Ok, you want to know the TRUTH? Well, you are at the right place!! Would you believe me if I’d tell you that in 10 years of career I have never had one completely satisfying Toronto gig until last Friday at This Is London? When I say not completely satisfying, I mean that perhaps I had some really cool gigs, but always with something wrong, that would make me rate a night good at, lets say, 99%, but never 100% or over! Well, last Friday I had a REAL REAL REAL BLAST! Finally Toronto has a proper place for me to play at! This Is It. This Is London! This is TORONTO!! And This Is Where I want to play!!! This is where I want to be playing from now on in Canada’s largest city, nowhere else – thank you very much! Finally, This Is London has brought to the city a nice room, not too big, not too small, with a GREAT sound system, but not great like when they said it was great and then I couldn’t hear shit, like at System Sound Bar or all those few techno places that have been opening and closing after a year or two… go figure why! I mean, GREAT! Chic, trendy, but not too much so people can feel at ease. Older people. No rave smell or vibe. I mean? it was PRO-PER! At least for me, now… Maybe 2 years back I wouldn’t have enjoyed a place like that, because it was not dark enough and proper for playing hard techno, but I swear to God this was a dream place for the music I like to play now, and I did have a dream gig! I mean, I could have only dreamt about having such a decent gig in Toronto, but to be honest I wasn’t even dreaming anymore about Toronto gigs, so much that each time I would play there I would come back home a little disappointed, or sometimes a lot, and this was creating within me some kind of fear each time I was scheduled to play there again… I would like to go on and on about Friday night, but I am afraid I will start repeating myself at this point. But one last time, just to make sure I made myself clear, I had THE BEST night of my tour so far, at This Is London, on Friday night! I am sorry for Chicago, which was so far at number one up until Friday, but Toronto really kicked ass!!!!!!!! Thanks so much to the promoters Talal and Jose for brining me there, and I truly hope to be back there soon. I wouldn’t mind a residency actually, and trust me I rarely say this about a venue. I have refused MANY residencies in my career; I can count on one hand the ones I have accepted, and my five fingers are not even needed to count of all them actually… The weekend has been great. Thanks to the Toronto night I was all motivated and excited already, although even if my night there would have been bad I would have still be super excited about going back to Ottawa at Helsinki on Saturday night because last year I had such a blast that I knew I was going to have a great time again this time. Last year so many people were not ready for my style change throughout the world. But so many people just didn’t know about it and I can understand how come there has been so much disappointment from crowds at times, since they didn’t know about my change and then I was back in a city after a while and instead of playing the very expected and waited hard stuff I was playing groovy stuff not past the 130 BPM! It is normal that sometimes it would create confusion and disappointment? But a year ago Helsinki has been one of the only venues where people didn’t say a word about it, they loved it and that’s it! I only played super funky minimal and electro and the whole club went nuts and enjoyed it so much that I kept such a sweet memory about that place! So this year I knew that I was going to have a good time there for sure, as on top of knowing that people didn’t mind my sound change there, it has now been fully said within the medias and fully publicized with the promotion of COME WITH ME… that while on tour for this CD I was certainly not going to play hard techno! So, Saturday at Helsinki I had a superb set! The club was RAMMED and hot and it was an incredible little underground party full of nice people and such a great vibe! But…… the F*&?@*&(?%# POLICE arrived at 2am and shut down the club, under the excuse that it was over capacity, and that is completely untrue and it sucks! People were upset, I can understand, but really I can assure you that it wasn’t the club’s fault as it was NOT oversold! It wasn’t not like some of Montreal 514 Productions events were they truly oversell tickets and inside it’s way too hot and no one can move and the people outside can’t even hope to get in, no matter if they already have their tickets in hand or not! Saturday it was just a proper busy club, rammed, yes, but still comfortable, plus upstairs was not that busy and no one was doing anything wrong in there, it was just great, no fights, nice vibe, no evident drug smell, no one completely wasted, and the police just came to shut this whole thing down. Fuck them! Really. I mean it. So I ended up playing only 1 and half hours, but I can still say it was GREAT!! I only feel very sorry for the ones who were in the line-up for that whole time and who were just coming in when the club got shut down, but nothing I could do… I hope to visit those two cities very soon again, and continue the unfinished parties… All my best to you!
