Clubbing with James Tran

View of Brooklyn's main room from the front.

Never in the history of my RnB clubbing career for 4 short years have I been bombarded with promotional material for the Grand Opening of this night. Facebook, email, posters, more facebook, more email, more posters. You would expect them to do door knocking as well. The previous event at V-Bar had finally closed and the promoters, Urban Agent, have had success on their 40/40 Saturday Nights at Brooklyn – “why not do a Friday one as well?” They think. It’s an ambitious launch, to replicate the experience of a Shanghai nightclub with waitresses and limo service to the venue from a pick up spot at world square. A friend wants to check it out, so a guestlist was organised, and I was keen to see how Brooklyn has changed since the new promoters took over. So here we go!

Shanghai Nights @ Brooklyn Hotel Sydney

Assessment Time: 10:30 – 3:00am
Website: http://www.urbanagent.com.au
Address: Cnr George and Grovenor Street, Sydney
Dress Code / Door Policy: Dress code applies. Collared shirt for guys. However casual would have gotten away with it tonight.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: $25 Guestlist: Well well well.. this is a special point. One can usually send in a guestlist and get a $5 discount or more. Tonight, as we enter the club, the flat fee was $25, and ALL GUESTLISTS WERE CANCELLED. What the fuck! It was only 10:30. Well, apparently they were allowed to do it, because there were so many fucking people outside. They could have charged $30 or $40 and people would still have probably paid up. Total fucking rort.
Inside: A main bar dance area to hold 100 or so people with DJ elevated a metre or so above the floor. Central circular bar. Second bar at the back to primarily serve the back outdoor courtyard. The courtyard holds 2 or 300 people. A second DJ resides here as well.
Cloak Room: I can’t remember, but it was a reasonable price – $4 or something for an item.
Bar: I did not drink tonight, but they had $3.50 for shot based drinks until midnight. Much more reasonable than $17 vodka red bulls the last time I was here.
DJ: Unknown Music: RnB inside the main room. Mixed as a professional does – choruses only to keep the crowd going with the occasional commercial house song thrown in.
Crowd: Mostly if not all asian. The occasional white person and indian clubber were also represented tonight.
Entertainment: MC for the main room at night. Promoters giving out lanyards the entire night like hotcakes, I suspect it was because the lanyards had the old V-Bar “Amber” event printed on them, rendering these lanyards throwaway material. By the end of the night everybody including myself had two of these things. Head promoter is throwing out free T-shirts out to the crowd. Nice. There is also a free shuttle service from world square to Brooklyn, if you book ahead, but why World Square? My suspicion is partly to show all the people lining up ouside of Flow: “Hey, you guys going to Flow, do you get a stretch hummer? nope. we rule and you drool”. That is my conspiracy theory. (Promoters have since dropped the Stretch Hummer promotion). Later around midnight, a dancing chinese dragon came in, which had blinking lights and everything. That was pretty impressive, even though Chinese New Year was last month. Also being the grand opening night, confetti is sprayed everywhere amongst the crowd. It’s hard to not like and hate this place at the same time. To top it off, there’s also a BBQ out in the back. They’ve gone all out here.
Atmosphere: Packed like sardines inside, smokey in the back outside area. Inside the vibe was good, but still too packed for my liking. Keep reading for more details on my thoughts on this whole setup

Nom Nom BBQ

(continue reading…)

Good Vibrations Sydney 2010

I won two tickets to Good vibrations 2010 in a 25 words or less competition. ( I wrote a very clever line which I shall keep secret ). Matty made me enter the competition, so I gave the second ticket to him as reward. It was pretty hot midday so we bought some sombreros and awesome hologram sunnies at Market City and suddenly we were ready – so here we go!

Good Vibrations Festival @ Centennial Park

Assessment Time: 16:00 – 22:00 (closing time)
Website: http://www.gvf.com.au
Address: Centennial Park Sydney
Dress Code / Door Policy: Anything goes, no dress code.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: Prepaid tickets were $145 each. I won tickets to the show today.
Inside: There were 5 official big areas for the acts to appear. There were also 2 smaller sponsored areas for dancing as well.
Cloak Room: $5 per item
Bar: $8 light beers, $10 smirnoffs. Thanks to the cool weather, there weren’t so many people lining up for a bar, and we had some booze in our hands within 3 minutes of lining up.
Bathroom Line: Appalling at about 20 minutes
Acts: Salt-N-Pepa, Armand Van Helden, DJ Crazee, Aston Shuffle were the main acts we visited today. Other acts included Busta Rhymes, Naughty by Nature. The Killers and Friendly Fires (I was dying to see Friendly Fires) had pulled out of the Sydney show.
Music: A mix of Indie Rock, Hip Hop, and House
Atmosphere: Despite the pullouts, the atmosphere was buzzing throughout the whole day. People are everywhere and its quite good. Later in the early evening it starts to rain but not too hard, but it rains enough for people to get out their ponchos. Instead of being a downer, people embrace the rain and keep dancing and singing along. The rain is also a huge welcome as earlier it was pretty stinking hot earlier in the afternoon.

Videos:

Salt-N-Pepa : Let’s talka bout Sex + Man Dancing on Tent

Everyone is cheering for this guy more than Salt N Pepa – hilarious – The poor guy was most likely kicked out, but for immortal fame in the eyes of thousands? Sure, why not.

(continue reading…)