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Hard House Academy: The Spring Edition - review
Reported by bunny
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Submitted 25-03-03 13:51
The night has reached its apex. You stand in blissful silence in the thick, warm haze of body heat, high on the balcony, and gaze down upon it all. Light, sound and movement converge and shatter simultaneously below in an act that imitates the beginning and end of everything, while lasers stream across the dance floor, stroking and tantalizing the almost tangible atmosphere with fine threads of green-white brilliance. High up on stage a heavenly creation is taking place, the stimulus for 4,500 hungry minds and a million memories from a single, extraordinary element buzzing behind the decks, energising our strange universe that exists within these walls… And in the centre of it all, far below, vivid constellations of northern and southern stars shimmer and swirl through the velvet darkness like celestial dandruff. This is Hard House Academy.
Turn the corner into Stockwell Road on the 15th March 2003 and if for some rare and bizarre reason you weren’t excited beforehand, you will be now. Brixton Academy is ablaze with colour, noise and people and the dazzling banner that illuminates its entrance is enough to tell you why: Hard House Academy. The place is humming like a nuclear power plant; following the now legendary exploits of last October’s HHA 2nd birthday bash, it seems everyone is chomping at the bit for a mouthful of tonight’s offerings, and I can’t say I blame them. With Andy Farley, Phil and Tara Reynolds, Rob Tissera, Paul Glazby and Hard Dance’s top showman Steve Hill among many, man more on the bill it’s set to be a night of a thousand stomps. So with no further ado, ladies and gents, let’s leave our egos at the door and get on in there…
Hard House Academy is one event you’ll never be fashionably late for – just late. So I was more than a little annoyed at myself for not getting there until close to 10pm. The scene outside is as electric as ever, with constant streams of people heading down Brixton High Street in a mass pilgrimage for Ground Zero Euphoria. Around the building itself groups of clubbers meet, merge and disperse as old friends and long-lost stomping partners re-acquaint themselves and welcome each other to the party  while behind them a line of eager disco bunnies clasping crumpled and sweaty tickets pour into the foyer in an organised riot of cheers, chants and giggles. Round the side the guestlist queue is moving comfortably enough as well and within 15-20 minutes we’re in and walking up the side of the main dance floor with mouths hung open like happy human fly-traps. Brixton Academy has certainly kitted itself out in its most stylish togs for tonight’s soiree, thanks to some hard graft from Frantic. It’s like a turbo-charged Changing Rooms (only with more class and no Carol Smilie, thank the Lord…). An enormous screen alive with oscillating space-age dreams forms the backdrop to a stage strewn with industrial oddities. Either side of the decks 2 enormous humanoid metalwork sculptures have fallen to their knees, head back and arms thrown wide in an all-encompassing embrace, caught permanently in the ecstatic culmination of euphoria, and above it all the top of the stage coruscates through a wild kaleidoscope of vivid coloured lights. But I know what you’re thinking though, enough of all that, what’s the tunage like?
It’s around 10.30 and we storm into the main room just in time to hear the closing bars of I Don’t Care. – Oh big, wrinkled bollocks  – merge into the opening chords of Rob Tissera’s The Weekend Has Landed – huge smiles all round! The man himself is up on stage and like the crowd before him he’s LOVING IT; one thing that comes across more than adequately from every DJ playing at HHA is their obvious enjoyment at being there. There’s even more reason for Rob to be in high spirits tonight as it’s also his birthday and therefore it’s celebration time all round  But before we can get too lost in music we’ve gotta go check our coats + bags in, so in true Linford Christie homage we sprint off upstairs to swiftly drop-off our stuff in the cloakrooms.
Only once we get up there we realise this isn’t quite going to be the case… The queues go on and on like Ariston and it rapidly becomes obvious that no one’s going anywhere fast. That’s the big downside to major events such as this, especially in the colder months. Everyone has something to check in (tonight most people have a couple of items) and, of course, this is going to take time. This could’ve been a pretty excruciating experience if it wasn’t for the divine intervention of the DJ box in the Corridor and the heaven-sent tracks and angelic mixing skills of Donna Birt. Keeping the grumbles at bay with ease, Donna gets the queues moving with an energetic set of timeless tunes (Mosquito’s Tweeter blending straight into Energy 52 as a fine example) that placated even the most disgruntled punter. They do say music soothes the savage beast and intensive research has proven there’s no beast more savage than a clubber in a long cloakroom queue 
Finally we’re all sorted and free to party, so it’s 100 metres dash time again as we make a break for the main room. If only we’d got our acts together and made it down sooner we could’ve got all our stuff sorted straight away and then wouldn’t have missed anyone’s set. Biggest regrets of the night were missing the opening sets by DJ GRH, James Lawson and Daniel Bailey, although Chef and Tenacious-Dee did manage to catch both the latter sets and told me they were real hits, with tracks like For An Angel (the hard mix, how long has it been since I’ve heard that out and I managed to miss it? ), James Lawson’s remix of Alpha Zone’s Stay and Red Snapper. Thankfully though we’ve made it in time to catch a good chunk of Rob Tissera’s set and the gentleman is very much on top form tonight. Sharkboy’s Night Time and an unknown track featuring lush vocals pleading ‘surely our love can stand the test of time?’ flow fabulously into the 7 time-stopping notes that open We Come One, just about audible above the explosion of appreciative screams that have erupted across the room :spins: Hard House Academy is taking off in fine style, with Rob’s choice of sign-off tune (the Neon Lights mix of Olive’s Not Over Yet) illustrating the point perfectly!
