#2klub

I'm writing this late Monday night on one of the best highs I have ever had in my life. Last Thursday morning, Ben, Nick, Tom and I decide to do the craziest thing we have ever done. When we told people at 7 magazine, they literally laughed down the phone and screamed "Are you mad?" We decided to put on a float for the Leeds Love Parade. We'd just come from seeing the flat bed trailer parked up in Leeds, and returned to Manchester where we spent a couple of hours discussing the idea. It was 3:30am Thursday morning and we all decided to go for it. At that moment we were precisely fifty six and a half hours away from the start of the event. In that time we designed the float, organised the sound system, arranged and installed the lights, designed, collected and installed the decorations, designed printed and collected the flyers, arranged the DJs and running order, told the press and our members what we were doing, found people willing and able to help and basically didn't get any sleep until Sunday sometime.

Was it worth it? Not only was it worth it; it was beyond our wildest possible imaginings. When the tunes started up and the float set off we only then realised that we had in fact, REALLY pulled it off - that 2Klub, from Manchester, was a part of what turned out to be the biggest dance music festival in the country. Four hundred and twenty thousand people were there. Cream were there. Gatecrasher were there. God's Kitchen were there. Slinky were there. Trade were there. And there, the last float in the parade, not exactly glamorous, but with the biggest bloody sound system of the lot, was 2Klub! Our heads nearly fell off we were grinning so much. For the next nine hours we rocked the Love Parade. The exhaustion just evaporated as first Sunil Odedra and then Chris Graham cranked up the tempo and we started to pull clubbers in around our float from the main field. When the float stopped they stayed with us. When the float moved on they danced alongside us. Then Chris Phillips built the crowd up more and when he dropped Dave Clarke's remix of Leftfield's Phat Planet they roared! He set things up beautifully for Eddie Halliwell to rip it up, and the crowd went mental as he scratched them into a frenzy.

One of my favourite moments - and there were many - was towards the end of the day, and the parade of floats was coming to an end, when our float climbed the hill at the top of the field and we had a view of the whole event, of people as far as the eye could see, and I suddenly realised that we were indeed the last float.

That the last tunes people heard from the floats were our tunes, tunes being played by Tom Whitaker and Rob Vanden - AND THEY WERE LOVING IT! A huge swirling, mass of dancing people following our float simply because they didn't want the parade to come to an end. When we finally had to turn the system off, and we were the last to do so, they were still clamouring for more, despite the fact that there were some huge sound stages still running and it was by then pouring with rain.

The enthusiasm for what we had done and were doing was immense. It came from the crowd at the event, from people who had heard of 2Klub, from our members who helped us out throughout the day, and even beforehand ferrying things between Leeds and Manchester, and it reflected the true spirit of the original Love Parade, an event which today hosts one and a half million people but which started from the enthusiasm of clubbers and their small underground clubs in Berlin for their music. The enthusiasm we felt on Saturday was pure energy for us. It fueled us through the day and into the night as we took things apart, drove backwards and forwards again between Leeds and Manchester, until we finally were able to stop and say "We did it!" - at around 6am on Sunday morning!

To all those people who helped make it possible and gave us one of the most fantastic days of our lives we want to say a heartfelt "Thankyou". You are, and in no special order: