Industry Boy’s version of SAMC

Industry Boy’s version of SAMC

11 March, 2008 | 12.05PM

• Written by: Industry Boy
• Filed under: Music News: samc

Industry Boy’s trip to the South American Music Conference started with some helpful advice from previous visitors to Buenos Aires.

The list of To Dos is short and to the point.

*Eat steak
*Go to an underground afterhours club called Cocoliche
*Meet a beautiful Argentinean girl (there are loads of them apparently)

Steak wouldn’t be a problem and Cocoliche looked like an easy one, so I put all my concentration into the final and most important task.

God, my mum, or the girl at check-in must have found my To Dos list though, because from the moment we left Denver everything was working against my mojo.

First we missed our connection flight because some bastard at Continental forgot to do his job and oil the flaps of the airplane.

The plan B offered to us by Continental was more like a plan E: instead of flying straight down south they sent us west by about 2000 miles to Los Angeles, and then to Mexico City, before a 10 hour flight to Buenos Aires.

The journey took 30 hours altogether, and Industry Boy came out of the other end looking and smelling like a tramp who had been pooed on by pigeons for 12 hours.

The ladies would not be impressed but it was nothing a decent shower and a fresh lot of clothes couldn’t cure. Except the clothes never showed up, or the soap.

Despite waiting feverishly next to the opening where the conveyer belt spits out its black plastic lane of hope at Buenos Aires arrivals the luggage never arrived.

“$100 US? You must be joking!” I shout to an airline official of Mexicana later.

“I’ve been traveling for 30 hours, you lose my luggage, and now you offer me 100 measly dollars to buy a whole new wardrobe?”

“Si signor,” she says, smiling helpfully.

“But I er…have a very important speech to do at the university of Buenos Aires and I need to buy a suit,” Industry Boy lies.

As I say it, I imagine a crowd of Argentinean beauties in a bar laughing and pointing at me in a clown suit, the opposite of the suave sophistocat I want to be.

“Si signor, but that is all we have,” she responds.

Fabulous. I’ll never pick up a cute Argentinean girl now.

Once at the hotel, Industry Boy weighs up the options.

It’s 1am, there’s an SAMC pre party going on down the road, and I’m wearing the same clothes as I was two days ago.

At the very least, I need some new socks and a tshirt.

Thankfully a friendly bloke from a record label, who is sharing the same hotel room with Industry Boy, lends over the essentials.

Once inside Bahrein, a trendy underground club in the heart of the city, the nastiness of traveling half way around the world with no sleep kicks in, but Industry Boy uses whiskey to balance it out.

Funny how life becomes glossy and easily flickable like a high end fashion magazine, when staring out through the cool dark brown liquid.

There’s some trippy techno coming out of the speakers and in the dark smoke of the dancefloor there are vague shadows of female beauty moving about.

Out back in the bar area, the token that Argentinean women are stunning seems to be true – there are gorgeous models standing tall, cute trendy petite girls giggling and tanned faces flicking smiles.

“Oh my Gawd, did you just see her dude?” some American tourist shouts to one of his inebriated friends, pointing manically like an excited child at a new toy, as a girl with long dark brown hair silks off into the crowd.

Every man might be thinking the same thing, but the drunken desperado tourist was not going to impress any girl in here tonight.

So Industry Boy decides tonight is not the night for courtship nightclub style (falling asleep in the toilet does that to you) and heads back to the hotel.

The next day the pathetic $100 offered by the airline doesn’t stretch too far.

There aren’t many decent clothes shops about (the problem with being a tourist is you don’t know where anything is, and head towards the brightest light like moths), so I settle for some mediocre army combat trousers, a couple of wife beaters and some new boxers.

At least Industry Boy can realize a boy band dream tonight.

Dinner at least goes does well, and whilst the first drips of bloody juice ooze out of a pure Argentinean fat steak, I cross off the first of the To Dos. It’s the best steak I’ve ever had.

Back once again at club Bahrein there’s more totty than the night before.

But there’s also loads of industry heads and DJs throwing drinks down like it’s the Wild West; there’s going to be a fight tomorrow and some won’t last.

Before long Industry Boy is sucked into a drunken raucous stupor of smoozing and floozing.

The head starts spinning, and before long IB is in the DJ booth dancing and being graciously out of control.

There’s a cute girl in the booth and she smiles at Industry Boy, before tossing her long curly hair over her shoulder, the signs women use to express interest don’t change between cultures it seemed.

“All my friends have left me and I have no idea where my hotel is - when the club closes can you take me back to my hotel?” I ask her sweetly, a half-truth statement of bravado.

It was not a lie that my friends had left me, but a fib that I didn’t know where my hotel was; even a drunk Industry Boy could manage to remember to turn right out of the club and walk 500 steps down the road.

