Live Review: Flight Facilities

Another February, another Fringe and another Friday night. It was time for one of Adelaide's feature festival venues, The Royal Croquet Club, to get its 2016 on. Once again at the thriving centre of Adelaide's festival geography, the RCC continues to refine its layout, and while perhaps a little lighter on the eclectic character of previous years, the use of the Tarndanyangga space continues to impress. Sydney DJs of the sky, Flight Facilities, flew in to guide an enormous crowd through the emergency procedures for safely taking-off, getting high on tight tunes and coming back on down. The DJ set took a packed crowd through a tour of funk and soul of yesteryear, swaying and slinking through from sensual '70s soul through to more well-known '80s pop hits made party perfect.

At what will likely be the year's biggest garden party, it was of course all about the crowd; plenty of fine folks dressed to casually impress flooded the lawns of the RCC. Spirits were sky high as Flight Facilities stepped to the decks, throwing out airline captains' hats, as is custom.

Our captains for the evening brought about some significant dancefloor turbulence with a host of golden-oldens, twisted with some new-school spice, all set against the newly constructed, monolithic ghetto blaster stage. Surprise spins of Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and even Paul Simon, made for an unlikely, if much beloved, base for some groovetacular mixing, resulting in a whimsical, nostalgic set, well-aimed at the young and old alike.

A few gentle refrains of Flight Facilities' own tracks peppered the set, notably the vocal chorus of Clair De Lune over the top of the music of Don't Stop Till You Get Enough; it was an interesting effect, but the fit wasn't snug. As with many DJ sets, it's likely the crowd would have responded overwhelmingly positively to FF dropping some of their original tracks in a more complete form.

The recently politically vocal Sydney maestros rounded out their impressive performance by softly dipping their toes in the crowd for a gentle spot of surfing, before winding up the journey with an ultra uplifting mix of John Paul Young's Love Is In The Air — and so it was as the good people of Adelaide floated off on wings of anticipation for the Fringe that is to come.