the end. I would have plonked her, easily, but - you know - I've got a bird back home and am saving up my sexual energy so that when I finally get back to Oslo I'll smash her bed right through the bedroom wall and into the back yard. Safe.

Fabric. Fuck you guys! Seriously fuck you guys! Best nightclub I ever been to, I'll tell you that much. Dj's were great in two out of three rooms, room three was all dubstep and wamp wamp hardcore things that I just couldn't get into. But rooms one and two were simply amazing!! Utah Jazz! Bukem!! Hype!!! It just went off and kept getting better and better throughout the night. The sound system was fucking ace, crisp clear sounds made even the jump up stuff sound fucking sweet, man! MC's were kind of chatty but at least they were doing obviously improvised bits and hyping off the crowd and stuff so it was all good fun. Lights were good so the pillheads were proper entertaining to watch, lots of smiles and "You alright, mate?" all over the place. I'll probably remember Friday night for the rest of my life, you know what I mean?

I don't really wanna go "ho!"...

And then!! Finally!! We get on the train from Euston London [we made so many "Euston, we've got a problem!" jokes, you have no idea] to Northampton for our fourth straight day of partying hard, meet up with the fellers, they're all "You want drink? Need skunk? Want me to change the music?" and were doing this half hearted badman routine made me think these weren't exactly the coolest kids in class. Once they got proper pissed, which didn't take very long TBH, from in-car pre-drinks b2b shit MC'ing they lost it completely and just walked around like zombies thinking they were hard. We get into the place and it's like a school dance or something, there's all these kids... Get t the outdoors stage the place is reeking with skunk and a few people are quite obviously off their heads and there's these things look like the gas canisters for air guns all over the floor.. Jenna G is on singing and wearing little clothes and I'm thinking it's not that bad really, but as the night progresses and Skibba Live comes up the crowd turns from school kids having a good night out dropping pills and things that I will never understand to roidheads with tribal tattoos fighting over lost and found 20£ bags of Mandy that they're eating right off the floor. We watch Hazard, I actually manage to have a good time doing it, and then everyone has to go inside. At the same time. There's pushing and shoving and fighting and eventually - and seemingly magically - we're inside and here's jump up but the Dj's alright and we do a bit of dancing and things.

But after a few hours I'm simply not having fun anymore. And I'm catching myself trying really really hard which I normally won't have to, I'm a pretty easy going guy, see. But everything around me just seems so fucking depressing. You've got the underage girls in the whorish outfits trying to get at least some kind of positive attention from the neanderthals that make up most of Northampton's male population. There's the guy passed out on the floor with cheerfully coloured balloons hanging out of his mouth. There's the terrible PA with every knob, fader and dial turned to eleven and the Dj's in three rooms all dropping the same tunes over and over again, I barely recognize some of them from the main room at Fabric but it's like a completely different thing altogether. It's full on in your face no time to rest no buildups no changeups no intelligence no soul womp womp MC's are going "Noz noz noz! Noz noz noz! Roids roids roids! I don't give a fuck!!" and the guys we went there with are actually - as I've suspected all along - total tossers and keep contradicting themselves every three seconds and are impossible to have half a sensible conversation with even when they're sober but still they just keep on talking just to talk at all and probably because noone will ever listen to them usually and I can't even find the fuckers when all I want is to get to the one with the car keys so I can get to the car and try to forget where I am and sleep for a few hours and then get on the train and see my cousins and things.

My brother tells me he's found them, then we lose them.. Then I sit down next to a speaker thing for about an hour have a few walks around the place, spot the guy with the car keys again, grab him, coerce the keys from him, chat shit with the bouncers for a bit because despite their ugly appearance and bad manners they're the most sensible people in there.. Walk to the car, there's a guy staggering down the road shirt covered in blood from a really gnarly cut across his face, get in turn on the stereo, listen to some Plhaleh whatever mellow dubstep stuff, keep finding one and one ingredient that we need for the spliff [oh shit, they took all the skunk inside with them!! no wait, there it is, haha! oh no! we're out of skins!! no wait, there's a pack here, haha! oh shit, there's no lighter!! no wait, there's one with about two seconds of gas left in the back seat, haha!] smoke the skinny bitch up lean the seats back and try to catch a few hours of sleep but it turns into more like minutes really.

