Eight Hundred Drunk British People and a Mountain
The bus from Munich to Mayrhofen had empties rolling under the seats before we cleared the city limits. This was nominally a press trip—music editors, winter sports people, PR managers, the usual coalition of people with lanyards—but it had the energy of a school excursion immediately, and not the tame kind. You make friends fast when you’re stuck on a coach for four hours with nowhere to be. Among the temporary clique: Wilson Gonzalez Ochsenknecht, German actor, and his memorably unhinged fiancée Bonnie Strange, whose presence made the whole thing feel considerably less like a work event and considerably more like a situation.
Mayrhofen runs ten party locations during Snowbombing and the crowd—overwhelmingly British, overwhelmingly in costume, uniformly committed—migrates between them with the determination of people who’ve paid for flights and refuse to waste the investment. The place everyone ends up is the Racket Club, a converted sports hall that runs mainly on drum ’n’ bass and the collective momentum of a few hundred people who’ve decided to be somewhere together. The first night was Pendulum. We almost died. That’s not a figure of speech—the set had a physical force to it, the kind that makes you understand why people used to talk about music as dangerous. They were extraordinary in a way that felt faintly personal.
The rest of the week kept pace. Professor Green, Ms Dynamite, 2manydjs doing their calculated chaos thing. Mark Ronson played a daytime set in a palace of ice on the mountain—genuinely absurd, genuinely wonderful, this figure in a DJ booth at 2,500 metres while everyone squinted into the Alpine sun like they’d wandered into a better reality. The Prodigy closed it out with the kind of set that temporarily convinces you your body is optional. Fatboy Slim, Jamie Woon. The lineup was almost unfairly good.
Press trips are usually managed misery—controlled access, managed enthusiasm, a product to push at the end of it. This one felt different, or maybe I stopped caring about the distinction somewhere around the second beer on the bus. The mountain was real. The music was real. The hangover lasted longer than the train ride home.