The Rotation Garden Party is pretty much perfect. It is an intimate gathering of like-minded folk who love proper music, appreciate (but don't fetishise) high-quality sound, and, most importantly, know how to party. 2024 looks like it will exceed its own high standards with guest DJs, including Idjut Boys (ten-hour set!) and one Ruf Dug. We had a little chat with the latter about some of his festival highs and lows, and what he's got in store for Rotation.
TP: I have a theory that festivals are either amazing or terrible, with no middle ground. As such, can you tell us your three best and worst festival experiences? (Trench foot, 16-hour bad trips, the shits, etc.)
RD: 3 best (In no order)
Glasto 2023 - we took my seven-year-old son; he’d never been to anything like this before and was a total natural. He came backstage with me, polished off my whole (non-alcoholic) rider and fucked off before I finished. Top shelf +1 behaviour.
Electric Elephant 2010 - my first time to Croatia, me and my mate drove there from Manchester so we could take all our drugs with us. The drive was amazing both ways and DJing a perfect petrcane sunset remains one of my best memories.
Burning Man 2007 - holy shitballs. The music is fucking diabolically bad, and it’s always been totally full of the worst kind of privileged nauses, and it's totally unsustainable and fucking wrong on about 150 levels, but Jesus, it's a good do.
3 worst
Glasto 2016 - I played first thing Thursday morning and dashed away ASAP because I needed to vote in the Brexit referendum and hadn’t registered a postal vote. On the drive back, I saw millions of Vote Leave posters and realised that maybe things were even more fucked than I thought. At least I didn’t wake up to the news in a muddy field in Pilton.
V festival Sydney 2007 - what a dogshit festival. Like reading and Leeds rolled into one and full of the really bad Aussies, not the good ones. Fuckin awful. The headliners were Gnarls Barkley and Groove Armada.
Outback Eclipse Festival, Simpson Desert, 2001 - could easily be my best festival experience as well, but let me tell you, when ur 4 acids deep into a desert experience and think the portaloo ur in has been craned onto a truck and ur being driven away somewhere when in fact nothing happened at all, well that’s a bad time m8.
TP: Tent, campervan or hotel?
RD: IT'S NEVER A TENT
TP: You’ve curated your own area at festivals before. If someone gave you carte blanche to run a whole festival with no financial or practical restraints, what would that look like?
RD: Prince nonstop 16 hours with King Tubby on the mixing desk and Rahsaan Roland Kirk dishing out cocaine to the crowd while Christo & Jeanne Claude wrap everything up in sheer silk.
TP: Give us the scoop on Rainy Heart. Is it coming back? Any more long-term plans?
RD: YES, it's coming back, and we’ve got a bunch of plans. We’re having so much fun with it and we are very much letting it tell us what it wants to be.
TP: What’s in the pipeline for you musically in the next few months?
RD: A release on Pinchy & Friends that I’m very proud of, a remix of Roisin Murphy, some tracks I’ve done for one of Luv*Jam’s weird labels, a collab Open Secret edit 12” with James Holroyd, some exciting new Ruf Kutz releases and maybe a new project as well...
TP: Three records you might play at Rotation and why.
Lask - Sucht - because it’ll sound fuckin mint on Klipschorns.
Carl Craig - Sandstorms - because it’ll sound fuckin mint on Klipschorns.
Tatsuro Yamashita - Solid Slider - because it’ll sound fuckin mint on Klipschorns.
The rotation Garden Party is held at Carney Pools from the 19th to the 21st of July, and you can get tickets here.
