Early jump, hardstyle & hardcore events are happening more and more in the recent years and it’s not simple to explain why they are so popular, but we can definitely say from our own experience that they always got an amazing atmosphere and it draws a crowd that truly loves the roots of the harder styles of dance music. We decided to catch up with Focus Events, known for Dance Boulevard in the glorious south of the Netherlands, the organization behind the brand-new classics concept ‘Oude Liefde Roest Niet’.
To kick things off ‘Oude Liefde Roest Niet’ is a Dutch saying, how would you explain that to our English readers?
It’s a rather nostalgic expression. Freely translated it would be something like ‘Old love never fades away’. We want to deliver an experience that brings people back to the good old days, with the very same friends, the same DJ’s, an underground location and yeah, it’s in 2019 & it’s a daytime-event instead of in the 90s and in the middle of the night.
You guys definitely aren’t the first, nor the last to organize an early/classics event. For which reasons did you decide it was time to make it happen this year?
That’s true! We as organizers absolutely loved this early period of the harder styles of dance music. You could absolutely find us on the dance-floor very often in the 90s. Now that we’ve mentioned the 90s, we’re doing a euro-dance flashback party for years already called ‘90’s No Limits’, so it wasn’t a really big step to pick up this new type of party. Basically, we don’t just know our target-group, we ARE the target-group, so when we noticed there was a big demand for it in our region it was decided: we’re doing a big early party!
We’ve touched base on the subject of the location a little bit already, but what can visitors expect?
We’re really happy with the location we’ve managed to arrange for our event! It’s a cool industrial building, a type of party location that you sometimes see in Rotterdam or Amsterdam but is quite unique for our region. It’s not just an empty building, however it’s a breeding-place for creativity and talent, which we feel definitely connected with as event-organizers.
‘A group of massively talented graffiti-artists will be creating amazing 3D artwork of creative text & portraits, you’ve got to see it to believe it!’
You’ve got 3 areas with a total of 28 artists to deliver the crowd their classics fix. Which artists do you recommend the crowd to check out?
Of course! Well, DJ Luna, founder of the Minus Is More label and truly and oldschool legend. In the beginning of the zeroes he was arguably the biggest and most-appreciated hardstyle artist out there. He was the very first artist ever to get an XQlusive event in 2004 and he totally deserved that We’re super glad to have him with us!
If you think about the history of hardstyle and hardcore, there’s one name that comes to mind and it’s DJ The Prophet. He’s the absolute trailblazer of the early-hardstyle & early-hardcore scene. If it wasn’t for DJ The Prophet, loads of artists wouldn’t have been in the scene, or as famous as they are now. Scantraxx, his label, is still one of the biggest and most innovative labels out there as it has been for 15 years already!
We love ourselves some early hardcore and we absolutely love the music of Bass-D and Vince. They’ve played at all the major events and still are doings loads of bookings after all these years. They’re ambassadors for the early-hardcore sound, which we’re proud to have on our line-up!
It’s way to hard to mention only one other DJ, but for us other big highlights within our line-up are Deepack, Zany and Pat B. All these guys known exactly how to hype up a crowd and produce quality music. The combination of euphoria and bass that these guys bring is just awesome & our Dance Boulevard crowd knows exactly what we mean by that!
Oude Liefde Roest Niet
April 20th 2019
The Loods, Roosendaal
Full line-up: https://olrn.nl/artiesten
Tickets: OLRN.NL/tickets