Now it's on - 2 May 2009

After ending Sovereign Academy in July last year I didn't throw any rock and roll dance parties. Until the first Saturday of this month.

The night wasn't officially my return to the world of promotion, instead it was intended as a kind of prototype for the follow up to Sovereign.

When I ended Sovereign, I really wanted to come back to kids with something on a whole new level. Something totally unprecedented.

I hadn't thought to much about what that would be for a long time, but "Now It's On" just kinda all fell into place, and I think it worked as an awesome way. Joe (of Griet) called me up to say he'd booked Tings and Times for the 2nd and that we should do something really fun with the date.

The inspiration for the part came from "Now It's On" a music video for Granddaddy:



...and this Professor Muggles, my hamster:



So yeah, the idea was replace the geriatric boyscout with Professor Muggles and, instead of powering the gear of a power-pop band, he'd be powering up the a bad-ass TV-screen-faced robot. This is how it turned out:



The party itself landed up been very different from anything I'd ever been involved in before. Collaborating with the Griet kids and my friend Cameron, I think we put together something quite special. We didn't have any visuals, which meant that in the lead up to the event, for the first time ever, I wasn't furiously animating away right up till the party started. Instead I was furiously turning cardboard boxes into robots.

The humans to robots ratio on the night was quite pathetic. In fact I can give you a basic run-down of most the robots in the place:

Richard came in an awesome outfit that highlighted the difference between the awesomeness of robots and the hairiness of humans:





... this was a big hit with the ladies:



Cameron came as Medi-bot:



This was the girl version of The Tinman:



I was a big box-bot:



My sister Tess got roboted:



Kidofdoom painted themselves silver:



And Colin was a kind of aeroplane robot:



... this was also a pretty big hit with the ladies...



There were some other mechanical friends in the crowd, but they were sadly un-documented. All in all it was an awesome night, and I must mention that this was largely infleunced by the mood set at the start of the night by Mr. Nathan Scott Phillips.



NSP made his Pretoria debut at Now It's On. He's the newest DJ up here - something we've all been waiting for too long to see. Prior to becoming an awesome DJ, the Space Cowboy could be danced to while he played bass and sung for Cenurion Post-Pop Band Greenisforturbo.

Nathan has a free mix up for you to download - I highly recommend it's blues/funk/rap/pop-core goodness:

Nathan Scott Philips - Honey for Honnies

And with that piece of auditory awesomeness, I leave you with a few more photos of the party:



P.S. Check out all of all of Patrick Dinneen's photos from the night HERE!