That Southport Magic

There’s something about Southport. On paper, it looks great. 5,000 friendly people and tickets that sell out months in advance. Live acts that push the boundaries of soul, jazz, funk, Latin and house. DJs who are at the forefront of every evolutionary branch of Black music. But when the sweat’s pouring down your face in the Powerhouse, or when Theo’s playing just a little bit too loud and you still can’t be dragged away, or when you’re surrounded by some of the greatest dancers you’ve ever seen and you don’t feel even a little bit self-conscious, you feel the part of Southport that can’t be written down. The part of Southport that isn’t captured in the footage and that isn’t invoked by live recordings. It’s a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

In The Gift, a literary exploration of the creative spirit, Lewis Hyde retells a mid-nineteenth-century English folk tale about a man from Devonshire. Fairies had given this man a barrel of ale that would never run dry. For many years the ale flowed freely until one day the man’s inquisitive maid removed the bung of the barrel and peered inside. All she saw was cobwebs. And so it is with Southport. Whenever I try to pin down just what it is that makes Southport special, I’m inevitably left with cobwebs. What I do know, and what the Southport faithful most definitely knows, is that here, for six days each year, there is magic in the air.

And it’s a magic that everybody feels. A few songs into a blistering set, Carl Craig takes to the mic: ‘I know you’re all music lovers here. Southport’s all about the music. So I’m gonna play a little different to how I usually do, I hope y’all keep dancing!’ For two hours his pulsing, concrete beats and nagging synths cause a riot in the freshly branded Beat Bar.

Another highlight in the most progressive room at the Weekender came from Luisito Quintero on Saturday night. His contagious energy and glowing smile elevated the mood as he introduced rhythms from the Afro-Latin, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Venezuelan diaspora to an excitable capacity crowd. Recloose followed with one of the standout DJ sets of the weekend, not only joining the dots between the organic and the electronic but blurring the boundaries completely with his low-slung show of tropical techno funk.

At 6.30am on Sunday morning, Theo Parrish stepped up to the turntables. Whatever music Theo chooses to play, it always sounds like Theo. It’s mind-bending, it’s raw and it’s feverishly unpredictable. Whether it’s the giving of a particularly rousing techno 12″ to an admiring DJ Rahaan or the passion that flows through every twisted sound, his magic - the magic of Southport - is a magic that can never be truly described, but once felt is never forgotten.

Lead photograph by Kwame Asiaw
Book tickets for November’s Weekender here.