Archive for November, 2009

Where do I start… Well, Dubai has dubai-ious internet. Sure, start with a pun. Yes, there was little to no internet in Dubai, without paying an arm and a leg for it since Wednesday. There were grandiose plans to update this blog every day, even post twitter photos instantaneously. Well, instead I sit here, exhausted and in London after another night flight, recanting the last five days. So, grab a juice (or a beer if you’re in a hotel as it goes in Dubai) and enjoy.

We landed at 5AM on Thursday morning. Dubai, itself, is quite difficult to explain in one way, and remarkably easy in another. On the surface, it is one big shopping mall. Every amenity available is in one mall or another, from an ice rink to a ski slope, aquapark, restaurants and of course, entertainment. A few more quick truths; you can only drink in hotel bars, and alcohol is super expensive. A metro in Dubai opened on September 9th, 2009 – at 9:09AM, but it’s mostly useless. We took it once and got lost, turning a 20 minute trip into two hours. Instead, Dubai is the city of the taxi – they are cheap, plentiful and useful. Nothing is within walking distance here, there is no pedestrian culture whatsoever. Instead, you cab to a hotel, there is a mall under the hotel, a venue within or near the mall and so on. It’s a weird place. Really weird.

But it’s also a fantastic place. It’s hotter than chicken soup, all the time, is incredibly multicultural and has some of the loveliest locals imaginable. Everyone is polite here. And since 8 out of 10 citizens are expats, there is a lot to do, albeit it’s hidden in traffic jams, motorways or shopping malls.

But we are here for a music conference. And not just any other conference. It’s the first indie music conference and festival of its kind in Dubai. And Dubai is all the better for it. Chatting with locals shows how important an idea this is for them. They really do appreciate the effort going into the festivities here, even though nothing runs smoothly. Instead, from start-to-finish it’s a wild ride, and one that simply got crazier and more interesting and the days passed.

So we landed at 5AM. The hotel was booked up (even though we booked a room), so we were upgraded for the night. Upgrading to them means a couch bed in the corner of a room with glasses instead of plastic. Up at 9:30AM and in a cab to a massive hotel, the Emirates Towers, for the conference. A slew of countries and companies are represented here, from EMI Middle East to NOKIA, ATC Management and Chugg Entertainment in Australia. I sit on a panel discussing international touring, before we return to the hotel for a nap. Dan Mangan is playing later in the afternoon, and we’re tired. Here’s why.

Unfortunately, the third member of our party, the wonderful and talented Kae Sun, did not make our flight. He encountered visa problems in London, which left him stranded in Heathrow for 36 hours. It all worked out in the end and Kae Sun played both his shows, but no amount of verbal outpouring will explain the emotions we all encountered fighting for his paperwork. We laughed, we cried, we slammed fists into the wall, we embraced.. And we got him here. Just Friday afternoon instead of early Thursday morning.

Dan’s concerts were scheduled at Festival City. This is a big shopping mall, with a marina in the back housing a festival of sorts, or a carnival to us. The stage was in the marina, literally – a floating stage. You had to be boated out to it, while the crowd was on the boardwalk watching. There were couches and beanbag chairs to enjoy the fun, while the artist was twenty feet away on a barge, so to speak. It was gorgeous, odd, spectacular, confusing and unique all at once. And this is where both Dan Mangan and Kae Sun performed all their gigs.

Dan was fantastic, performing to rowdy Dubai locals and a smattering of delegates at 9:45PM, a set he repeated on Saturday evening. Kae Sun performed on the ‘rock and roll’ stage on Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon. CDs were sold, fans were won over and laughs were had, as three or four times during each set a large boat passed, creating a wave that sent the stage into flux, shaking it like a martini. Watching Dan and Kae sing whilst holding back laughter as their stage shakes was an experience.

Aside from that, the conference continued through panels and roundtables, while we all experienced other bands performing at the festival’s main stage, the Irish Village. This was a lake 362 days a year, that was drained and boarded up, so a stage could be planted on it. It bordered a tennis stadium and Dubai’s largest Irish pub – hence the Irish Village. We watched The Wombats, The Automatic and the Super Furry Animals, as well as club sets at another venue (in a hotel of course) by We Have Band and Ladytron.

In addition, we touristed. Dubai is weird. I know I’ve said that, but it needs to be said. There is very little definitive city centre. Everything is huge, so much so that it’s a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone who says they couldn’t make their buildings the biggest, their city the shiniest. There are no parks (that I saw), few sidewalks and everywhere you look the city is a construction side. The malls are unimaginably huge. The Dubai Mall, which borders the Burj aj-Dubai (the largest building in the world) has a fountain show that beats the Belagio running every twenty minutes, as well as a 3 story aquarium in one of its concourses. The largest candy store in the world borders the aquarium, which is a stones throw from the ice rink – international size.

In addition, we went to the palm. It was £200 to swim with the dolphins. Next year, definitely. The waterpark, one of the world’s biggest, was only £40. There’s also an aquarium there – it had several sharks in it. The palm, of course, is the paramecium looking spate of buildings that are on reclaimed land. The main building is called Atlantis, and it was swanky, shiny and like everything in Dubai, completely faultless.

And this was the beautiful and odd hypocrisy of this place. It was the true result of east meeting west – the hajib carrying a Prada bag, or the dish dosh adorned Muslim chowing down into KFC. Everything was a chain, absolutely everything. They even had a slew of Second Cup chains. There was a small Canadian flag in the second cup logo. Dan and I took a picture. Plus, the top selling movie in Dubai was Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Too funny.

While the festival wasn’t perfect, it deserves heaps of applause for happening in the first place. De La Soul, Echo and the Bunnymen, Bloc Party and a few others didn’t make it to Dubai, schedules were changed on a whim and sets inserted into previous quiet moments – we had to truly be open to anything, and we were.

And as such, what an experience Dubai Soundcity was. It should happen again next year, and I hope Canadian Blast Presents is there to join in on the festivities. If so, come hell or high water, I’m swimming with the dolphins.

Pictures coming. We were all camera happy, to more to come. I also filmed the fountain twice.Dubai… whoah. Indeed.

Oh, Dan’s rendition of ‘Robots’ to end his set was interrupted by the call to prayer. It was one of the funniest moments in a long, long time, Chris Cooke from CMU says it perfectly here…
DAN MANGAN
So, I rushed across Dubai on Saturday night to try and see Canadian singer songwriter Dan Mangan do his thing. But, having spent most of the day telling everyone how I’d yet to come across one of these famous Dubai traffic jams all the locals talked about, our cab driver drove straight into deadlock.

That, added to by an eight minute discussion with our driver, on arrival at the Festival City venue, as to whether this large shopping centre was really the place we were meant to be (“we’re looking for a lagoon with a stage in it, right?”, our cab driver looked perplexed), meant that by the time we found the right stage Dan was reaching the close of his set. Still, we’d get to hear the set closer ‘Robots’, that was certain. Except, wait, what’s that in the distance? Oh, the tea time call to prayer at the shopping mall’s prayer room. Sorry Dan, Mr Sound Guy says, however good your Robots may be, Allah wouldn’t want you drowning out the prayers. I will miss Mangan’s London set at the Canadian Blast event at Puregroove Records on West Smithfield in London tonight (from 7pm) not because of jams or prayer, but academic commitments. But you guys should go and enjoy his cleverly-penned toe-tapping sing-along repertoire when he plays with fellow Canada-based musician Kae Sun at the record store tonight. Or, if your traffic reporter or god of choice says otherwise, join me by streaming said quality tunes on this here

MySpace. www.myspace.com/danmangan / www.unlimitedmedia.co.uk