Review: DJ Vadim on Fri 18 May
It’s midnight and The Westbury is hotting up. Everyone’s thanking god it’s Friday, while toasting the weekend with vodka. The dance floor sizzles as platform-heel clad feet shift in time to the beats of the expert at starting a party – DJ Vadim. Mingling crowd-pleasing classics Billy Jean and Salt ‘n Peppa’s Push It with his signature bouncing beats, loops, drops and bass aplenty, this Friday saw the internationally-acclaimed DJ getting that Friday feeling sussed.
As part of The Westbury’s spectacular schedule of end of the week line-ups, Vadim joins previous incumbents Yo Mama! and Scratch Perverts in welcoming the weekend by pumping out the liveliest of sounds. It’s not his first time playing at the Westbury – and as he outlined when we caught up after the gig, he’s something of a west London veteran too, ‘I used to live in Kingston; real far south-west, and when I was younger I used to always hang out in Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill.’ He knows that west London isn’t short of a party or two either, citing Notting Hill as one of four party hot stops in London – a quartet that also includes Brixton, Camden and Shoreditch.
Despite currently residing in east London, and jet setting all over the world to promote his imminent album Don’t Be Scared, Vadim also knows just what to play to get the Kilburn crowd going – and what gets himself grooving too: ‘At least 50 per cent of the audience, if not 70 per cent of the audience, would be as happy if you played flipping Keisha – this is not the place where you can go in deep. But it’s kind of cool because people take music too seriously. Sometimes it’s just good to let your hair down and just play those records that you know everybody likes, that even DJs like but they never play.’
And let their hair down everyone most certainly did. As Vadim dropped current radio sensation Azealia Banks’ tune 212, the dance floor ricocheted with movement. The pace picked up and one particularly enthusiastic guy almost knocked someone’s artfully placed cocktail umbrella out of their glass. That’ll teach them to bring their raspberry jam mojito onto the dance floor.
