Maurice Fulton @ The Civic Underground, Sydney (20/06/08)
You know those nights where you wake up the next morning and your feet and legs hurt more than your head? No? Never had a night like that? Well I did, last Friday at the Civic, and it was to Maurice Fulton, and the crew of supports assembled by the mighty fine folks at Niche Productions to whom I owed that condition. Every so often it is important to have a night that makes you remember that the function of dance music is that it is music for dancing, and dancing there was in abundance.
Everything was cued up nicely. Firstly, the venue. The Civic Underground is fast becoming one of my favourite Sydney venues, for the location, the layout, the sound, and the friendliness of the bar staff. It has the right combination of booths to sit in early in the night, and floor to dance on later in the night. It has pretty lights on the ceiling that you can stare at, and padded walls which you can bang your head against if the mood takes you (not that I would recommend banging your head against inanimate objects; look where that got Todd McKenney). And another new and exciting feature I discovered tonight is that if you pop out for some fresh air at about 1.30 a.m., you can see some shirtless wonder working out in the gym of the North building across the road. Which provided a great deal of amusement to those assembled at 1.30am.. But I digress.
Kicking things off for the evening were Messrs Harry Sounds and Mikey Miutante (if those are their real names), members of Paradise Lost disco wagon train. If there’s quality disco happening anywhere in Sydney then one or more of the Paradise Lost chaps are the Likely Crew, and so it was tonight. Playing back to back (with Mr Miutante carefully moderating Mr Sounds’ understandable enthusiasm to crank the sound up early) they played a superb opening set of dusty disco intertwined with some slithering soul. It was good to see the Sydney disco mafia rolling in early, and as the disco mafia can be recognised by the fact that when they make you an offer, it’s an offer you can’t refuse (to boogie to), boogie we did.
Somatik was next behind the decks (or behind the laptop and decks, in his case) and continued to build up the groove with an organic feel (organic is this sense meaning music free of unnatural additives, not music overly concerned with organs). Somatik was followed by Simon Caldwell, whose gigs I am going to have to stop reviewing until the fresh load of superlatives I ordered from eBay arrives in the mail. For my money, there is no better DJ in Sydney at the moment in terms of the quality of the tunes in his bag and his ability to deploy them to devastating dancefloor effect. Trying to train-spot was all but hopeless (although I did love hearing Chic’s “I want your love” on the Civic sound system) but my feet certainly knew what was happening. Did I mention that there was dancing? Simon built the dancefloor perfectly and suddenly we were in the hands of the headliner, Maurice Fulton.
Who also started with a Chic track (this time Gimme Your Love) but again, that’s where the train-spotting stops and the dancing begins. Over the first two hours (he played the best part of four, but though my ears wanted to stick it out, they were over-ruled) he played a diverse mix of disco, house, and odd stuff. The signature for the first part of the set was a distinctly percussive sound; pulling the drums and other percussion out of the tracks and presenting them to the ears directly, rather than as the background (and one track which he played seemed to be just a drum track). I’d read about Fulton’s reputation for being technically very good, and that reputation is certainly deserved, but it wasn’t the sort of set in which the technical issues were the most important. It was, as I might have mentioned a time or two now, the way it made you dance.
Unfortunately, on a Friday night it couldn’t keep me dancing until closing time, but that weakness was in my limbs rather than the music. Another superb event from Niche Productions, who once again showcase their ability to snare the quality internationals, and to present those internationals to their best advantage by surrounding them with local support of the highest quality.
