Carl Cox now regards Melbourne as a home from home – not that he really has a home as such as he belongs to the international DJ elite and flies from country to country preaching the gospel of up for it, fun dance music. The man couldn’t even stay in the same country for one night on Millennium eve, playing both Sydney and Hawaii. However, come January and February Mr Cox retreats to his Mt Eliza home (NOT Frankston so I am told), tours around Australia and takes a deep breath, one suspects, in preparation for another mental Northern summer with Miami and Ibiza in store. This is great for us in Melbourne as it means we get to see the big man at least once a year, which bar Ibiza is probably the same frequency with which he plays any other world city, such is his global reach and schedule.

After last year’s gig at Room, Hardware obviously decided to up the ante and moved the Cox experience to the Metro. I believe that the Metro is the best venue in Melbourne – it’s multi leveled which always increases atmosphere, it has a kick ass sound system and it has some cool side rooms as well. I arrived at the venue at 1am to find no queue at all which was excellent. The reason for this was that everyone had arrived early and when I walked in the place was rammed already. I love busy clubs – maybe it’s the Londoner in me but I find the busier the club, the better the atmosphere. Sure it can get a little uncomfortable at times but give me busyness over emptiness any day of the week.

Cox’s fellow ex-pat mate Eric Powell was on the decks and playing quite a fierce selection of funky techno – I have no idea of any of the tunes he was playing I must admit (not being a techno nerd) but he seemed to have the dancefloor rocking nicely in anticipation of the arrival of the headline act.I had a wander round the venue at this point and all rooms seemed to be nicely filling out, I was surprised that there was hardstyle in one of the rooms – I couldn’t see how this fitted into to the overall experience personally? Things got far worse in there later on when they started playing thrash metal/hard rock – don’t know about you but I never want to hear the likes of Rage Against the Machine played in a dance club??!?! Mind you, it was in a side room so didn’t really effect my night, just a shame you had to suffer it whilst maneuvering from the top balcony of the main room down to the main dancefloor.

Cox stared at 2:30am and kicked off his set with my tune of last year, Pryda’s ‘Aftermath’ – what a way to start! Cox is known primarily as a techno DJ but I believe that’s far too narrow a description of him. I would simply call him a ‘dance music’ DJ as he manages to weave every genre under the sun into his sets – I heard house, tech-house, techno, trance, electro, prog and even drum and bass. Multi genre sets are very hard to pull off as the results can often be messy and disjointed but the genius of Cox is that he makes the whole thing sound like a set rather than just 30 random tunes thrown together.

Highlights of the mammoth set included Sander Van Doorn’s ‘SOS’, ‘Good Life’, ‘Pontape V Born Slippy’ and ‘Alloy Mental’. The other wonderful thing about Cox, bar the fabulous music he plays, is his pure unadulterated passion for dance music and club culture. The mere thought of a DJ doing continual shout outs on the mike is well, unbearably cheesy, but when Carl Cox does it it just works. You can’t help but get swept away in the hedonism, passion and fun of the moment. Cox isn’t a techno purist and thank the lord for that, he recognises that clubbing is about having the time of your life with friends and with fantastic music and he plugs into that feeling so very well.

His set this year was far more banging than that at Room last year which was probably due to the younger, more house orientated crowd at the Hawthorn club. Playing in front of a savvy twenty something crowd at Metro Cox let loose with a ferocious set. Considering this man has been doing this for 18 years (at least!) its amazing to see him still smack it as much as ever!!

Come 5:30am and my legs gave way under the pressure of dancing 3 hours non- stop right in the ‘mosh pit’ of the club so it was time to leave. Cox had now decided to inject some drum and bass into his set which left a few people slightly bemused but by the time we were near the doors the techno beats had started up again.Well done to Hardware for an excellent night at metro. Mind you, it could hardly go wrong – a top crowd, a world class DJ and Melbourne’s best venue. I look forward to seeing PVD perform his magic there on April 1st.