I wanted to post this verbatim from the people behind BLOC, as I think it accurately summarises the ethos behind the already-legendary BLOC parties, and provides a mantra for what partying should be all about. Forget corporate cashing in – this is about people sharing the music they love, any way they can.

BLOC DJs are playing this Sunday 2 May at the thrice-yearly Eastern Electrics at the vast Union Car Park in Suffolk Street. Get tickets here.

BLOC started in an attic above a bad nightclub next to a river in Norwich. We were so young we weren’t allowed in to set up because the bouncers didn’t believe we were eighteen – which is fair enough because we weren’t. In between interminable equipment failures we bust out the dance floor electro and techno bass from Detroit, Miami and London that we had been hearing on trips to London at clubs like WANG and The Haywire Sessions.

Everybody who goes to underground club nights likes them – they’re brilliant – but there was something about it that just spoke to us. We alternated between getting the train to London where we’d go to these hi-tech parties in the East End with going to rig-it-yourself raves on old pig farms in Norfolk on the weekends in between.

BLOC was us matching up the DIY ethos behind setting up sound systems in unexpected places with the the white-hot sounds we were hearing in the big city. So we set up parties in windmills, in boats on the Broads, in ex-military bunkers and in fields during the summer months in Norfolk and then spent the rest of the year getting BLOC moving as a club night in our new adoptive home of Brighton.

Times were hard in Brighton. We were totally and utterly broke, sharing a five bedroom house with 26 people and racks of audio equipment. We used to ride to and from the Volks nightclub on old ladies bikes that we had found in the street, handing out home-made flyers. But it was all we cared about and we went at it as hard as we possibly could, flyering, postering, partying and signing-on with a vengeance.

BLOC built up a head of steam quickly in Brighton. The people rose up and responded to our heart-felt immersion in the underground sounds we were pushing once a month at the Volks club. We never really had any superstar guests, but soon we were mobbed down on the seafront every month without fail. When the club shut in the morning everyone would spill out on to Brighton beach and carry on till it was time to go back to ours.

Well anyway when you’re on to a good thing you feel it and we realised that BLOC was on a roll. Every month when we threw a BLOC club night it ended up lasting all weekend anyway – more people were getting turned away than could get in the Volks and besides, we knew that back home there was a cash strapped Pontins holiday park out in the forgotten hinterland of coastal south Norfolk. In 2006, on a whim, we cancelled the milk, packed up our records, got in the Volvo and bombed back to Norfolk. Holed up in a wooden Gypsy caravan deep in the wilderness, we carefully plotted BLOC’s next move. We made that caravan our office for more than two years and by the end of our stay there, we had fixed most of its leaks and were happily convinced that we’d managed to kill the mouse.

Festival promoters at that time underestimated the fervent desire of the masses to bear witness to fine, powerful music that reaffirmed themselves as participants in the human race. What was offered, especially to the UK festival market, was an unending slurry of pap featuring the same inoffensive headliners, belting out the seasons vom-along anthems at increasingly forgettable plots of waterlogged land outside provincial towns. Everything closed early, the beer was warm and it was impossible to watch the highlights without wondering if there was a single soul coming close to enjoying themselves. Many of these festivals are bankrupt now.

We thought, just go all-out. Take the finest underground acts on Earth, get hold of a holiday park so that no one has to sleep face down in muddy brown water, run the thing right the way through till morning and bob’s your cousin’s mother’s live-in-lover. You’ve got a festival concept that’s so radical the public just will sit up and take notice.

We just believed so utterly that this would work, that when we sauntered into the bank and asked to borrow more money than I had ever dreamed existed, when they said yes, I wasn’t even surprised. Looking back, it takes my breath away that when we offered our cash flow forecast to the local business manager, he waved it away telling us “I don’t want to look at that. It’s boring”. The cheque turned up in the post soon after. I think that it might have been his last day in that job.

So went at it, throwing the bank’s money at what we were convinced was about to be the best rave the world had ever known. We were spellbound when Kool Keith and Autechre said, we like what you’re doing – we’ll headline your first ever festival. It was like year-zero, a bomb going off – BLOC went overnight from a wicked, chaotic, shambolic, overcrowded club on Brighton beach to a festival with an international reach and superstar headliners. BLOC 07 sold out capacity, and just to show it wasn’t a fluke we repeated the trick in 2008.

Then, it was like the Volks all over again. We were selling out way in advance, and besides wanted to showcase more music than the three original stages would allow. So much music was blowing up all around us and if we were going to give the public a healthy dose of all of it, we just needed more stage time and a substantially increased capacity. So, we upgraded to the Butlins resort in Minehead. Now we’re playing with six stages, 6000 people, a hundred+ acts, three nights – it’s enough to make your head spin but honestly, and truthfully – the soul of it still feels a bit like that first attic in
Norwich.

Top five BLOC venues of all time, in no particular order;
1. The seven-floor, fully intact coastal windmill, complete with wild Norfolk ravers dancing on the top of it, clinging to the sails in the middle of a gale.
2. A working Paddle Steamer which chugged several hundred of us round the Norfolk Broads one Summer eve with a couple of bars, a pair of decks, a grossly oversized sound system for the occasion and a visibly anxious Captain.
3. Volks nightclub on the Brighton seafront – abandon hope, inhibitions and any thoughts you may have of returning to work at any time in the following week. The mezzanine DJ platform once memorably collapsed midway through and landed on my boss’ head. I stopped working at the call centre that weekend to do BLOC full time.
4. Pontins in Hemsby – sadly, BLOC finished this place off. It never really recovered from the festival that was held there in 2008 and had to close its doors for good soon after.
5. Butlins resort in Minehead – like Moses leading his people to the promised land, BLOC has now arrived at the most futuristic hyperleisure complex in the planet. It’s a small town built up around five interconnected super clubs.