a special night for sure.

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