Carl Cox waited for his time. It was shortly before one-thirty on a Saturday morning in late September. Wearing a black T-shirt, black-framed glasses and black jeans, he stood at the side of the stage in the Mayfield Depot in Manchester—a vast, disused rail terminal in the heart of the city that has become a thrilling entertainment venue, and the home of The Warehouse Project club nights. Cox listened as Peggy Gou, the penultimate DJ, finished her set. Out of Cox’s eyeline rolled a sea of ravers who were, on aggregate, wasted. Nearly 10,000 people had streamed through the depot’s giant doors that evening. Now, with 90 minutes before closing time, more than half that number pressed together to watch whatever Cox was about to do.
Some DJs know exactly what they are going to play, but Cox is not a planner. His method is anti-method. He likes to “feel the room” in the hours and minutes before he begins. He’ll have records on his mind: new stuff, old stuff, maybe an idea of how to finish. Certain sequences are at hand, should the set go one way or another. But, until he has taken the temperature of a crowd, he cannot say for sure what medicine he should prescribe them. The process, as he described it to me, sounded quasi-shamanic.
What, I wondered, did Cox feel in this room? The worst strictures of the pandemic had only recently loosened. The novelty of a mask-free night out with thousands of strangers remained fresh. Sweat dripped from the girders and plastic crunched underfoot. Dazed and forlorn people wandered at the back of the hall, as if they’d lost their mothers. Young men with muscles were stripped to the waist. Women in lurid cycling shorts, sports bras and angular sunglasses held hands in the middle of
