Success has never been achieved with merely good intentions. Hence, retailer events often tend to be a bore but not so if we get to perform them. Levi’s® asked for an experience of sound and vision at the Studio Camping Festival (Men at Work), an extravaganza of music and fashion. Location: downtown Amsterdam, Westergasfabriek (a former gas plant), in the pump house to be precise. Sounds fancy but time had turned it into a grubby slum. Yet, we never underachieve, so we stripped it, brought in the right instruments, added some surprising arrangements, and offered no less than a 360° sensation that baffled the visitors’ sight and hearing.
For maximum shock treatment we made people enter through a shabby house trailer. The occupant had left the building, but his Levi’s® clothes lay scattered across the room. Exiting the trailer on the side, one entered a dark industrial room. Once inside, the entrance doors were locked and, while Metallica met Morricone, pin spot pierced smoke floated into the gloomy rock dome. While the sunrise was slowly rising on the circular LED wall, suddenly hell burst loose: Primal Scream’s “Get your rocks off” burst through the speakers and the visitors became victim of an ambush. What followed was a 15 minutes curtain fire of cut and mixed rock video clips on the LED wall: Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Rolling Stones, Kaiser Chiefs, Editors, and plenty of other iconic bands rocked them to the bone. Everybody went nuts. Well, not everybody, which made the hired dancers morph into Masters of Ceremony stop the party. Once the immobile souls had been removed, the deejay started spinning his wheel again, volume to eleven. Fortunately, we had provided everyone with denim blue ear plugs in advance. GetYourRocksOffButYourPlugsIn.
