There’s a giant gorilla face staring down at the harbour tonight, and for a moment it feels like the whole city is about to get swallowed by a rave.
The lights go blue, the sails of the Opera House loom like alien wings behind the stage, and suddenly the forecourt is no longer architecture or heritage or anything respectable. It’s a dancefloor. And here come Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, the Brixton alchemists who have spent three decades turning club chaos into pop scripture.
Basement Jaxx don’t do concerts. They detonate pageants.
The show is a riot of colour, singers appearing like characters in some surreal disco opera, dancers spinning through costumes that look stolen from carnival floats, lights exploding across the forecourt while the harbour glints like a mirrorball somebody dropped into the Pacific. Every few minutes the stage morphs again. Latin rhythms tumble into garage beats, ragga collides with disco, funk punches through house music like a brass section kicking down a nightclub door.
This is how they’ve always done it. Since the mid-90s when their Brixton club night gave them a name and a laboratory, Basement Jaxx have treated dance music less like a genre and more like a circus tent big enough to swallow everything. House grooves. Pop hooks. Caribbean rhythms. Gospel choirs. Brass bands. Whatever makes the crowd lose its mind.
Tonight, the songs arrive like old friends who’ve been out partying for twenty years and never bothered to sleep.
‘Bingo Bango’ hits and the crowd moves like a single organism. ‘Do Your Thing’ explodes into the night air and suddenly strangers are singing to each other like they’ve known each other forever. ‘Where’s Your Head At’, the track that once bulldozed club culture straight into the mainstream hits, and the forecourt turns feral in the best possible way.
This isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia is polite.
Basement Jaxx are still maximalists, still convinced that more is more and then some. Their music remains a technicolour collage of house, funk, Latin, garage and ragga stitched together with pure euphoria. Thirty years in, the philosophy hasn’t changed: give people rhythm, colour, sweat, joy and absolutely no time to think about tomorrow.
Somewhere above the stage that gorilla face is still staring at us like it knows something.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it knows that for a few hours on a warm Sydney night, the Opera House forecourt has been hijacked by a glittering, delirious dance cult led by two blokes from Brixton who decided long ago that music should feel like the greatest party on Earth.
And tonight it does.
Images Deb Pelser
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