It’s 12:30am and the crowd is getting impatient for Ricardo Villalobos. He was scheduled to start at midnight, but so far he’s only made a tantalisingly briefly appearance on stage during the arrival of his records crates. Luckily, rumours earlier in the night about his set time moving to 11pm due to the Metro needing to close early were unfounded. Gary Todd is still performing warm-up duties on the decks. Accompanying him on stage are promoter girls and guys for the upcoming Space Ibiza party, a strange choice given the panning of the onstage dancers at Sven Vath earlier in the year. The crowd, which swelled around midnight, at first got into Todd’s set, but their focus is now drifting away. They’re waiting for the arrival of the main act.

I’m impatient to hear what Villalobos will be like. Having never personally seen him DJ before (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is his first ever club show in Sydney), I’m curious about the diverse reactions that he provokes. Whilst some people worship Villalobos, with him having been ranked highly in the Resident Advisor Top DJ poll the last few years, others deride his sets as boring and requiring the copious consumption of drugs. Feedback from his set at the Stereosonic Festival in Sydney on the previous weekend was overwhelmingly favourable, and given his preference for longer sets, there are generally high expectations for tonight’s four-hour set.

At 12:40am, Villalobos takes over on the stage, mixing in his first record. Thankfully, the clarity of the sound improves, showing that the levels being pushed up too high, not the sound system, was to blame for the previous distortion. The overall production on the night is better than usual for the Metro, three bright screens displaying VJ Morph’s visuals filling up the stage. Kicking off with some grooving tracks, Villalobos proceeds to deliver a steady, solid couple of hours of techno beats, sometimes heavier, sometimes housier, but always suited to getting out on the dancefloor and dancing. He doesn’t play many recognisable tracks, and despite his set being quite good, I start to get a little bored, wondering whether he’ll continue in the same manner for the rest of his set.

My wish for some variation is granted by Villalobos dropping the classic Good Life around 2:30am, and for the remaining two hours of his set, he mixes things up a bit more. A distinctive feature of Villalobos’s DJing is that he still plays vinyl, the occasional skip of a record these days sounding strange with some many DJs solely using CDJs and laptop. He also shows off some skilful mixing, teasing us with hints of Lil Louis vs Josh Wink’s French Kiss (So How’s Your Evening So Far) before giving us the full pash. Other highlights include a pair of ‘80s touches courtesy of Lil Louis and The World’s I Called U (The Conversation) and Talk Talk’s It’s My Life.

Leaving shortly before he wraps up at 4:30am, my final opinion is that whilst Villalobos played a great extended set for some serious dancing, for me his set didn’t quite hit the hoped for heights. It’s also likely the vibe on the evening wasn’t helped by heavy-handed security and the saturation presence of police, along with a sniffer dog. The sniffer dog was even led on stage to Villalobos at one point during the night, making it hard to ignore. Unfortunately, the final effect is that the gig will be more remembered for the overwhelming police presence rather than the actual music.