Chemical Brothers / DJ Numark
Chemical Brothers @ the Apollo / DJ Numark @ the Roadhouse
Manchester, 28th May 2005
A surprisingly clement bank holiday weekend beckoned in arguably the best night out of the year. The Chemical Brothers were one of the few remaining acts that I’ve followed over the years that I had never seen live, while the prospect of following that treat up with some badass cuts and breaks from DJ Numark was just too much to resist.
Oddly enough, the last act I’d seen at the Apollo was those other giants of the UK dance scene, Orbital, and I arrived at the venue fully hoping that the Chemical Brothers would replicate their excellent performance. I’m glad to say that I wasn’t to be disappointed.
The gig formed a part of the Carling Live 24 ‘festival’. Earlier in the day a number of other bands including the Doves had been performing at various venues around Manchester, and a rather optimistic compere took the stage to welcome the punters to their ‘14th hour’ of music.
Opening the night’s entertainment were The Infadels, an electro-punk/rock outfit featuring a bald man and a man in a trilby and a pink t-shirt. They certainly gave an energetic performance and in all fairness the early crowd reacted well to their charging around stage. While I admire their gusto I can’t say I found their music terribly inspiring or memorable. There were guitars, there were samples, there were bin lids used as drums, but I’m afraid it all washed over me with little impact. Perhaps just not my cup of tea!
And so to the main event. The Chemical Brothers took to the stage in a sea of indigo fog, white spot-lights and ambient music before kicking the evening off with one of their many party favourites, Hey Boy, Hey Girl. Flanked by screens bearing the name of their opening track the set began with a bang and the crowd reacted with predictable fervour. The main body of the gig was divided into two seamless unbroken sets, one of an hour and the second of 40 minutes, as the two ordinary looking blokes on stage, surrounded by mixers and keyboards and god knows what else, worked their way through their incredible back catalogue. Several tracks from their most recent album, Push the Button, were given an airing including Galvanize, Believe and Come Inside, while classic tracks like Out of Control and Block Rockin’ Beats whipped the crowd into a further frenzy.
Throughout the gig a gigantic cinema sized screen showed a series of mesmerising images from an exploding tea-pot, to variously coloured robots, a rather mad looking clown, and what appeared to be the worm-hole sequence from the opening credits of Dr Who, all mirrored on four smaller screens at stage level. Similarly every track was accompanied by an array of lighting trickery such as green lasers and all manner of strobes, making for a visual extravaganza. In the absence of any guest performers, many of the tracks, which in their recorded form feature signature vocals, were boiled down to a more minimal techno form - a cacophony of beats and samples and weird noises.
After an hour and forty minutes of arm-waving, pogo-ing and most of all sweating (on my part at least), the Chemical Brothers temporarily left the stage with the crowd still calling for more. And so they returned to finish with Hold Tight London (though cannily Hold Tight Manchester was displayed on the screens), and the absolutely awesome, and my view never equalled, Private Psychedelic Reel. An epic two hour performance ended in a hail of strobing with Tom wielding his mixer like an axe-guitar, apparently believing he is a god of rock. All in all a great gig, though if I had one criticism it is that they just didn’t make enough of Funkdub favourite Galvanize, which appeared early on and in an abridged form. Still, that they could do this with such confidence is a testament to the quality of the Chemical Brothers’ back-catalogue.
So how do you follow that? Well if you’re DJ Numark you follow it with a set of breaks, beats, funk and soul of staggering technique and dance-ability. As we arrived at the Roadhouse, the Jurassic 5 DJ was already in full flow and the club’s fairly bijou dancefloor was just about as crowded as it could be. For the next hour and a half we were treated a DJ-ing tour de force as Numark shifted through the gears cutting and mixing everything from Al Green to the Sugarhill Gang, Cypress Hill, James Brown and Maceo & the Macks (a favourite track of Funkdub!). After the intensity of the Chemical Brothers, the mellow vibes of Friends & Family at the Roadhouse and DJ Numark’s bag of tricks (and even bigger bag of records) was exactly what was required. Managing to find a niche at the back of the room we got down and boogied, joined periodically and as duty allowed by the suitably dreadlocked cloakroom attendant. Shortly before the end of his set Numark gave a nod to some homegrown talent and dropped Roots Manuva’s Witness, a move greatly appreciated by the gathered faithful, before finishing with his own Blendcrafters reworking of John Lennon’s Imagine. What this man can do with vinyl most DJs can only dream of – a true craftsman in full flow.