Jack Ü’s Impromptu Set For King’s Day Gets Shut Down By Police
Koningsdag otherwise known as King’s Day is a national holiday in the Netherlands that takes place on April 27th (26th if the 27th is a Sunday) every year. It’s basically Amsterdam’s biggest party of the calendar — the whole city turns orange, the canals fill with boats, entire streets turn into one massive flea market, and just about every square and rooftop in town ends up hosting some kind of impromptu set. To celebrate King’s Day this year, many electronic musicians took to the Netherlands to put on some incredible sets, official and otherwise. One set that stood out to us was Jack Ü’s impromptu set outside of the window of their dressing room. Unfortunately the party ended up stopping traffic and was shut down by the police.
“We set up turntables outside our dressing room after kings day fest and played music out the window .. Cops turned it down cause we stopped traffic”- Diplo
https://www.instagram.com/p/1_n_CrKMgs/
That quote, straight from Diplo’s own Instagram, tells you basically everything you need to know about how King’s Day works in Amsterdam: even a duo as massive as Skrillex and Diplo can’t resist turning a dressing room into an ad hoc stage the second the party’s already happening in the street below. It’s a pretty perfect distillation of what makes King’s Day such a wild event for dance music fans in the first place — it’s less about official festival sets and more about the entire city collectively deciding to throw the biggest open-air party in Europe for one day a year, with DJs, amateur and legendary alike, setting up wherever they can find an outlet.
It’s worth noting this wasn’t Jack Ü’s only run-in with authorities that year, either. A couple months earlier, back in February, a 24-hour livestreamed marathon set the duo threw at a private album-release party in Los Angeles got shut down by the LAPD after 18 hours, once the crowds trying to get into the house party grew too large to manage. Between that and the King’s Day window session, 2015 was shaping up to be the year Jack Ü kept testing exactly how much chaos a party could generate before someone in a uniform showed up to turn the volume down.
