There is something about arriving at a club when it’s still daylight outside that just feels wrong; nevertheless we arrived at Metros at around 8.30pm. At such an early hour there were maybe 10 people in the room. The Signal Drivers were already playing. Some technical issues meant they only played for a short time but the guys still delivered an energetic opening set.

The main reason for getting to the club so early was because The Autobots were playing at 9pm and we didn’t want to miss that set. By the time they came on the crowd numbers had at least doubled but that’s still a small crowd for an international DJ. I got a bit excited when I heard the familiar ‘autobots transform and rollout’ intro and for the next hour and a half I was glued to the dance floor. It was a bit of a toss-up as to who was enjoying themselves more, the audience or Tom up behind the decks because everyone was bopping around with big smiles on their faces. A highlight from his set for me was a remix of The Freestylers’ Painkiller.

My one complaint for the early part of the evening is that it seemed like Metros hadn’t bothered to switch the air conditioning on. For such a small crowd, it was really hot inside the venue. If this was a ploy to get people to buy drinks then it was certainly working and I had to be reminded to slow down because I was the designated driver for the evening. Deekline & Wizard were on at 10.30 and this was right about the time I started to get distracted by phone calls from friends trying to beat the midnight network jam. I had expected their set to be chock full of their own songs and it wasn’t really, so I was a bit surprised. I definitely hadn’t expected to hear a remix of Peter Bjorn and John’s Young Folks. Nevertheless, it was great party set. The dance floor was getting more and more crowded and it seemed like everyone was having a good time.

I’m not really sure what happened around midnight. I guess I had expected Deekline & Wizard to do the countdown and handover to D-Bridge, who was due to come on at midnight. But D-Bridge came on, started playing and then my phone started going ballistic with “Happy New Year” text messages. It almost seemed an afterthought that they stopped the music, had a countdown and then promptly started the music back up again. I know the first rewind came shortly after midnight.

I hung around downstairs for a bit doing the rounds of hugging friends and all that New Year’s guff. I was enjoying listening to D-Bridge but my friends who are not really into drum and bass wanted to go to the upstairs bar and check out the rest of the breaks acts. This is where things got a little frustrating. We couldn’t find the upstairs bar. Oh sure, plenty of stairs all leading up and everything up there was closed and locked. We spent the next hour trying to work out what was going on before we found out that you had to go back out into the foyer to go upstairs.

By the time we did get upstairs we had kind of lost our enthusiasm for the evening. There was a small crowd of about 15 people up there dancing to who I think was Craig B, because I heard that Shimon had decided not to play that night. There were rumours going around the room that there weren’t enough people in the bar and the breaks room was going to be closed down. Most of the friends I was there with were leaving to go to a party and I decided that I was tired and went home at about 1.45am.

All in all I had a fun time, but it was almost like there were too many good acts crammed into the evening. I would have preferred to have started later and had all the breaks acts on in a separate room, but I guess there was a lot of competing events on that night and there might not have been the crowd numbers to run the gig in that manner. I think the internationals would really have torn the place up given a later time slot but I definitely had no complaints about the quality of the music on offer.