I was right: there was no sleep to be had on Friday night. Jan and I went to the Audio Projects Christmas party (one of the dubbing studios I work for) and then we raced over to Razzmatazz to have Fatboy Slim lay down some intensely dancable beats.

I thought we would get there when the doors opened at 1am, stay for his set, and then head home around 2 or 3am. Boy-o-boy was I wrong. There doors opened at 1am, but we didn’t count on there being an opening act. DJ Amable mixed some funky beats for the crowds for the first hour before Mr. Norman Cook took the stage. And what a performance. He had the throngs grinding, bouncing and grooving for over two and a half hours! And he didn’t just play all the same stuff that’s on his albums. He mixed bits of his own songs with some break-neck beats, some choice new samples, and we even got a dose of The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, The Beastie Boys, and The Bangles. When he wasn’t flipping vinyl, he was writing some choice expletive on a record cover and waving it in front of a camera that he had onstage with him. I remember such phrases as, “Come on you cunts, have some proper fun!”, “Harder, faster, louder!”, and “Let’s fist!” He kept us guessing, smiling, and dancing till about 5am – but the party didn’t stop there! The joint then got lit up by the likes of three different DJs on three different floors. Razzmatazz is fairly big. Jan and I wandered from room to room, swayed with the Goths, pogoed with the Boppers, and bounced with the children.

We left well before the party was over to catch the first metro of the morning at 6am. And then did we go straight to sleep? Nope! We were too wired. I surfed the web looking for new Fatboy tracks while Jan vegged-out on the couch to Kojak. Needless to say, we were both sound asleep within 15 minutes.