Friday, April 24’s DXBeach marks some notable firsts: it is the first big UAE beach festival of the year and the first event to be hosted on a previously unused stretch of sand at SkyDive Dubai hotspot Zero Gravity.
But it is also a notable finale – the last big all-day dance happening before things calm down for the sweaty summer season (we can’t wait for Blended, a week later, but that’s a whole other thing entirely).
There have been inevitable comparisons between DXBeach and that other, currently-on-hiatus Dubai beach festival, Sandance. They’re not unfounded – three of DXBeach’s six international acts have played at Sandance (Danny Howard, Nightmares on Wax and – twice – Sneaky Sound System). And the promoter Think, which was the engine behind Sandance, a brand name owned by Atlantis, is powering this new event.
Still, DXBeach is markedly more boutique – with a maximum capacity of 5,000, whereas Sandance was capped at anything up to 15,000 – and has a bigger emphasis on chilling, with water sports and free massages in addition to dance-floor raving.
With talk of a follow-up event come the cooler autumn nights, this one is bound to kick off, with Mark Ronson heading the bill.
The super-producer has always been hot, but right now, he’s burning up like a pair of vintage flares doused in petrol.
The last time Ronson was this scorching, we reckon, was in February 2008, when he took home the Grammy for Producer of the Year. Why? For making the world dance to the retro sounds of 1960s soul again, both on Amy Winehouse's classic Back to Black – still the 13th best-selling album in UK history – and his own, celeb-heavy Version.
Ronson turned his attention to the 1970s to pilfer from for the veritable earworm Uptown Funk, featuring Bruno Mars, which is unquestionably the biggest song of the year so far, reaching No 1 in more than 20 countries and being streamed 15 million times in a single week. The tune is so big, and so good, it has in some ways overshadowed how big and good its parent album is.
A deceptively moreish audio feast, Uptown Special recalls Ronson's assured 2003 hip-hop debut, Here Comes the Fuzz, in the way it ably takes a vintage genre and paints over it with a wantonly Technicolor, widescreen brush.
People still talk about the two nights Ronson played to packed-out crowds in the now-closed Trilogy – in 2010 and 2012 – but right now this guy is sailing in another stratosphere and by spinning to a beachside festival crowd, this one threatens to push things up to 11.
rgarratt@thenational.ae