The tourist in need however, has a friend indeed, and before long we are in the street with the sun up, and the streets of central Buenos Aires are busy with traffic.

“Where’s your hotel then?” she asks, grabbing my arm as we stumble up the cobbled streets bumping into sign posts and business people hurrying to work.

Thirty minutes later, we’re back at the hotel in a brand new room, staring at a pristine bed like daring explorers plotting the best way to cross a frozen lake of unknown depth or thickness.

There was no way I wanted to take her to the room I was sharing with the other lot, so I had checked us into a new room, much to the confusion of the receptionist downstairs.

At this point, there should have been some wild Champagne and strawberry romp, but unfortunately Industry Boy fell asleep somewhere in between kissing her and trying to take off her bra.

I awoke at some hazy point in the mid afternoon.

Tick tock; flip flop, the mouth was dry as.

The sun was cascading through the large windows covering the bed in a bright white warmth, the kind that you imagine heaven might be made of.

Asleep next to me is the girl, an elegant dark brown island of Argentinean youthfulness, but before there is a chance to take it all in the phone rings.

Already late for a lunch meeting, there was no time to finish where we had left off.

She gives me a warm kiss and then we split into separate elevators like two halves of a coconut, she the unreachable juicy fleshy part grown from the warmth of the sun, me the hairy, dry and dirty outsider.

A few hours later Industry Boy has forgotten all about the Argentinean lady because he’s just seen a DJ piss into a cup on the main stage of the SAMC rave.

“I was dying for a fucking piss but I couldn’t run off in the middle of my set, so I pissed into a cup,” explains the DJ afterwards.

We both laugh at the thought that in a minute Ferry Corsten or some other trance DJ might just take a swig of it on stage mistakenly thinking it to be a cup of Red Bull.

Soon we’re in a room in a hotel next to the convention centre of the SAMC, which is being used as a staging area for VIPs.

In the room is Christopher Lawrence, Anthony Pappa, a very sweaty Ferry Corsten and some South American DJs.

Adam Beyer then turns up and it’s interesting to observe the way the power shifts in the room from one spinner to the next.

They all seem to get on, even though on paper techno and trance people are very, very different beings.

“I was just backstage of the techno arena and it sounded like the same song for one hour,” Ferry Corsten tells Industry Boy.

“You know, take the bass out, put the bass back in. Bleep, bleep.”

The rave turns out to be a sweaty mess, but towards the end Industry Boy picks up some English girls (of all the nationalities in the world, why did they have to be British?), and soon we’re on our way to the infamous Cocoliche club for an afterparty.

One of the Brits is surprisingly cute and she’s got a smart-ass mouth on her, the kind of sarcastic English humour that can sometimes be fun to deal with, and at other times just plain annoying.

Cocoliche turns out to be a messy banging techno party, with Beyer, Carola and co. taking the 300 or so trendy heads down a thrashing path of no return.

We smuggle a bottle of vodka into the afterparty that we had swiped from the VIP hotel - the extra large pockets in those army combat trousers coming in handy.

The sun is shining outside, but in Cocoliche it’s dark and throbbing.

There are some strange quirky weirdos in the club, a sure sign that we’re on the very fringes of Buenos Aires’ society, partying with freaks.

Task no.2 complete.

A couple of hours later, we’re back at the hotel smoking and drinking with the British girls, but Industry Boy ends up getting too wasted to make a move on the smart-mouth Brit - downing straight vodka tends to do that to you.

She flirts for a bit, but when she realizes that Industry Boy is out for the count, they make their excuses and leave.

There was no English girl listed on the To Dos anyway.

The next day after dinner Industry Boy calls the good Samaritan Argentinean girl who took me back to the hotel the night before last and she arrives a few hours later for a drink.

We head to a bar next to the river and drink Champagne.

For the next few hours we talk and kiss like old lovers, as if the two halves of the coconut had been hastily glued back together.

Before long, the bubbles in the Champagne start to work.

“You are a good boy, but I can’t come home with you,” whispers the Argentinean girl, before straddling my lap and biting my face off.

Women send out conflicting messages here too apparently.

“You kiss funny,” she says, “Not enough…” she says pointing to her tongue.

The more slobber the better in Argentina, then.

Appropriately, a mini Madonna then comes onto the TV and starts singing ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’, a line Industry Boy is repeating to the girl some 12 hours later the next morning.

This time the hotel bed isn’t so pristine.

As Industry Boy leaves Buenos Aires, I get a pen out of my bag and take one last look at the To Dos list.

The third task needs ticking off, but somehow it doesn’t feel right.

Because whilst juicy steaks and quality techno afterparties are a must-do in Buenos Aires, Argentinean girls are a permanent To Do for Industry Boy now.

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