There’s certainly a whole handful of surprises and more to experience before the night can even begin to consider ending. Case in point: the sets in the main room and foyer that began at midnight. Case 1: Steve Hill’s set in the main room. Here’s the evidence, yerr’honour…
By now, just about everyone in the scene must have heard about Steve’s set at the last Hard House Academy. It was like nothing seen before or since, a total all-out, all encompassing experience, Steve providing mind-blowing music for the ears and a captivating performance for the eyes. Question is, can the man recreate that famously intense atmosphere, which left the room so highly-charged your hair very nearly stood on end? Well, he was certainly gonna give it his all! You’re never left in any doubt of when Steve Hill’s behind the decks. Rather than hide behind the turntables, from the instant the first beat of his set drops to the second the final beat dies away, he’s on a mission to involve you in the music; to make sure that, rather than just stomp away to a pounding backbeat, you’re actually listening to the tracks themselves and interacting both with him the DJ and the crowd around you. Basically, he’s having the time of his life and he wants to make sure you do, too! So as the mash-up of Jonah Listen vs 4 Motion’s ‘Over 4 Me’ throbs out across our heads like machine-gun fire, Steve’s up there punching and pounding the air in time to the music and working us all up into a wonderful palaver. Unfortunately, the props across the stage (which are admittedly utterly amazing) prevent him from repeating the sprints he made across the front of the stage at the last event but he’s compensating for this by bouncing around behind the decks . What a star! And as the set progresses it’s all we can do to keep up, although when you have tunes such as My Lovin’, I Don’t Care (the FH unreleased mix) and the mash up of Breather's Come On with The Dawn, it’s more a matter of getting your legs to keep up with the impulses thrown at them by your brain.
So hear this, all you doubters: Steve Hill’s done it again, hands down (and also come up with another mighty fine CD, well done  ). Nearly halfway into the set it’s clear to see, he’s got something we need - and everyone’s well up for a hit. But I’ve got to head on out to the foyer now, because there’s another set that’s equally vital to catch and I’ve already missed close to 45 minutes of it…
Case 2: Tara Reynolds set in the foyer. Nearly 12.45 and the main room is in a state of near-apocalypse, albeit of the most rapturous kind. From the back bar to the boshpit in front of the stage it’s idyllic bedlam in there and I’m sure the noise level is so loud it’s making waves on the magma at the Earth’s core. Perhaps the less hardcore punter is thinking that it’ll come as a relief to get out through those big black doors into the relative calm of the foyer, only they’re soon to find their hopes are hastily thwarted, since pure pandemonium is kicking off out here too – but in a more condensed form. The foyer might not be very big but size ISN’T everything, especially when the electricity that’s sparking amongst everyone makes the place feel like a mini-football stadium in the World Cup Finals when England are 100-nil up to Germany + there’s only 20 seconds time remaining . The whole place is heaving with a euphoric rabble of stomping + jumping clubbers, kicking up a cacophony that’s the perfect polar opposite to what’s surging out of the speakers. People are constantly bumping into each other but no one seems to care, you just turn around to apologise + then carry on boshing. Every few minutes the crowd spontaneously breaks into elated chants of ‘Tara! Tara!’ in between whooping and hollering like they’ve all simultaneously found a winning lottery ticket  . It’s beatific to the point of absolution; to come from the elation of the main room into this is almost too much for the senses and any sane, well-adjusted person would probably need a few moments to themselves… but I just get stuck in there instead as anthem after classic pours through the ears and down the spine like warm honey. Isn’t It All A Little Strange, Kokane, Ascension, Hallucination, Mosquito’s Tweeter, Vacuum Packed – wait a minute while I take another deep breath - Curse of Voodoo Ray, Incisions and last but in no way least Revolution is just a cross-section of what we were treated to, and all at a speed that’d make Speedy Gonzales feel right at home. Truly, if that lot doesn’t float your boat you must be trying to sail the 7 seas in a sponge
What’s even more remarkable is that Tara managed to keep up the madness for close to 30 minutes over her advertised set time of 12-1.30. This wasn’t down to all of us getting carried away (although that was almost certainly true as well) but because the next DJ, Paul Glazby, was coming to Hard House Academy straight from a gig in Ipswich and had unfortunately been held up in traffic . So it was up to Tara to keep it all together in the meantime and she proved herself more than capable for the job. Mind-blowing set
