Thursday 5 May 2022

Tribal Gathering @ Otmoor Park, Beckley 06/05/1995

 


The only place to be on this particular night was the Tribal Gathering. It was a dance music festival that was an annual event and I've never heard a bad word said about it.

There were 27,000 people there across 5 arenas. With those sort of numbers it was inevitable there would be some mainstream acts there, which there was. The mainstream acts in question though included The Prodigy, Orbital and The Chemical Brothers.

Putting personal taste to one side, I don't think anyone on the line up could be described as cheesy commercial crap who are there to attract the masses. The mainstream acts were all ones who still had some credibility amongst the purists.

No recordings exist from this event to my knowledge, but the ITV show BPM were there so watching this is the closest I can get to the music.

The question is if I was there, who would I have gone to see?

It's a difficult one because I have to consider my 1995 self as opposed to myself now. I wouldn't want to restrict myself to just hardcore and drum & bass with all the other music there and I think even at the time I would have wanted a bit of variety.

To kick things of it would have been drum & bass with Krust. As far as I can remember he's not featured at any of the raves featured so far this year.

Then it would have been off to the main arena for Apollo 440 doing a live show then back to the drum & bass/happy hardcore arena for the first happy hardcore set with DJ SY.

It's then back to the main arena for another live show with Sunscreem and then staying there for Dave Angel who followed. Then across to another arena for Trevor Rockcliffe.

It's then back to the drum & bass/happy hardcore arena to see Dougal & Vibes back to back which would have been top of my list in sets to see. As a consequence I would have missed The Prodigy in the main arena. I would then stay there to see Easygroove next.

Then it would be back to the main arena to see another live show which this time comes from Orbital.

After Orbital in the main arena would have been Carl Cox which would have been the first time I'd have seen him play since his last hardcore set at Doncaster Warehouse around 3 months prior.

There are quite a few clips from the Carl Cox set on the video and he has Ribbz MCing for him. It definitely appears to be a must see set.

After Carl Cox it would be back to the drum & bass/happy hardcore arena to see the latter part of Kenny Ken's set and then stay there for the final set of the night from LTJ Bukem.

As a result there would have been 2 arenas I wouldn't have gone to. Both had acts I would like to have seen, but others would have taken priority over them. This is the downside to events of this scale, there will inevitably be clashes.


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