I used to go to Drumsheds for flat-pack furniture.
On Saturday, I went for Armand Van Helden and nearly met God on a badly lit staircase.
There aren’t many clubs where I can genuinely say, “Oh yeah, I used to shop there,” but Drumsheds is one of them. I grew up going to IKEA Edmonton; now I’m getting the SL1 from Walthamstow back to the same enormous building to spend most of a day listening to house music. Somewhere along the line, meatballs and tealights gave way to lasers.
Getting there is almost offensively easy for me. Drumsheds is basically on my doorstep, and the Superloop deserves some credit because it’s one of Transport for London’s better recent ideas. Hurtling down the North Circular on the SL1 had me feeling very Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
I should probably admit that I’m not a dance music event regular. Far from it. I did, however, bring one of my oldest friends, who is a properly routined raver and considerably more familiar with the logistics of spending all day in a warehouse full of DJs. I was in safe hands, at least.
Security was thorough enough to feel airport-adjacent, complete with “drug detection” dogs. Why the quotes? Because judging by certain sights later in the day, I reckon those dogs need firing.
Once inside, Drumsheds still makes an impression. It’s bloody massive, to put it bluntly, and Defected had made full use of the building with music spread across its different rooms. I’d previewed its return to Drumsheds for AW26/27 beforehand, but looking at the room plan on a screen and actually navigating the place are very different things.
Trying to see everything would have been ridiculous. I accepted defeat on that fairly early.
Ella Knight Glitterbox · Y Room
Rinse FM regular Ella Knight was exactly who I wanted to walk in on. Her set was deliciously understated, with the sort of careful curation that explains why she’s so highly regarded without needing to scream for attention.
There was no rush to make an early-afternoon room behave like it was already midnight. Knight let the day find its feet, which felt far more appropriate when half the crowd had only just worked out where the toilets were.
At this point, Drumsheds was still weirdly spacious. You could move around without having to negotiate a wall of shoulders, which felt increasingly luxurious as the afternoon went on.
The age mix was lovely too. I kept spotting Gen X parents raving with their Gen Z children, and these weren’t mums and dads standing miserably at the back holding coats. They were fully involved.
It makes sense with a bill like this. Younger fans know Defected as it is now, while plenty of their parents remember when names like Armand Van Helden or Basement Jaxx first started appearing everywhere. Watching both generations lose it to the same music was genuinely one of my favourite things about the day.
Paisley Jensen DFTD · Z Room
By 4pm, people were arriving in force, and Paisley Jensen caught that shift nicely. She warmed the crowd up while the building took care of the temperature itself.
Drumsheds changed quickly once the late-afternoon influx started. The early breathing room disappeared, and getting from one part of the venue to another suddenly required a little more thought.
It is absurdly easy to get lost in there. You can study the map, feel completely confident about where you’re going and still end up somewhere unfamiliar five minutes later wondering which turn betrayed you.
The Wi-Fi was decent for most of the day, which helped a lot. Set times stayed accessible, and locating friends was easier than it might have been otherwise, although “I’m by the stairs” remains spectacularly useless information in a building with stairs everywhere.
The staff were nice whenever I asked for help, although knowledge of the venue varied. A couple of questions were met with the unmistakable expression of someone who had just discovered the building was confusing them too.
Nobody was being deliberately unhelpful. Drumsheds is simply a lot of building.
Eats Everything b2b Sam Divine Defected · X Room
The tag-team set of Eats Everything and Sam Divine was where the afternoon really found some momentum as the pairing worked well, and there were stretches where the room felt completely locked in.
Unfortunately, they seemed to lose some of their vitality towards the end. However, that didn’t undo what had otherwise been a strong showing.
By then, the temperature inside Drumsheds was becoming hard to ignore. This wasn’t the usual warmth you expect once a room fills up; it was sweaty fringe stuck to forehead, regretting your makeup choices territory.
Thousands of people dancing inside a converted warehouse were obviously never going to produce a refreshing autumn breeze. Even allowing for that, it became uncomfortable.
That made the water situation more frustrating. Free water apparently existed, and I’m not suggesting otherwise, but finding it wasn’t remotely obvious from where I was.
Canned water, because that’s the new thing, was easier to locate and expensive enough to make you resent the whole arrangement. +1 for the planet, -1 for me, namely because the alcohol was only fractionally more exorbitant; I simply had no choice but to embrace the “four cans of White Claw for £26” deal.
Groove Armada Defected · X Room
Groove Armada were where the day dipped for me.
The DJ set was dry and repetitive, which is somehow more frustrating than outright disaster. A terrible set gives you something to react to; this mostly left me waiting for it to become more interesting. Alas, they failed to launch.
The sound in the room probably didn’t help. Other people complained afterwards too, and there were points where everything seemed flatter than it should have been.
Eventually, though, you run out of things to blame on the speakers. The set itself wasn’t giving me much.
