Blowing Up Your Spot

jonny5

04.30.09 | 6 Comments

I meant to write something sooner about this, but to follow on from Tom’s last post about the launch of DJHistory’s first book ‘The Disco Files’ there is a book launch party tonight (30th April) in London. To celebrate the launch of the book Bill Brewster has convinced the legendary French underground disco group Arpadys to play live – this is the first time they’ve ever played live as Arpadys, although they toured and had a few hits as Voyage back in the day. Arpadys was just a studio creation at the time but the songs they made such as ‘Monkey Star’ and ‘Funky Bass’ were big club hits in the discos of the 70s and remain big underground disco tunes to this day. This may be the only time anyone gets to hear them play live so I would strongly recommend people check it out if they are in the area. DJ support comes from myself, Idjut Boys, Toby Tobias and Bill Brewster.

The party is at Cargo from 7pm to 1am. Here’s some more party details: click. Send me an email at jonny5 [at] gakfoundation [dot] org to get the cheap tickets list.

Here’s a nice feature on the guys behind Arpadys by Alexis LeTan, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton on DJHistory

here’s 11 great Arpadys related moments via youtube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqIoth3nVEk
www.youtube.com/watch?v=syqK9QcCQzo
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hayvvtZO70s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJU01GRoqrw
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoqdeiLyUw0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOJAs7cp0sg
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSfHepsL9wI
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-5zzg_LCz4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPOI_jRurGE
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHeU0SpYL1U
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAdV_eAptOo

6 Comments

On 05.01.09 at 5:54 am pipecock said dis shit:

so how did this go? i’m so jealous, i would have loved to check this out!

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On 05.05.09 at 5:54 am jonny5 said dis shit:

Well, it felt like quite a special night to me. I’d been to Cargo a few times before and was very disappointed with the sound system, but they seemed to have sorted that out. It seemed nicely tuned for the live percussion sound.

Me and the Idjut Boys did the warm ups, me playing some slower spacey stuff earlier and going heavy on the spacey, french and afro type disco sounds later on. The place had filled up nicely and seemed to be really buzzing by the time Arpadys came on at 11pm. Despite their advancing years the music was as heavy, tight and grooving as ever. They started off by playing bass power from spatial & co 2, followed by funky bass from Arpadys and one of my favourite of their tracks, Electric Maneges (again from Spacial & co 2). All highlight the brilliant bass playing of Sauveur Mallia and the great rhythm section of Marc Chantereau on percussion and Pierre-Alain Dahan on drums. Like you would expect from a very experienced disco band these guys really make the tracks, building them up to a crescendo and then breaking them back down with some killer percussive sections.

By this stage the crowd are really lapping it up, screaming and shouting their appreciation and dancing like crazy. Next came the highlight of Monkey Star – extended to infinity and with some sweet synth and vocoder work by Arnaud Frachet, standing in for their original keyboard player Georges Rodi (who also made some brilliant solo albums) and Slim Pezin’s funky guitar work. They also played a couple more great tracks including Disco & Co’s Cold Coke (recently reissued on Tubetracks), another deep disco number with an ace bass line. For the encore they played Monkey Star again stretching it even further out into space, dancefloor gold.

It was a great way to celebrate the launch of the Vince Aletti book, which looks to be very interesting indeed.

Hope you can still read the review through all the superlatives :p

[Reply]