“I can’t believe he pulled it off, he really pulled it off!” said a man we’d met thirty seconds before, whooping and grabbing us around the shoulders. We were at the Red Bull Music Academy presents Major Laser Soundsystem party during the Notting Hill Carnival, and it was the Monday so everybody was letting things go to their heads. Eventually we established that our new friend was the cousin of the proprietor of the car park where the party was taking place, and if we’d been him, we’d have been proud too. The party was going off! Not just because Diplo and Switch are amongst the most energetic and inventive deejay/producers in the world right now. Not just because the dancers were giving it some serious dance hall schwing. And not just because of the crowd (although what on earth did we look like to the tube train that slowed down as it was passing us by? Perhaps not as fierce as we felt, but fierce!). Backstage we drank Red Stripe and tried to steal biscuits from the rider table (we say “tried”: a big hand-written sign imploring us not to was easily enough to stop us. What softies). Best bit: hanging with the great dub and reggae pioneer Lee Scratch Perry, who’s 74 if he’s a day. Here he is pictured with a random skull on a stick he/someone had left leaning against the sofa. We never did get to the bottom of that one.
