Crasher Unplugged at the NEC 29/11/03
Review by Neil Doody
Gallery available here

First stop Birmingham New Street to meet friends before setting onto the not so unfamiliar destination of Crasher NEC. I’ve been lucky enough to attend all Gatecrasher events at the NEC and for this I left my house with somewhat of a smile, secretly knowing that tonight was set to be a good night.

Shortly after arrival, once crossing the last fence preventing my full view of the venue, the secret smile quickly turned into an astonished frown after seeing the size of the forever lasting quadruple S shaped queue. Being my first ever night out to a club as a member of the press, I took my “normal looking” ticket and joined the large queue.

Soon after joining I had a brainwave, if my memory served me correctly, I distinctly remember there being another entrance into the venue just around the corner. I took my friends along with me and thankfully the queue was definitely shorter. Not long after queuing up I had a call from one of our site admin’s telling me I needed to collect my press pass from the box office to allow safe entry for me and my trusty camera.

I trundled round to the box office to meet Rick who’d been queuing for some time. It was explained to us we would pick up our wrist band at the VIP and PRESS CREW door. This by the way was through a rather large, angry mob of anxious clubbers trying to get in via the normal entrance.

After much confusion regarding not being on the list we made it past the press door only to be greeted by a rather short queue. I’ve never in my life seen anything like it, a queue that in normal circumstances would have you in within 5 minutes took half an hour thanks to the over zealous inspections taking 5 minutes per person! Finally we were in, a quick drink in the VIP lounge and we set off down stairs for the evening’s entertainment.

Downstairs we went, “Ah, just as I remember it” I thought to myself, great memories of past times in my favourite bi-yearly event suddenly came crashing back. We strutted onto the main arena to meet our friends who were waiting for us centre seat position.

Shortly after taking up the surroundings I wondered off to the entrance to meet the friends I’d left earlier in the queue. By this time security were just letting people in without patting them down so as you can imagine the wave of people flooding in was intense! I met with my friends and we headed off back to the main arena where we were met with a short queue to enter. 10 minutes later I was back in the Crasher arena with all my friends around me. I took up my seat, put up my feet and sat back to relax; now I could enjoy the show!

First impressions of gatecrasher’s efforts on décor, not bad at all! It was nice to see the large round screen return, on top we had a good assortment of lasers and sufficient coloured lighting dotted around the arena. My favourite décor were the Crasher disco balls that seemed to go from large to small in a strip down the left and right hand sides of the arena. Later on in the night, these balls were lit by a rather nice shade of blue and pink, which stood out really well. The sound system was great, well up the usual standard Crasher performance.

By now I was a little more relaxed and enjoying Scott Bond’s set whilst perched on my chair doing the classic head bobbing and foot tapping. Scott played on a more uplifting “harder” tip, and as we all know, harder is my personal preference!

After Scott came Paul Van Dyk, a popular Dj among the masses whom can usually do no wrong. By this time you could see the whole place was on fire, masses of people loving the night, starry eyes everywhere, this brought on a great warm feeling of self satisfaction, any disappointments how now pretty much disappeared and I was buzzin!

Paul was definitely made to feel welcome to the venue with people screaming his name from the top of there lungs and cheering as he opened his set. The live performance with Vega 4 did it for me, very euphoric, very uplifting and most importantly different, gave me tingles down my back it did!

PVD’s set I thought it was of the usual high standard one expects from the 2nd best Dj in the world. Each tune was blended well enough to keep my legs and arm doing the chair dance, by the time the already classic “Holding onto Nothing” by Agnelli and Nelson came on I was practically having a fit in the chair! Nice one Paul!

Next up was the worlds number numero uno Dj, the one and only Tiesto. Big track for me was the track off Donnie Darko, “Mad World” by Michael Andrews. Unfortunately the euphoric state created by this tune quickly fizzled out as we moved into some quite deep stuff, the sort of thing that just doesn’t seem like natural progression. Thankfully this bleak period was quickly resurrected by his own tune “Traffic.” I could tell from this point that Tiesto was gonna play a roller coaster ride of a set for us.

Tiesto’s set continued reasonably well for me, dropping a belter remix of radiohead and then relooped, making a proper mark of the night! Last mention of Tiesto’s set, “Clockx – Overdrive”, oh my god, wet my pants material!!

Our next contestant for the night came in the shape of Armin van Buuren, currently ranked number 3 in the world. Armin opened with Sarah Mclachlan – Fallen (Gabriel and Dresden remix), a nice tune and nice warm beginning to a set. I can’t really remember much else of his set to be honest, it wasn’t the high light of the night due to the lack of “hardness” yet even the fluffy aspects kept me chair dancing throughout.

At this point we decided to go on our travels into the Hard House arena hosted by Frantic and Nukleuz. When we got there the atmosphere was electric with some hard tunes being thrashed around the NEC. BK and Andy Farley were banging them out back to back in such a way it seemed they were constantly pitching the decks up to near hardcore speed. Result!

Hardcore is a personal favourite of mine and I was in my element, however the company I keep aren’t known to show quite such a key interest as myself. I continued to take what was coming at me, didn’t know what it was but I was loving it, thank you BK and Andy!

After seeing the dismay on my friends faces for so long I decided to ask “Do you want to go?” They were more than happy to leave, so we made our way back to the main arena making sure to take loads of pictures on the way, some tasty women had made the effort to look nice and were more than happy to pose for me.

That brings me onto something I was thinking that night, it was definitely a matter of “spot the crasher kid.” I couldn’t see many people dressed up, there wasn’t much to take photo’s of, I didn’t see none of the usual people on stilts walking around this time, wonder what went on there?

Back in the main arena, Ferry Corsten was playing his set; unfortunately we’d missed over half of it. In the short duration we listened for, Ferry dropped some fire lighting tracks, including the likes of Motorcycle which went down well and had much crowd interaction.

This pretty much drew the night to and end for me as the time was getting on for about 5:45. I had taken a nice collection of photos and thoroughly enjoyed the night so we rounding up all our friends to make our way for the car to try and beat a bit of the traffic. We said goodbye to the NEC and I left with a smile on my face, that same secret smile id gone with returned knowing that come the next Crasher at the NEC, I’d be there.