The line is long. REALLY LONG. It’s down the street and round the corner, and we can’t see the door. Well, this must be the right place: Vice’s 10th Birthday Party, at Cable, London. It’s no wonder, though. Where else are you going to see Andrew W.K. and Wiley in the same building again?
Once we finally get inside, the place is full of tight jeans, kids carrying skateboards, and a lot shouting (Odd Future’s new label additions, Trash Talk, just leave the stage). Oh, and there’s a free bar being heavily taken advantage of. This definitely is a Vice party.
Tonight is one massive genre blend, as walking through the rooms you go from punk, to RnB, to hip hop. Necessary really for the broad Vice’ readership (from androgynous hipsters all the way to Made In Chelsea extras).
Although electro punks Crystal Castles and American rapper Danny Brown make appearances here tonight, it’s actually the stranger acts that put on the more memorable shows.
Newcomers Peace teeter between psychadelia and good ol’ rock and roll, and get quite a crowd reaction, which is a surprise seeing that their recorded material hasn’t really hit home yet. They provoke crowd surfing (we think it’s crowd surfing, or people are just passing out and being moved backwards), and the whole room becomes more sweat than human.
Andrew W.K. provides a bizarre set. Arriving on stage in his signature dirty white outfit, he takes the microphone and a backing track comes on. No band. Actually, there is a bald hype man doing the Irish jig. So they are technically a duo. However, W.K. surprises people by alternating between his Pokemon-esque shouting of ‘PARTY! PARTY! PARTY!’ to knocking out some elegant yet rapid chords on his piano, showing that still over a decade of partying hard he still has the palpitating heart of a student in freshers' week.
Crystal Castles ramble their way through another chaotic live set, but by this point the place is so packed you can’t even bring your hand up to give a little cheesy fist pump.
If anything is taken from tonight, it’s that Vice know how to put on a real party (although it be a completely manic one).
P.S. Whoever took a skateboard to this…what were you thinking?
Photos by Christopher Bethell, Theo Cottle, Dan Dennison and Victor Frankowski