Avicii Live at the Turf Club (Sunburn Arena Tour)

Sunburn in Mumbai- a seeming ‘un-possibility’ that happened to magically appear in the midst  of the Racecourse at Mahalaxmi and boy did it almost look the same or what? Nearly ten thousand Avicii-maniacs thronged the open air space for one of the biggest names to grace the country.

The evening started with Shaan, who’s improved on his mixing but for some reason just banged it from the word go. It was fun, but with yet another person who was going to come and bring the house down—it did end up tiring a few folks.

Miss Nine popped in soon after for another banging ‘opener’, dropping massive hits like the Fedde le Grand mix of Coldplay’s ‘Paradise’ and ‘Crush on You’. She took the festival mood from the word go and dropped bigroomer after bigroomer, and the five odd ‘k’ who’d come in early were treated to some instant dancing. For a quite longish set and a fickle audience — she gripped ‘em tight by the balls.

Soon after—near the 20:20 mark, in comes the prodigious one-year-and-I’m-top-of-the-world Swede.

The now packed ground wears the near exact look of what the beaches of Goa will look like in a few days time. Though we hope the visuals will change as a few screens conked and the seemingly last minute low-opacity ‘I love Percept’ additions to the actual visuals did not look appealing — one bit.

Back to the music, ‘Fade into Darkness’ brought every vocal chord out first-up and watching that is some sight. Doesn’t happen too often at EDM gigs of this scale — and it looks beautiful.

Mood suddenly lifts a track or two later as ‘Kick out the Epic Motherfucker’ from Dada Life brings the dirty electro in the set and the predominantly kiddo crowd lap it up. It continued with Dirty South and Thomas Gold’s ‘Alive’ in Kate Elsworth’s opiate voice and the singing chords came out again.

The sound got bigger with Avicii’s mash of ‘Coming Home’ with ‘Flash’, the trumpet-chained bass line going perfect after lyrical drops. The singing continued and the bar continued wearing an empty look as Nadia Ali’s ‘Pressure’ plonked in. Almost everyone seemed to know every track he played tonight—doesn’t happen too often.

Next up came ‘Bromance + I Found U’ and boy did the crowd explode. Manic air-piano-ing. The set suddenly stops and he drops ‘Swede Dreams’—it’s a little off-putting to see a DJ of his prominence do that.

And then comes his biggest hit of the year ‘Levels’ and I frankly don’t understand why this fairly decent melody is so catchy, it’s fairly generic in most ways. But it has a rather satisfying effect on the crowd, who absolutely blitz their minds within.

The gig in many ways was a success, considering the amount of ‘public’ that turned up, but the entry lines were shoddily managed and bottlenecked and screens going off can’t be excused. The set was more to please than anything and while we know Avicii’s underground productions are far more pleasing to the ears—he came to do a job and did that pretty well.

Photo credit: Sunburn Festival