Mark Knight warms up a Glasgow evening

Mark Knight warms up a Glasgow evening

4 January, 2008 | 1.21PM

• Section: Music News
• Written by: jamiegardiner1

On a cold December evening, the Glasgow masses turned out in force to support Scotland’s premier charity dance event called the M8 Christmas Party — M8 being one of the UK’s leading dance music/lifestyle magazine based here in Scotland.

The event has been running for over five years to raise funds for the local charity Cash for Kids and continues to top the previous events billing.

Local DJs Woody, Fox McLeod and Stereofunk took to the decks first to get the early arriving crowd warmed up.

Playing a mix of soulful house with a Defected vibe, Dennis Ferrer’s ‘Church Lady’ set the tone for what was to follow.

The clubbers soon realised this was no ordinary club night when Defected in the House’s legendary DJ Spen took to the decks.

On the other side of the room, we had Shovell on percussion.

They seemed to feed off each other with kinetic energy, Spen’s soulful beats being replayed and further improvised by Shovell. 

The shirtless bear of a guy decked out in red Indian style body paint gave a performance as crazy-looking as his costume! (If you like your 1990s pop music you might remember Shovell as the drummer/percussionist from the UK group M-People).

Working and teasing the crowd for over an hour, they took the roof off when Spen dropped Mark Knight’s remix of the Derrick May classic ‘Strings of Life’.

Indeed, Mark Knight had just arrived to the venue and was soon making room for himself on the heaving dancefloor to get funky with the rest of us punters!

Before we knew it, Mark Knight took to the decks armed with a selection and deep filthy house and soon had the swelling dancefloor eating out the palm of his hand.

He played current and classic house tracks from D.Ramirez and Bobrov’s ‘Pleasure Me’ to his own ‘Drug Music’ (in this case, the Will Bailey Dirty Carnival Mix).

Things stopped for a second… before the Toolroom Records supremo dropped the Angello and Ingrosso acapella from ‘Be’ and the always up-for it Glasgow crowd went bananas; the look on Mark’s face was a picture as the 800+ crowd roared in approval.

The sign of a good night is when you lose track of time, and tonight simply flew by.

Mark Knight dropped his final tune of the night, an unnamed white label of filthy funk of his own his that will be released in “March sometime”. I pestered him for the name of it to no avail.

Chatting to Mark backstage afterwards, he said that Glasgow has “some of the craziest clubbers in Europe” and he “was very much looking forward to returning to Scotland”.

Which gives us more to look forward to at future parties.

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