Award ceremonies are known for being messy. You attend. And get off your tits. Just like Brandon Block at the Brits. This is messier than most, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s like a Gordon Ramsey recipe. Cooked by Edwina Currie. The ingredients are right, live performances from new bands, cutting-edge DJ sets and a venue with an enviable reputation, but the final product is shambolic.

Admittedly the awards ceremony is finished by the time they start letting joe punters like us in. It’s wetter than a wet Wednesday in Manchester, but überclub’s Fabric’s response is not to hurry the crowd along. Instead select members of the queue, i.e. not me and my mates, are handed umbrellas.

Once inside, our engines require some diesel, so to speak. But their range of lager extends all the way from Staropramen to Stella Artois, not the widest selection for a venue this size. There are three rooms. Rooms one and two host mainly bands, whilst Room three is populated by DJs, largely of the superstar variety in Midfield General, Tim Westwood and Damian Lazarus. 

There are some notable absentees. There’s no Goldie Lookin’ Chain and their presumed replacements, the about-to-explode Kasabian, finish their 15-minute slot at the criminally early time of 8.30pm. The Libertines’ Carl Barat has done a Pete Doherty and gone AWOL. Admittedly, he doesn’t miss much.

Absent Kid impress, to a degree. Musically, they’re competent, influenced by the shoegazing of Ride and early miserablism of Radiohead. But I just can’t dispel the image of this group forming in a music class at one of the country’s leading public schools. Ditto the rockier Tom Vek.

The pick of the bands, to my surprise, is the Leah Wood Group – aside from some odd foibles of Leah’s. She seems to be wearing one of her father Ronnie’s Rolling Stone bandmate Keith Richard’s headbands. And despite an upbringing in TW10, her accent is more Richmond, Virginia than Richmond, Surrey. Yet their good-time rock‘n’roll would have bought a tear to Wood senior’s eyes.

Overall, the disc jockeys win out with the Jamaican dancehall leanings of DJ Ransom providing the most danceable tunes.  Later on the decision to play SL2’s classic ‘On a Ragga Tip’ unites the crowd in Room 1 like only a great track can.  Sadly, the emerging talent this event is supposed to showcase don’t deliver anything near as moving.
(2/5)