Electronic group Wilkinson perform in Camden Town – Cheyenne Chan Richies, Ashmole Academy
Earlier this month, underground musician Mark Wilkinson, otherwise known by his stage name, Wilkinson, performed in Camden Town to an audience of 1,700 excited teenagers and adults. The drum and bass music producer, originally from London, debuted in 2010 with his single, “Moonwalker / Samurai”, and continued to successfully progress his music to a wider audience throughout the years, leading him to his most popular single released in 2013, called “Afterglow”.
Unlike most fan based concerts, where popular chart music artists attract hundreds of teenage girls to get overly excited about, Wilkinson belong to a category where, to your ordinary fangirl, the atmosphere and crowd is a completely different world. Instead of sardine packed crowds of aggressive and determined teenage girls who wouldn’t budge for anybody, this social war zone is near to non existent at concerts such as Wilkinson, where the audience is completely friendly and you actually end up leaving the venue with a few new friends. The atmosphere Wilkinson provided allowed you to feel safe amongst the hundreds of strangers, with their welcoming voices encouraging everyone to get along. Whilst waiting for the main act to arrive, two separate groups opened the show, with remixes of songs everybody knew, such as Adele, and of songs we had never heard before.
The concert was a completely new experience for most of the audience, a few teenagers on each other shoulders were peppered across the audience and strobe lights batted intensely across the wave of anticipated young crowd. The atmosphere was ultimately eudaimonic. It became a concert where you didn’t feel obligated to have your phone glued to your hand the entire night, filming every second of every song like most fans do when they see an artist they love; you were able to simply enjoy the atmosphere and music the most, and if you didn’t even look at the musicians throughout the show then it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
If intimacy and hustling and bustling aren’t your kind of thing, then these types of concerts may not be for you, as the crowd became one that night with everyone jumping around in sync to the music, forming mosh pits and going wild, letting loose of all their worries and troubles and just appreciating the moment. For a change of your usual pop chart music, Wilkinson are the perfect gateway into the electronic drum and bass world, where it only gets better from there. It was definitely an experience that I know a lot would never forget.
Cheyenne Chan Richies, Ashmole Academy
