In most genres of music if you're a fan you tend to have your favourite bands or artists and go to see them in concert. In dance music it's a little bit different. Whilst you have the likes of The Prodigy who you can see in concert, there's many tunes that are one off projects or made by producers who never play live.
As a result more often than not if you were into dance music you'd go to see a DJ play these tunes. Not just one DJ, but multiple DJs play at a single night that would go on until the early hours. As a youngster the all night aspect added to the excitement and your presence there showed you knew how to party.
I went to a number of such events when I was younger but then 2 things happened. First I almost inevitably stopped liking the newer music. Second I inevitably got older and thought I was now too old for this all night malarky.
By 2016 I was a 30 something into dance music from yesteryear and whist I was still going to plenty of gigs from all sorts of genres, there seemed to be a lack of event where I got to hear a variety of older dance tunes and get to bed at a reasonable time.
Enter Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra. They put on a gig at The O2 where they'd play dance anthems using an orchestra that worked in the same way as a normal gig there. Sounded like the sort of thing I'd been waiting for.
I went and enjoyed it. The orchestra generally did a great job of playing the tunes the way they were supposed to be played. My only gripe was they did a small number of modern tunes and the rubbish vocalists.
A year later I went again and I enjoyed it that time too. Still some tunes it could of done without and still some rubbish vocalists but they did a bunch of tunes they didn't do the previous year meaning you weren't seeing the same thing.
I decided to go again the following year. Tickets went on sale almost a year in advance and as physical tickets stopped being a thing they sat in my inbox during this time. As the time got nearer I looked at the O2 listings to see the dates and there were 2 of them, a Friday and a Saturday. Given the choice I would always pick the Saturday over the Friday so I just assumed that's what I did.
On the Saturday I went into my inbox to print the tickets and found an email from The O2 asking how I found the gig last night. A bit premature I thought until I looked at the tickets and saw they were dated the Friday. Turns out it was originally going to be just the Friday, I bought tickets and then they added the Saturday afterwards. It had been so long since I'd bought the tickets I'd forgotten.
Yet I somehow wasn't that disappointed. I saw it as a sign that it's something I've done twice and there's no need to do it again. Another thing was that we were now starting to see more dance events for the older dance music fan, the all-dayer.
OK the all-dayer was nothing new. There were festivals such as SW4 and indoor events at places like Tobacco Dock but the ones I went to at least were more geared towards a younger crowd. With old skool events they're probably more likely to be day time than night time these days.
Yet the orchestra concept has grown huge since then. There's the Hacienda one, Spoony does a garage one and Fabio & Grooverider now do a drum & bass one.
My reasoning for going to see Pete Tong wasn't an overwhelming desire to hear the tunes played by an orchestra. As good as they were at replicating the tunes I wouldn't say any of the tunes sounded better as a result.
I did go to see one of the orchestras a year or so ago. No big name DJs behind it though they were doing it even before Pete Tong was. What became apparent is that there's only a finite amount of dance tunes that really work with an orchestra.
Clearly there are people out there who enjoy it and fair enough. For me though I see it as a choice between playing the same tunes that work over again or introduce new tunes that don't really work. It's worth going once in your life, maybe even twice but no more than that.