I've hit a wall, I realize I panicked a bit in the rec center or whatever that place was. I realize these people are kids grown up in a place that's closing down leaving them with no options for escape but to hammer their depressed and probably a little paranoid brains into submission with high powered drugs and mind numbing twelve hour sessions of "listening" to "music". I can't shake off the fear or the loathing, I think every little noise is a car jacker or a serial rapist or the boogie man come to get me.

All in all, I'm happy I had the experience, I think I've gotten a pretty broad look into different niches of bass culture and I've gone a bit primitive in the country my Mum grew up in where my family's from and everything which was a new and sort of big thing for me.

But fuck me, I am never ever going back to Northampton again, ever, though you might just catch me at Fabric some time in the foreseeable future!!

[Harry3]

I get that fabric feeling every time I go, everyone has to experience it

[EWOKS]

ape, you mentioned expensive train costs.. try www.megabus.com for cheap train, and thetrainline.com ... if you catch it right you'll be abel to travel cheap , i wouldnt rule out national express coaches either .. always the chance of getting a blowjob off an old granny aswell then?

[EWOKS]

shit .. youve been and gone .. just see ure post there ^^

[ApeCat]

I'm holed up in errr.. this small place on the countryside down south, not far from Brockenhurst like.. So I might try to book train tickets back to LDN yet!

But fuck me, fellers.. I think Northampton has left me sort of emotionally scarred or something. The worst of England I've ever seen was Lymington. Are there a lot of place - and people - like that about? Like proper proper trash?

[armed]

I'm holed up in errr.. this small place on the countryside down south, not far from Brockenhurst like.. So I might try to book train tickets back to LDN yet!

But fuck me, fellers.. I think Northampton has left me sort of emotionally scarred or something. The worst of England I've ever seen was Lymington. Are there a lot of place - and people - like that about? Like proper proper trash?

yes.

[EWOKS]

I'm holed up in errr.. this small place on the countryside down south, not far from Brockenhurst like.. So I might try to book train tickets back to LDN yet!

But fuck me, fellers.. I think Northampton has left me sort of emotionally scarred or something. The worst of England I've ever seen was Lymington. Are there a lot of place - and people - like that about? Like proper proper trash?

yes, i was at lymington today.. and there was alot of ' trash ' welcome, to the uk .. brockenhurst is alrite for mooching around tho ..

[dirty breaks]

But fuck me, fellers.. I think Northampton has left me sort of emotionally scarred or something. The worst of England I've ever seen was Lymington. Are there a lot of place - and people - like that about? Like proper proper trash?

not everyone that went would've been from northampton mate.

[ApeCat]

The people in Lymington are alright, init? They're all just very very old..

Checking the Random Concept facebook comments, people are all "Thanks for last night, what an amazing event, very emotional blah blah!" and I'm thinking we must've been to completely different events.. And the blokes we went with were all "You having a good time, yeah?!" and we're all "Well.. It's alright I guess.." "Is it better than Fabric, bruv?!" and I'm all "Weeeeell.. It takes a lot to compete with Fabric, mate..." "and they're all "Just you wait, man, just you wait!!" but they'd never actually been to Fabric so I don't know what they expect it to be like.. It was nothing like Random Concept, I'll let you know!

[PhorceOfHabit]

Hahahahaha. Incredible to see a foreigners perspective on a Northampton jump up rave. Exactly what I've always known but never really noticed just because it's not such a culture clash.

The people in Lymington are alright, init? They're all just very very old..

Checking the Random Concept facebook comments, people are all "Thanks for last night, what an amazing event, very emotional blah blah!" and I'm thinking we must've been to completely different events.. And the blokes we went with were all "You having a good time, yeah?!" and we're all "Well.. It's alright I guess.." "Is it better than Fabric, bruv?!" and I'm all "Weeeeell.. It takes a lot to compete with Fabric, mate..." "and they're all "Just you wait, man, just you wait!!" but they'd never actually been to Fabric so I don't know what they expect it to be like.. It was nothing like Random Concept, I'll let you know!

Nothing worse than people seeking assurance on a night/film/music or whatever it may be when you just wanna get on with it and enjoy what's there. Especially when it's shit and you're trying to just make the most of a bad situation, but by constantly having to answer that question you're constantly reminding yourself it's shit.

[ONSLAUGHT88]

It's basically Jeremy Kyle b2b with jump up. And yes I'd say there are a LOT of people like that here.