BLOC RETURNS – First Artists Announced for 20 Year Reunion
Ten years since the last Bloc Weekender checked out of Butlins Minehead and twenty years since the first one checked into Pontins Hemsby, we’re doing it again. Just once, properly. In London at The Cause.
Bloc started in 2007 on a holiday park in Norfolk, because nobody else was booking the lineups you wanted to see. It worked. We moved to Minehead, built it into a proper institution, and kept it going for the best part of a decade.
In 2012 we went to London. You may have heard that it didn’t work out. You were probably there, or you’ve heard the story enough times that you feel like you were. It looked as though that was the end..
But instead, we opened a club. Also called Bloc, also East London, this time behind a door rather than inside a fence. It ran for eight years, longer than the festival did and it’s where a lot of you actually found us.
Now it’s ten years since the last Weekender, and we’re back. Bloc Reunion 6th March at The Cause in Docklands, doors 2pm – 6am. Same instinct as always: we trust the room to hear the music that matters.
In proper reunion style, the lineup brings together some of our favourite artists from across the past 20 years.
With more headline sets for Bloc than any other artist, our favourite cosmonaut, Jeff Mills, will be teleporting to earth for one more unmissable session.
With numerous appearances over the years, including a legendary Saturday morning set at Butlin’s Waterworld for our final Minehead party, Egyptian Lover will be putting his 808 through its paces for a rare live performance.
After making his festival DJ debut with us way back in 2016, six-time world snooker champion and prog obsessive Steve Davis returns, this time with long-time musical co-conspirator and psychedelic polymath Kavus Torabi by his side.
Having rattled the walls of Butlin’s both together and separately across numerous editions, Surgeon and Regis reunite as British Murder Boys for another blistering live set.
Electronic music royalty Leftfield make their first ever appearance at Bloc, with Neil Barnes digging deep for a DJ set from one of the acts that helped redraw the boundaries of British electronic music.
From hosting their much-loved Your Love parties at our Autumn Street club to playing back-to-back at the final Minehead Weekender, Tama Sumo & Lakuti have been part of more than one chapter of Bloc history. They return together for another deep-digging, soul-filled session.
Metalheadz legend DJ Storm goes back-to-back with Tasha, founder of Neighbourhood, bringing two generations of uncompromising UK club culture together behind the decks.
A familiar face from the Autumn Street years, Dutch acid queen Miss Djax returns with nearly four decades of hard, fast and uncompromising techno behind her – playing 100% vinyl and 100% acid.
And it wouldn’t really be Bloc without the crews who made as much of an impression off the main stages as on them. I Love Acid are back, responsible for some of the Weekender’s more brilliantly ridiculous moments over the years, not least the now-legendary Acid Bingo. They’re joined across the rooms by long-standing Bloc cohorts Plex, queer London institution Chapter 10, and ambient rave pioneers Telepathic Fish who will be hosting a dedicated chill out room.
As for how exactly we found ourselves doing all this again…
“No one planned for this. We didn’t see it coming. But it turns out it was just what we, and you, needed. Twenty years since the first Bloc Weekender feels like the perfect time to reconnect, listen to some repetitive beats and dance our heads off until daybreak with the friends we made a lifetime ago.
Truth is, deep down, we’d both really wanted to do it again for years. It turned out everyone else was hyped for it too, with more than 1,000 people signing up when we put it on sale that afternoon. Reactivating the Bloc networks and talking to friends old and new to put the lineup together has been soul-warming, life-affirming stuff. This is just for starters: plenty more artists to come, joy to bring and dancefloors to pound. We’re overjoyed to be back amongst it with you all.”
— Alex Benson & George Hull, Bloc
