As the month of February shuts down, we thought of sharing with you our piece of Ultra SA 2018! We had a jolly good and as always the best DJ in Africa set us on fire. Shame on you if you don’t know who we are talking about.
The turnout was abnormally quiet for a few hours after we arrived until we learnt that people could not get into Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some of them had been standing there for almost 4 hours. The delay in letting people in was caused by scanners not working. The organizers tried to hide this but Twitter went a bit wild with that and they were forced to let people in. Due to this delay during day-time, the food stalls were not as busy, ‘watering holes’ and merchandise stalls were quiet too. After 1800hrs when the crowd was let in, the party started and it got WILD. Muscle men everywhere, hot women in hot shorts, people of all races. In essence, it was a global crowd!
By the time Afrojack got on stage, there was a better turnout at the main stage, the crowd was going crazy and Afrojack delivered like the master he is. At the same time, Kayle Cassim was rocking the Samsung Stage at which we had to dash of too as well. The man mixed the Super Mario theme song in his set and look, if I could break dance, I would have spun on my head he mixed it in so well. The playlist from then was as fun as a theme park over school holidays, we moved from one stage to another trying to keep up with all great performances.
However, we covered as much as we could with Black Coffee shut the house down! We were in a trance at the Resilience Stage, we couldn’t go out of the hall for a whole hour and 15 min. He played current songs from Omunye phez’ Komunye travelling back in time to house Daft Punk’s One More Time. He then shut the stage down by playing a Armin Van Buuren song mixed with a deep drum beat. The crowd was in awe, one could power up and fly a jet plane with the energy in the arena at that time. He even played slightly longer whilst Dubfire was giving him props.
Unfortunately for Dubfire though, when Black Coffee got off stage, so did the crowd. Everyone ran to the main stage to catch Axwell & Ingrosso who also brought the house down with their finale. By this time it was way past midnight and quite a lot of the crowd were zombified. Axwell & Ingrosso never disappoints anyway. They played all the hits including You Got The Love and Somebody that I used to know, not forgetting Don’t You Worry Child. The whole experience was out of this world.
When we left though, we found out there were issues with security. The network coverage was so bad and people struggled to get Uber and Taxify. Girls were the most targeted and that did not end very nicely. There were a few cars broken into and a few lost people who were too drunk to care for themselves lay on the grass soaking the whole night in.
In as much as that dampened the night for some people (after being rained on earlier in the day), it was an awesome experience which we can’t wait to enjoy again. See you at Ultra SA 2019!
By Mbali Khumalo & Sean Malefane
