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As our plane came into land at Split airport on Thursday evening, the full moon had just begun to rise over the horizon to the right, not blue as advertised but blood red and smouldering. This was my first time flying in to Dimensions from Berlin instead of Lisbon and I’d had the uncanny experience of waiting at the gate, lost in thought or my laptop screen, I can’t remember which, only to look up and see about 10 familiar faces — read: other DJs — standing in the queue. Another one was late after a forgotten passport, but the Easyjet gate staff were implacable. There was a last-minute scramble. Everyone made it.
On the flight I refined my playlists for the day after — I was playing twice, once on a boat and once on the beach — and, after a micro-nap, drank in that moonrise through the plane window. I searched for it again, unsuccessfully, once we emerged onto the Tisno airport tarmac, before walking through the baggage reclaim doors to find more DJs, DJs on DJs on DJs, as another flight had landed almost simultaneously from London. A group of 20-something lads passed by, one of them clutching a Boots paper bag. Festival punters, surely. Often Dimensions can seem like an annual convention of 20-something lads clutching something or other: beer, drugs, girlfriends, each other.
But then it gives you moments like Sugar Free and Peach owning the Olive Grove stage back-to-back on Friday night, the lads who packed out the front rows at the start of the set being gradually pushed out by women — friends and strangers — dancing and yelling and revelling in it, all illuminated by the giant screen of spectacular visuals and the glow cast by this meeting of two icons. Peach played Mike Servito’s remix of ‘I Call Upon…’ and suddenly I felt like I was at a different festival altogether, but actually it was just Dimensions, and Dimensions has a knack for surprising you if you let it…