What’s On previews New Year’s Eve in Dubai, specifically Zero Gravity Dubai Marina featuring Groove Armada and Hot82. Get ticket info.

More…
– Pharrell Williams profile
– NYE deals
– RedFest announcement
– Jazz Festival line-up
– Robbie Williams in AUD
– John Legend in DXB
– New Year’s Eve 2013

Andy Cato and Tom Findlay have been making and playing music together for more than 20 years. They’ve seen superclubs come and go, and superstar DJs rise and fall. And on more than one occasion they’ve survived dance music’s supposed demise.

In that time they’ve released eight studio albums – 13 in total – and are behind some of electronic music’s most enduring tracks (the lilting trombone line on At The River sent festival crowds the world over into raptures). But perhaps most remarkably, they’ve succeed in achieving both chart success with major label releases and remained credible as underground DJs. That’s because Groove Armada exist in two guises.

“Through the ten years we toured with the live band and released albums on various majors,” Cato explains, “we were always DJing. From Sankeys, Zouk or the NY Tunnel to the Space Terrace, and via any after-hours places we could find, the GA thing has always been rooted in the warehouse vibe where it all started.”

Cato is multi-instrumentalist and a jazz musician (that trombone from At The River is all him). And while Groove Armada are best-known for their work as a band, they always return to their to roots as club DJs where surprise is the name of the game.

“There isn’t a ‘usual’ GA show,” Cato says. “Weekends, when we’d close a big festival with the live band, we’d play a basement aftershow somewhere, then do Space terrace on the Sunday. That’s been the way for a long time. Since we wound down the live band at the end of the Black Light tour in 2010, we developed a new type of DJ show in which we control everything, live, from the booth: lights, lasers, visuals, sounds, effects.”

Twenty years in, and Groove Armada are still making it up as they go along.

NEED TO KNOW: HOT82

Hot Since what?
Daley Padley – born 1982 – is better known as Hot Since 82: a deep house DJ-producer from Yorkshire and founder of the label Knee Deep In Sound.

Is he new then?
Not really. Padley began DJing as a teenager, playing clubs for 12 hours at a time while still just 17. In 2006, as part of Leeds-based night Glasshouse, he was resident at Amnesia in Ibiza. He became disillusioned with dance music for a while, but reinvented himself as Hot Since 82 in 2012. His rise, since, has been nothing short of meteoric.

What does he sound like?
He’s perhaps best known for his ubiquitous remix of Green Velvet’s Bigger Than Prince, arguably the biggest underground tune of 2013. Somebody Everybody, meanwhile, is pure hands-in-the-air house, with its joyous looped-up vocals and shimmering synths. For something a little beefier, try the driving, swelling sounds of Time Out.

December 31
Zero Gravity, Sky Dive Dubai Drop Zone, Dubai, 10pm to 3am, Dhs350 in advance, Dhs400 on the door. Tel: (04) 3990009. Taxi: Sky Dive Dubai Drop Zone Dubai. 0-gravity.ae