Andy Cato and Tom Findlay: together they’re known as Groove Armada, but last Saturday at the Chinese Laundry they were DJing under their own guises. And an energetic, sweaty and ‘up-for-it’ crowd was treated to several hours of aural pleasure from the masters of experimental/big-beat/electro/house – they’re just plain masters of music really. The Laundry crew, still not satisfied with this massive line-up, threw in another well-respected name in the house music community in the form of Funk D’Void, just for good measure. The scene was set and people poured through the doors early in the night to claim spaces on the dancefloor.

The warm-up DJs kept the crowd moving with some well-known tunes like Krafty Kuts’ Tricka Technology, Claude Von Stroke’s The Whistler and an unidentified remix of Cassius’ Feeling for You. As the crowd sipped their drinks and conversed, this was the perfect buildup to the sets to come. The shame was that Cato, Findlay and Funk D’Void were all scheduled to kick off at 1:00am, so the majority of one or more of these sets would be missed by many.

Findlay wasted no time in showing off his skills behind the decks, beginning with a deeper sound and progressing into some solid electro house with nice, crunchy basslines. Hunched over his mixer, on several occasions he could be seen furiously twisting knobs and producing some huge buildups that stopped those on the dancefloor in their tracks as they watched in amazement.

In the Laundry, Cato was banging out some techier-edged house reminiscent of the TB-303 sounds of yesteryear. The entire dancefloor seemed to pulsate as people gyrated in unison to the sounds emanating from the Laundry. Cato, beaming with a smile from ear to ear, was lapping up the attention and churned out mammoth track after mammoth track, the clear highlight gauged by crowd response was no doubt Groove Armada’s brand newbie Get Down.

The only real downside of the evening was the serious competition for space on the dancefloor, and my failure to see any of Funk D’Void for that very reason: although the combination of the rain outside, that day’s V-Festival, the quality line-up and the Laundry’s tendency to oversell such events needs to be taken into account. And after all, who really wants to go to a club where there’s no people, no raising of hands in the air when the song hits a peak, no sweaty bodies rubbing against each other, no thumbs up to that absolute stranger who you’ve just met on the dancefloor… Certainly not me. In fact, I want to do it all again!