SuperClub
DJ Shan & Raw, Chaomain,
The Upbeats, and guests
Shooters, 26 July
DJ Shan’s Superclub party at Shooters bar on 26 July demonstrated that you can take one of Wellington’s most notoriously skanky bars and turn it into a premier venue for extraordinarily good dance music. Shooters is divided into three floors, and Superclub had drum and bass headlined by the Upbeats up top, hip hop in the middle (by the garden bar) and a mix of hard trance and breaks down by the door. This means you can journey through three distinct styles, or find the one you know best and stick there.
When I fluttered on in just before midnight the party was slowly building up. I briefly headed up to the top floor to appreciate the Upbeats’ support act doing a gooey remix of ‘Sun King’, then watched some breakdancing down on the hip hop floor. This floor, due to the combination of the garden bar and the pop hits being remixed on the decks, resembled a more typical Shooters night than the other floors, and I don’t really know hip hop well enough to evaluate the music. The top floor was dominated by reliably strong drum and bass, and some guy in a tweed suit and hobo gloves was absolutely carving up the dancefloor once the Upbeats got on. However it was the ground floor that really stood out.
Sydney’s Chao Main, playing the first couple hours from midnight, kept a consistent stream of dancers through the floor in front, while two girls simultaneously took shots of the crowd and danced on stage. But Chao Main was surpassed by the next act, local Pequire, whose sounds were at times a revelation of skuzzy and crunchy but nevertheless solid rhythms that hit in exactly where you wanted them and brought everyone up. Shooters’ transformation from a ‘meat market’ into a dance venue with serious musical pretensions doesn’t mean that it wasn’t full of hot women wearing very little clothing – it just means they danced to better music.
There was one notable flaw with the event: the large number of glasses that accumulated around benches were inevitably knocked off when the dancefloors were packed, resulting in a carpet of smashed glass, so perhaps Shooters should switch to plastic cups next time they host a similar event. The fact that the bar is sandwiched between Mermaids and Coyote means it is going to be difficult to shake off its reputation, but if it can keep attracting high calibre DJs then the rest will follow.
Apparently Shan will be back with Superclub in three months, and although I know most of you will balk when I tell you that Shooters can put such good music, it can. However the real test of the evening was one of vibe. Whenever I wear my sarong into Courtenay Place bars, some dick will inevitably try to “take me on” for wearing a “skirt.” But despite four hours of boogying, the only time my attire was brought up was when a couple of sweaty guys told me it was awesome and trippy and that I must therefore have taken “about six tabs” rather than the half-dozen Red Bull and vodkas that I was actually on. That Superclub’s atmosphere could be so sweet is testament to the fact that Shan spent most of the night wandering through the crowd in a white boiler suit chatting to people and generally making sure everyone was having a good time. Sure he got distracted and wandered off everytime he said he’d get me a drink, but hey, there were a lot of distractions.