OK it’s Wednesday and I’ve recovered from a big long weekend.
Saturday night was Sleaze Ball – the second big gay dance party on the Sydney calendar and small sibling to the Mardi Gras dance party in February/March. This year, breaking with tradition, only one hall at Fox Studios was used – The Horden Pavillion. Usually there would be the Horden plus one or even two smaller spaces used to accommodate people with different music tastes. The “headline” act this year was the Potbelleez, a Sydney electronic/DJ group who had a top-10 hit earlier in 2008 “Don’t Hold Back” which was catchy all over commercial radio and in the mainstream clubs. Other DJs were Alan Thompson (UK), Mark Murphy (Sydney), Simon Caldwell (Sydney).
Alan Thompson I’d heard play before and was glad that he was relegated to the 9-12 “warm up set”. My ambivalent thoughts regarding his music didn’t change. (Boring, relentless, hard-ish minimal house).
Mark Murphy I’ve heard play lots of times and tend to either really get into his music or feel left a bit cold by it. He is a good, experimental DJ, playing a mixture of fairly hard underground electro-house and sometimes tribal sounds. He played a brilliant set at Mardi Gras a couple of years ago (after Boy George’s masturbatory set). He also recently played really really well at the tiny underground Saturday Night “Handle Bar” that we sometimes venture out to. At Sleaze, he played some god tunes, but overall the set was a bit of a mess. Too eclectic – i.e. not the kind of “musical journey” one likes to be led along by a good DJ – and some pretty bodgy mixing.
Simon Caldwell was a complete unknown quantity – and remains so since we left to go home to bed half an hour into his set. (Not because it was a bad set I might add, but because we were tired and the artificial energy and serotonin flood had worn off by then 
That leaves two. Potbelleez and Sveta. I wish the Potbelleez played for considerably less than the hour that they were on for, and I wish that Sveta had played for at least an hour more than her all too short two-hour set.
The Potbelleez were worse than 4am drunk karaoke. Their singing and rapping (at a gay party!?!?!?) wasn’t in any key – let alone the wrong one. Their attempts at hyping up the crowd “Helllllooooo Sleeeeaaazzzeee We’re the Potbelleez…..” was met with bemusement and polite golf claps from all except those whose drugs had kicked in early (not mentioning any names…Baba…). The false hype reminded me of my mis-spent pentecostal youth. lol. Some of their backing tracks were actually quite good pumping tech-house but the moment the goose on stage was handed a microphone, the floor emptied.
Thank God, come 1am my favourite DJ in the whole wide world, the smiley, diminutive, sexy, lezzo Local girl Sveta rescued the night. She read the room and the mood beautifully and played all the right tracks at all the right moments. The set was typical Sveta for these big parties. A hard and slightly twisted edge with driving and funky basslines and seemless mixing. Lots of teasing and building without cliched “ecstatic” drum machine buildups, but instead a second of silence then sudden infusions of even more hot, powerful basslines. I may be a tragic groupie, but I couldn’t help getting right down the front and dancing before the throne of such talent. I love that kind of visual interaction between DJ and punter. There was also surprisingly a nice bit of space there where baba and I could dance like lunatics, as is our penchant. It was a F’n brilliant set.
No doubt a lot of the Oxford St madonna-kylie-mariah-remix fans would have been rather like fish out of water with the harder sounds, and the trance heads had absoulutely no where to go and listen to the lasers and see the music floating about the room; I expect Mardi Gras will cop some flack over not being all things to all people. For me Sleaze 2008 (my first sleaze ball) was a pretty ordinary party, made very memorable by a great set from 1 DJ in particular…who even blew me a kiss 