It had been clearly advertised as a Groove Armada DJ set, so I wasn’t expecting the live show. Even with that caveat, though, I got bored enough to go and see what was happening elsewhere.
The Shapeshifters Glitterbox · Y Room
That escape took me back to the smaller Glitterbox room for The Shapeshifters, now the solo project of DJ Simon Marlin. The name still carries a bit of duo-era history, of course: “Lola’s Theme” was released when Marlin was working with Swedish producer Max Reich.
The change of room did me good. Y Room was packed wall to wall and the atmosphere felt instantly livelier, which was exactly the reset I needed after losing interest in Groove Armada. Smaller did not mean quieter; if anything, cramming everyone into the Glitterbox room made the whole thing feel more immediate.
When Drumsheds becomes hard work
By early evening, moving around the venue had become much more chaotic, and this is where I have to talk about the stairs.
Because nothing says serious journalism quite like complaining about staircase illumination, right? Or lack thereof…
After a few drinks, going downstairs started feeling a bit like Takeshi’s Castle. There were several occasions when my foot confidently searched for a step that was not where my brain had decided it should be.
Nothing pulls you back towards sobriety faster than a split second of thinking, “Excellent. This is how I die, then.” Doing it inside what used to be IKEA only makes the imagined phone call to your family worse, surely?
Basement Jaxx Defected · X Room
Basement Jaxx should have been the point where things picked back up. Simply put, Groove Armada had left the room feeling strangely flat, so another huge name stepping in looked ideal on paper. In practice, it just didn’t hit the spot.
Basement Jaxx were disappointing, which bothered me more because so much personality is tied to that name. Their best work feels unruly and alive, and I expected at least some of that character to survive in a DJ set. And look, I know as well as anyone that “DJ set” does not mean anything close to a live set, but you would think they would drop in a few more of their iconic hits.
By this point, everyone had been standing for hours, and they needed something to pull the room forward. Instead, the set sat just about the same while the crowd’s collective battery drained. I’m afraid my knees had already begun negotiations for an early retirement.
Just goes to show that reputation and legacy can only get you so far (I have neither of these things, so who am I to comment on it?)
Armand Van Helden Defected · X Room
Armand Van Helden arrived at exactly the right moment; the change in the room was immediate, whether that was from genuine excitement for the set or the thought that the post-show McDonald’s (good luck with that one on the A406) was inching closer (SL1 to Walthamstow, baby!)
In any case, people who had spent the previous couple of hours visibly feeling the length of the day suddenly looked interested again. Van Helden immediately started serving out a performance that was slick without feeling overworked. He clearly understood that the room did not need educating by this point. There’s a lot to be said for a DJ who reads the situation properly.
We wanted recognisable records and the reaction that comes when a huge room clocks what’s playing at the same time. More importantly, we wanted to forget what our feet were doing to us. Luckily, he delivered, and it was easily my favourite set of the evening.
The crowd deserved credit
People were relaxed and genuinely willing to have fun, which is not always the case in London. There was less of the excruciatingly self-indulgent vibe where people pay a fortune to see a DJ play and spend the evening pretending they couldn’t care less. The mix of generations was also nice to see; parents dancing with their adult children, who they presumably taught to appreciate this kind of music, added a warmth to the evening.
Speaking of… Drumsheds can look spectacular when a packed room responds to the same record, yes, but once you leave that room it felt as if some of the practical stuff started eating into the experience. Either that, or I’m getting old. (Definitely both.)
The official event finished at 10.30pm, but our night carried on in the Spotify Artist Lounge. The cocktails were interesting, although some of the people were more interesting still. There was also an extraordinary amount of indoor sunglasses for somewhere approaching midnight, but by then I was too tired to question anybody’s choices, including my own.
I’d left Walthamstow that afternoon and got a bus to the IKEA I remembered from years ago. Several hours later, I was drinking a strange cocktail in the same building, surrounded by people wearing shades at midnight. London at its best, no?
Was Defected worth it?
Yeah, all things considered.
Ella Knight eased the day in nicely over in Y Room. Paisley Jensen caught Drumsheds just as the crowd started arriving properly, while Eats Everything b2b Sam Divine gave the X Room its first real lift even if the set lost some steam near the end.
Groove Armada lost me enough to send me back to Glitterbox, where The Shapeshifters immediately improved the mood in a packed Y Room. Basement Jaxx still never found the lift I expected from them, but Armand Van Helden did, arriving when the day needed a proper second wind and giving it one.
Defected itself gave the crowd plenty of options in the event that an individual’s scratch wasn’t being itched, but unfortunately Drumsheds made some of that movement more complicated than it should have been.
Would I go back? Of course I would. It’s down the road, and apparently near-death-by-staircase hasn’t put me off.
Editor. Gig-goer. Fantasy football tactician. London-based Executive Assistant by day, live music obsessive by night. Being a control freak? Very transferable skill.
