It’s Despacio time. Many stages will be open for business in Stradbally this weekend seeking to impress the 50,000 music fans on site, but the tent housing the Despacio extravaganza is sure to provide one of the must-see experiences at the Electric Picnic.
On the face of it, three DJs spinning records for hours at a time on a bespoke sound system does not seem overtly special in an age when club culture has become ubiquitous.
But when those DJs are James Murphy from DFA Records and late of LCD Soundsystem with David and Stephen Dewaele from 2ManyDJs/Soulwax, and the soundsystem has been created by high-end audio company McIntosh, it’s an entirely different matter.
One-off
Originally intended to be a one-off event at an open-air space in Ibiza, Despacio has instead become a travelling roadshow, although its seven 11ft towers of speakers and amps arranged in a circle have appeared at a mere handful of locations to date.
The reason for the small number of shows, says David Dewaele, has to do with the logistics and costs of transporting the components from place to place. “Almost every promoter in the world, from Columbia to Australia, wants to bring Despacio to their country,” he says. “They’re all, ‘Oh Despacio is amazing! I love Despacio!’ All this. And we go, ‘Cool, we’d love to come to your country too.’
“Then they go, ‘It’s really expensive, isn’t it?’ and we go ‘Yeah, it’s really expensive.’ It’s 30,000kg of equipment, it takes a crew of 5-10 people three or four days to set up, and we can accommodate 1,500 people maximum. Then they do the costs in their head and go, ‘Oh shit,’ or go, ‘I can get money from a brand,’ and come up with something which never works.
“That’s the reason why for every gig we’ve done – and we’ve done about 10 locations to date – 10 more don’t happen. That’s months of planning, finding the venue, finding the money, getting the licence to sell drinks and then something always goes wrong. We have not played Ibiza yet and the way it looks, it might not happen ever, which is ironic and funny.
“It’s a nightmare, but when it happens, it’s amazing.”
Dewaele says he finds it strange that something so simple as Despacio should be regarded as so groundbreaking.
“The whole idea for us was to create somewhere that we would like to go to and that meant getting rid of a lot of the elements that are prevalent around us in modern club culture.
“Things like the audience facing the DJs or not really dancing or only showing appreciation by jumping up and down and putting their hands in the air do not apply to Despacio. It comes down to how much the audience can enjoy themselves by dancing. The three of us intermittently go into the crowd and have a dance ourselves so we can see and feel the difference.
Abnormal
“We can also judge it by the amount of people who come up to us to say how revolutionary this thing which should not be revolutionary is. This is how it used to be, this is how it should be, it should not be abnormal.”
The way it used to be: three DJs playing great music on a superb soundsystem. “It just works, you know,” says Dewaele. “One reason for this is the sound system. It’s superunique and the most expensive part of the whole equation. It only exists because we’ve been able to lure the people from McIntosh into doing this with us.
“But we also play from start to finish, all seven or eight hours. Even before people come in, we do an hour for the bar staff. Just the three of us, no guest DJ trying to outdo everyone else. Just us playing vinyl in a bespoke DJ booth.
“No rules, we’re not being Nazis about what they should or should not do. We just want people to have a good time.”
Despacio play six-hour sets each night at this weekend’s Electric Picnic festival
