Summerfieldayze 2005 - 8.1.2005

It is the night before the big day & I am currently cruising my way back from the south pacific on the P&O, with an ETA of 8am into Brisbane port the next morning I have a solid 4 hrs to get off the boat, through customs, drive back to the Gold Coast & head over to the festival without missing a minute of the action. Unfortunately as some of you may have seen on the news a young man tragically fell over board that night & lost his life, this delayed our arrival as we turned around & searched for him for many hrs with no luck. We finally arrived back in Brisbane port around 12pm & it was a race against the clock for me to get to the festival without missing too many of the big names, I managed to make it there by 5:30 but unfortunately missed quite a lot of the people I really wanted to see including Moguai, Miguel Migs, & 2 Many DJs (who I have been waiting to see for a long time now), so I'll start my review off with the 1st set I did manage to catch, Darren Emerson.

It had been almost 2 years since the former member of Underworld blew my mind in Ibiza showing me just how good house music could be so I was expecting big things. He started with a banging mix of the guaranteed floor filler 'Born Sloppy' which definitely got everyone's attention, but then unfortunately went straight into (an albeit good version of) 'It Just Won't Do', that horn line still sends chills down my back, other than this little glitch, Darren's set was excellent & the remix of Blur's 'Song 2' he dropped absolutely went off! (Though I found out later that this had already been played a few times by other acts earlier in the day).

Meanwhile in the other tent De La Soul were showing the crowd exactly why they are still one of the biggest draw cards in hip hop today, hyping the crowd up at every chance, I was told that this set was a lot better than their previous gig at the Arena but the only criticism I have was that they didn't play enough of each song, very choppy & changey. Highlights of the short one hour set were definitely 'Saturday' & the last song 'Ring Ring Ring' where they packed the stage with lovely young ladies from the audience in true hip hop style.

Following on straight after De La Soul was one of the undisputed kings of trance, Armin Van Buuren. What's that you say- Trance straight after hip-hop- Has somebody made a mistake here- I was asking myself the exact same question, but this dramatic change in musical styles certainly did not scare the audience off, the tent stayed full from the start to the end of Armin's 3 hr journey of euphoric goodness. One of the first tracks he played was a the Ferry Corsten remix of the classic Thrillseekers tune 'Synaesthesia', other crowd pleasers among many others was the new Above & Beyond mix of 'Silence' & one of his closing tracks which was a tasty remix of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.

Over in the Field Day Stage, Meat Katie & Lee Coombs were giving the Break Heads exactly what they came for, playing many unreleased tunes which I'm pretty sure had come straight from their studios, the back to back set they played gelled very well mixing Katie's techiness with Coombs' acidy breaks, both playing popular recent releases such as 'Fabulous Mint 400', 'Lick The Frog' & 'Alright All night', & keeping me moving on the dancefloor the entire time, & thoroughly warming me up for the return of the arguable kings of breaks next up, Plump Dj's.

The Plumps had slightly disappointed me the last time I saw them but this time was a completely different story, the beats dirty, the bass lines fat, & the crowd definitely into it! They opened with my personal favourite track at the moment, 'Spitroast' which set the pace for the rest of the set & from there played a combination of classic, new & unreleased material which kept asses shaking for the full 2 hours. My only one complaint was that around halfway through the volume seemed to dip substantially & did not recover, though this may have been out of the Tags