Thankfully Paul Glazby managed to battle his way through the taillights and before the clock strikes 2 he’s in the DJ box and ready to roll. So as Revolution sprints towards it’s final 32-beat furlong, in comes the vicious riff of Mark Gray’s 99.9 and a reminder that, as is often the case, the best things in life are undoubtedly worth waiting for  If you like it hard and fast – and let’s face it, who doesn’t? – this is the set for you, a full-scale, unforgiving Hard House assault to sincerely and seriously AVE IT to. Anyone close enough to the front to clock the slogan on Paul’s t-shirt could tell you the likelihood of any Trance numbers creeping in  so all trance lovers take your leave and all Hard House maniacs, take it away
A little too late I realise that I’ve forgotten entirely about the other rooms, most specifically Tom Harding’s set in the main room. Since Tom’s a HQ Amsterdam resident, the chance for any London clubber to catch a set of his is rare indeed, which is a real pity because the sound of the Dutch Hard Dance scene is quite different to the British sound we’re used to. It’s generally a lot darker and more industrial, although recently I’ve noticed Tom’s incorporating a noticeably more trancey edge into his sets. Although I only managed to catch the final 20 minutes of his set, this seemed to be the case at HHA, as a wave of tracks streamed across the arena that seemed to blend the distinctive Dutch beats with the more familiar London sound most successfully demonstrated by Phil Reynolds. It feels a lot lighter than the material heard in previous sets by Tom Harding but it’s definitely growing on me; just takes a little getting used to after the banging hard attitude of foyer.
It’s a very brief hiatus however. 2.30am and Lab4 take to the stage to give all those who just couldn’t get enough of the foyer’s ferocity further incentive to dramatically lower their IQ through the medium of boshing their brains out! Ah, braincells; who needs ‘em anyway? Lab4 are always billed as a live act and as such they never fail to fulfil both criteria: they’re very much alive + kicking and they put on one hell of a performance. On stage, their equipment is imprisoned within a metal work cage, which also holds them, although the energy that sizzles from their every beat and movement must be felt in every millimetre of this room. Never standing still, Lez and Adam jump, rock, and thrash their way around the rig and even make a break for the audience, who surge forward in a deafening wave of hysteria for a very messy meet & greet session As well as the visual entertainment there’s also the aural stimulation to consider - although when you’re caught in the middle of a rammed dance floor listening to tracks like Reformation II, Contact London and the skin-tingling Requiem (which threatens to send your epidermis into orbit everytime you hear it), it’s pretty hard to be reflective! The first time I saw Lab4 was at the October 2001 HHA and they utterly blew me away… so whoever said history never repeats itself better work up an appetite, cause there’s a large slice of humble pie heading their way…
Have to do a quick time out here and comment on 1 thing which has noticeably and greatly improved since the last Hard House Academy, and 1 that just keeps getting better. First of all, I couldn’t believe the change in the sound quality in the main room. EVer since the first organism crawled out of the primordial soup and gurgled ‘let’s ave it’, it’s been a popular moan that the sound in Brixton Academy is distorted and poor. I can’t deny that this hasn’t been the case in previous years but the improvement at the Spring Edition’s event was incredible. I couldn’t sense any distortion throughout the main room - and I did a whole circuit of the place – and although it wasn’t as ear-bleedingly loud as some clubs (given its size, how could it be?) it was loud enough to hear everything clearly and to motivate you into moving everything you’d got. Frantic obviously put a lot of effort into sorting out the sound system and the results certainly made it all worthwhile. I don’t think I heard one moan about the sound quality all night
Secondly, mention must be made of the lasers, which seem to do the impossible and excel their previous efforts at every event. Three Enormous shafts of deep green radiance slice the darkness above the dance floor into a dazzling confusion of delicate shapes and symbols; in one instant a layer of glowing geometric lines shelters the clubbers below, in the next a fine spiderweb of emerald threads threatens to snare them all. It’s absolutely gorgeous and, when mixed with the music of HHA, takes you to places it seems impossible to reach with your feet still planted on Planet Earth. Along with these 3 beam lasers there’s also a fourth suspended above and before the stage, a green cube that reveals strange planets and spacecraft in it’s depths and stimulates a thousand sci-fi fantasies. Just before Andy Farley’s set I make a point of heading up to the balcony so I can take the whole light show in as it should be seen – in it’s full, beautiful entirety. To anyone who’s never done this I really recommend you do, although you have to be careful, as you can get very lost in those hypnotic patterns…
