Review: SW4

Set within the heart of Clapham Common and now in its twelfth year of operation, SW4 celebrates all things dance music. Spread over five separate stages, the festival embraces techno, pumping trance, deep house and everything in between.

Although far from desirable, the showery weather on Saturday 29th August did not phase audiences and attendance was high, with Saturday a completely sold out event. Upon arena arrival the beats and bass were suitably mellow for midday entry with Ministry of Sound’s Hilton Caswell setting the vibe, from the graphically LCD visual, Outdoor Main Stage.

We ventured over to the DJ Mag stage at 1pm to check out the four time South African Grammy award winner and urban house-party DJ - Black Coffee. He's been recently nominated for the 2015 Ibiza DJ Awards in the Breakthrough category, and his singles ‘We Dance Again’ (above) and ‘Pieces of Me’ were received well by SW4ers, ensuring a perfect introduction for our festival forages.

The crowd at SW4 were now fully immersed in the festival experience as Rowan Harrington, better known as Secondcity took to the stage. Having broken into the commercial UK scene in 2014 with ‘I Wanna Feel’, the BBC Radio 1 endorsed DJ lived up to reputation, delivering a set of crowd pleasing house groves.

The Gallery Stage, celebrating its 20 year milestone on the UK club night circuit, hosted a special line-up of hand-picked names consisting of the biggests talents leading the market. Spanning a career of over 30 years, Paul Oakenfold certainly has a legacy that rivals most other artists, and has been involved with The Gallery since its birth in 1995. An icon within the trance scene, Oakenfold packed The Gallery Tent to the absolute rafters, breaking the SW4 crowd into a somewhat older divide.

The SW4 Indoor Main Stage was laden with peripheral visuals and entertainment delivered by Norman Cook’s arena project ‘Fatboy Slim presents The Smile High Club’. The acid house smiling face theme ran throughout, the Smile High Hosts (a collection of enthusiastic dancers) provided entertainment both on the floor and within the Acid Converter - an installation to the side of the stage that acted as a podium for ancillary entertainment. 

By the time Pete Tong dualled with Gorgon City back to back, the rain had started to descend, resulting in quite the choke point, but the atmosphere was incredible. Tong released an instalment of his legendary All Gone Pete Tong mix compilation with the house duo earlier this year so the set was a head to head rendition of the deep and tech house that featured on the CD - and we lapped it up.

Half seven saw Eric Prydz take over the Outdoor Main Stage, this being his sixth performance in the last seven years at the festival. Dubbed Mr SW4, the set was as expected; bassline driven, laden with piano riffs and techno funk. Perfect festival fodder which made up for the punishing weather.

Post 9pm saw us running between stages trying to catch Faithless, Fatboy Slim and Maceo Plex before our departure. So many fantastic stage headliners, so little time.

We started at the Main Outdoor Stage where, once again that day, it was raining and the festival mud had taken hold. In celebration of their 20th anniversary one of the world’s favourite electronic live acts, Faithless, made one of the most exciting and highly anticipated performances in SW4’s history. As expected the 1995 rave classic ‘Insomnia’ (below) blew the crowd up with every hand in the air. 

Then it was a quick dash over to the Indoor Main Stage to catch the last few songs in Fatboy Slim’s SW4 performance. An amalgamation of lighting, peripheral entertainment and go-to floor filling tunes the set ended with ‘Praise You’ nearly bringing the roof down.

Final stage stop off of the night was to watch Maceo Plex, headlining the Dream Don’t Sleep stage, to witness a concoction of techno and house teamed up with a dream-state inspired visual lighting performance, plummeted audiences into the timeless realms of futuristic sounds.

All park performances had wound down by the 11pm noise curfew and festival goers had either the options of travelling to Brixton or Elephant & Castle for after parties headline by some of the festivals most prolific artists including Eric Prydz and Maya Jane Coles. Overall the event was huge line-up success catering for all music tastes and was an extremely enjoyable day on The Common.

Tickets are no longer available for this event