Our Summer With Gilles Peterson

Gilles Peterson is synonymous with Worldwide Festival, big beats and a serious record collection, so here at BBM, we thought we might follow him around Europe for a bit to find out what all that beautiful noise is about. Here’s how we spent our summer with Gilles Peterson.

Worldwide Festival

Ask anyone who’s been to Worldwide Festival and they will tell you why it’s just so goddamn awesome. 2015 was its 10th year, and there’s a seriously long list of reasons why it’s worth heading off to France for, so let’s start with the basics.

Location
Sète has canals, a beach (a beautiful one, surrounded by yes, more beaches) plenty of restaurants and one of the most lively art scenes in France.
Organisation
The organisers at Worldwide understand the age-old, multi-stage festival problem of missing acts, so they came up with having three main stages, which never play at the same time. There are even small satellite venues with DJ sets in the streets of Sète to warm you up before going out at night.
The Line-Up
It’s insanely good. Not only do you get the best of big hitting house DJs like Laurent Garnier and the man with the Midas touch, Seven Davis Junior, there’s also a plethora of small acts that demand the ears of the discerning music head.

Gilles Peterson is all about selection, whether you look at the who’s who line-up for his Worldwide Festival or the artists that appear on his ‘Brownswood Bubblers’ compilations, he only picks the best. So who better to play at this year’s Worldwide Festival than Roy Ayers and James Blake to name a few.
The great thing about heading to Gilles Peterson’s events is the crowd is electric, friendly and by no means scared of dancing. The atmosphere is a combination of great music selection, which comes from years of running his pirate radio station, Civic Radio; curating the Montreaux Jazz Festival; and being one of the most tuned-into DJs on BBC radio. So he comes with heavy credentials but he has a calming and modest outlook on fame; for him it’s all about the music. The festival has a good balance of hedonism and class that set it aside from others on offer; it’s truly worth making the journey over to France for the week.

London

Gilles has been making the floors jump and shout for years now, ensuring London’s music scene is consistently breaking in talent of the highest quality. To showcase his favourites, Peterson orchestrates his own annual award ceremony, The Worldwide Awards. It lays down what’s hot right now and sets the standard for aspiring instrumentalists and singers across the globe.

Oval Space
After arriving back from Worldwide Festival and keeping the spirit of summer alive, Gilles teamed up with some of the greats on his own Brownswood Records and Just A Little & Tremors to produce a seriously bassy afternoon and a hectic dance floor at one of London’s hottest venues.
You know things may get out of hand when you have kings of Notting Hill Carnival, Channel One Sound System, on the bill. Mikey Dread and MC Fas Kayleb have been around for 30 years and know how to put a crowd in the right kind of mood.
Romare is another really amazing name to watch right now and on his arrival to the decks showed why, with his African house beats that blow you away. He teamed up with Auntie Flow to go back-to-back to really set the party alight.
These kind of line-ups are defining the London music scene right now and Oval Space is at the top of list for places that you know will deliver a serious night of fun. It brings together a terrace, two bars, a mean sound system and a large dance floor that is only empty when the gig is over. Check out www.ovalspace.co.uk to see more of what’s on.
So none of us here at BBM are quite sure when Gilles Peterson sleeps, but if he did, then the summer wouldn’t quite have been this loud, dance floors as rowdy and sounds as tropical!
By Merlin Ramos