Officially 73 people, as the lovely door hand-stamper lady told me, turned out to listen to Artwork play his CDs at Fibbers on 26/10/11. It felt like a lot less. Many artists claim to be unaffected by the amount of people at their gigs; merely happy to play music at all. Yet from the queazy looks on the promoters faces and the unnervingly dry, consuming and dancefloor directed gaze of the Peroni supping Artwork, they were well aware they were playing to a unusually small crowd.
Artwork, the chosen pseudonym for Londoner Arthur Smith, is wonderfully anomalous in the music world. Arf’ was fiddling with electronic sounds before most of us were born and, between working in Big Apple Records and setting up a record label, he became one of the leading figures in garage and dubstep music. However this prominence is often misaligned within the current electronic music listening, pill-popping demographic; as he is better known as the elder statesman of the Magnetic Man trio. Flyers for the event hastened to remind me of this fact. Whilst Magnetic Man’s better known pair, Skream and Benga, seem to embrace the global fame this has brought them, Arthur apparently tours the north of the country playing his CDs to small groups of drunken revellers and kipping in Bed and Breakfast’s afterwards.
But i’m bloody glad he does. Only due to the size of the crowd, was i able to glide to the front and spend most of my time peering at what he was doing behind the decks. Immaculately dressed, Arthur played the most technical and interactive set i’ve ever probably seen. Even if it wasn’t, whilst watching him i forgot about any other DJ i’d gyrated to. Starting off with early ‘90s garage he moved from dubstep, including some thrumming brostep for the masses, before rather casually dropping Benga’s first every dubstep production(extremely rare) into electronica and house. Finishing on a samba record he claimed to ‘only play at his house parties’ and some classic Michael Jackson, it was at this point he offered the crowd to begin karaoke, beaming like a child on Christmas morning. Initially wary of the lack of people in the room, it was clear, from the mid set rolling up of his crisp shirt sleeves to the intimate track selection, that Artwork was impressed by the energy of the few people left in the room. We were impressed by him. Rather than play wobbles at us for a few hours, Artwork gave us, and excuse the pretentious musical metaphor, a history lesson in electronic music, entertained and ultimately had a lot of fun himself.