Going up to the balcony for a chill out is an essential part of the Hard House academy experience, but there’s a knack to the timing of the occasion. As I learnt to my cost, the best time is certainly not during a set by Andy Farley. After sitting down for approximately 2.37 seconds, I was straight back up there and attempting to have it to my all-time favourite Tony De Vit track, The Dawn. I say attempting because the gaps between the rows of seats weren’t really designed for clubbers to go nuts in, so we race on up to the walkway at the back of the balcony where there’s room to completely let go. And that’s what needed when a track such as this is playing, with that utterly sublime build up tumbling into a synth-infused breakdown that’d give the skin on a bowl of custard goosepimples Then there’s OD404’s Panic Button, the definitive mix of Miss Shiva’s Dreams by Mr Glazby and a couple of fantastically hectic tracks, one of which features the ‘house of love’ sample used previously on BK’s House Of Pain (any ideas anyone?). It’s a wickedly frenetic set that further typifies the unapologetically hard sound that Andy Farley’s been playing this year and is a tempting sneak peek at what’s yet to come. 
I can’t believe it’s 5am already. Tonight’s flown by so quickly in a gorgeous golden blur, I’ve been flying above the cloud barrier all night on a rush of jubilation but now it’s time to get ready to land back down on solid ground. But there’s still an hour to go until then and it’s an hour symbolized by a lush blaze of Hard Trance unfurling around you like the heat of a summer sunset. Phil Reynolds is up on stage to lead us through the final 60 minutes of clubbing and although his stage presence seems more subdued than normal, there’s still a deep buzz of energy in his music that has an irresistible effect on the mind, body and soles . Euphoric, epic tracks such as the impressive Society and his sublimely ethereal collaboration with Steve Blake, It’s A Dream, send ripples of shivering glee across the dance floor, from the cyber nutters hammering at the barriers down the front to the far-flung outskirts at the back, where we’re dancing in circles round strange wigwams of piled up coats and bags like 21st century Cherokee Indians
Then the bassline fades away and the MC for tonight dashes out on stage to pose us a couple of real brain-teasers: Have We Had A Good Time + Do We Want One More? Hmm, lots of chin scratching takes place at this point as people search for a phrase that they feel best describes what they’re feeling, and settle for a universal, whole-hearted, double ‘FUCK YEAH!’ The drumbeats throbs back into life as the glorious, dreamlike chords of Steve Hill and Phlash’s playful Frantic Theme, Get A Life unravel across the dance floor and 4,500 people get washed away on a tide of tender delight.
I love Hard House Academy, even though it’s such an enormous event it never seems to feel excessive or disproportionate, and despite the vastness of the Brixton Academy I never find myself feeling lost or overwhelmed. The 2 major problems that I’ve noticed are that those that it’s those that it’s either difficult or impossible to remedy. The first is impossible; with so much on, spread over 4 rooms, it’s inevitable that you’re not going to catch every set you want and once again I barely managed to get a look in at either the 4th room or Corridor. Secondly, the cloakroom queues were pretty awful at both ends of the night but especially at the end. Our friend had gone off to get coats at about 5.15 and didn’t actually get to the front of the queue until around 7am, which is a pretty miserable experience and not a good way to end what was in all other aspects an utterly enjoyable night. Undoubtedly, this long wait was down to the sheer volume of people (the Academy was at close to maximum capacity) so it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a degree of hanging around and waiting, although there must be something that can be done to cut the timescale down a little. The main problem seems to be idiots cutting in at the front of the queues because they somehow feel they are above queueing  which is the single most infuriating and selfish thing to do; they should realise that we’re all in just as much of a hurry to get out and if they actually had the consideration stand in line with the rest of us we would all move a hell of a lot quicker.
But enough of the grumbling, the fact remains that as we gently mill out into the fresh, calm and tingling Spring air, the lingering buzz of a sensational night’s clubbing is enough to blow away the clouds of moody blues and set us strolling through the smudges of grey dust and stone and into the sunflower blush of the sunrise.
With thanks to Ab Fab, Club.man + Mr Bicgit for the use of their pictures
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The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable.
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