Reviews
KISSY'S TURN IT ON TOUR FINALE
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- Clubs
Where Electric Brixton, Town Hall Parade, South London
When Gigs and club nights on Fridays and Saturdays
Music Electro, d’n’b, dubstep, house and more
Good news! The bass bins of Brixton are banging again. You can hear them from the bottom of Town Hall Parade, a clubbing ghost town for so long, now bustling with club kids, students and last-minute stragglers desperate for spare tickets to join the ‘sell out’ crowd for Kissy and friends, as the big man brings his 26-leg UK ‘Turn It On’ tour to a rapturous finale.
Inside the venue formally known as the Palladium Picture Playhouse, The Ace and most recently The Fridge, the scenario is a long way from chilled. The wide dancefloor is packed from the bar to the stage. Well before Kissy’s main-stage appearance the air is being whipped into a frenzy by friendly four-deck mash-up merchants Alex Powell and Oliver Portamento, aka The Squatters. Then Ed Banger’s Feadz lets loose a tornado of twisted electro.
Bare-legged and backlit by LED strips and flashing blue and white strobes, Kissy soon raises the recently refurbished roof. He is energy personified, like the huge confetti cannon that sends ravers into near hysteria. Bass bombs abound, and a snippet of So Solid’s ‘21 Seconds’ causes widespread destruction. Yet before anyone can take cover, Rusko hollers, “Yo Brixton, how you feelin?” before annihilating the soundsystem with incendiary drums, bass and fun-step. The 5am spectacle of an 18-person human centipede crawling across the stage to Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’ marks the return of good times to SW2 as a new dawn breaks for one of club-land’s sleeping giants.
