Madrid Orgullo 2025
It’s been six years since I last attended Orgullo Madrid, and that last time in 2019 I had to leave halfway through the Saturday night parade in order to get some sleep before flying to Paris at 6am to play at The Breakfast Club (yes that party). I’d been going to Orgullo since 2012, the year it coincided with Spain winning the World Cup and for a week the streets of Madrid were the site of an unprecedented collision of elated heterosexual football fans in kit and equally delirious gays all losing their collective minds. In those early years, as the parade finished, me and my friends would wander the streets of Chueca with 1-litre calimochos in hand, stopping at the street parties to sing our hearts out o ‘A Quien Importa’ or ‘I Don’t Care’ before invariably ending up at Gris or La Sixta.
This year would be a bit different. Firstly, my two Orgullo ride-or-dies are fully sober these days, and although I wasn’t going to forgo the booze entirely, I took this as an opportunity to at least step away from the calimochos. I was also going to be DJing, not as part of the official celebrations or on a float (I’m not that kind of DJ), but at a party run by friends El Cuerpo Del Disco on the Saturday night. Billed as a Pride party, it was in fact going to be quite a mixed affair taking place at a straight club in a fancy neighbourhood, Salamanca, thrown by ECDD in collaboration with a younger, straighter crew called Recreo. I’ve played for ECDD a couple of times before (there are recordings here and here) and it’s always been a fabulous party where I’ve felt free to indulge myself, so I was really looking forward to doing that again, even if the context might be a bit less gay this time round.
But first, the parade. One of my abiding mental images of Orgullo Madrid parades past is that time the WE Party float got trapped between the traffic lights overhanging Paseo del Prado, marooning its cargo of drag queens, gogo boys and minor celebrity porn stars for several minutes as the driver of the lorry tried to edge through the gap.
There was nothing so dramatic this year, sadly. We arrived in time to see the last of the political party floats clearing the roundabout at Atocha station, to be followed by the Lesbian Section, and then the Circuit Gays. Each float in the Orgullo parade has a soundsystem and decor of vastly varying quality. The lesbians generally sit at the lower end of the quality spectrum, meaning they really just look like a load of lesbians standing on a lorry and you can barely hear the music they’re bopping around to.
Meanwhile the big gay brands — Mr Gay Spain, the circuit parties — and the corporate floats — Iberia airlines, another one inexplicably sponsored by Centrum multivitamins — clearly have much more cash to splash, their floats often featuring multiple levels of architecture, fairground ride lighting, confetti cannons and so on. (Why do they put all the lesbians together in one section, we wondered? To get them out of the way first?) By general consensus, the multivitamin float won the day: the lighting was on point, as was the sound, the dancers were clearly having a blast and the DJ did a key-matched transition from a Villalobos-esque Whitney Houston remix into that sample from ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ that Mylo used on ‘In My Arms’ (except it wasn’t ‘In My Arms’). Another float mixed Generic Gay Music — read: faintly tribal remixes of pop tunes — into the Spanish version of ‘The Circle Of Life’. Gays, eh?
(Top trivia: ‘El Ciclo Sin Fin’ was sung by none other than Tata Vega of ‘Get It Up For Love’ fame!)
Sadly we were on a schedule so we didn’t have time to wait around for WE Party & co’s circuit floats later on. We wandered up the Paseo del Prado towards Goya Social Club, the venue for the night’s party, observing that this year’s parade felt quieter compared to previous ones, though I couldn’t be sure if that was true or just a different perspective brought on by age and (relative, in my case) sobriety. At Plaza de Colón things seemed subdued, though I guess it was still early. We crossed over the end of the parade route and made our way through the upscale Salamanca area, where groups of people were having defiantly heterosexual dinners on the esplanadas. The party was due to open at midnight so we passed a little time sitting on a bench over the road drinking kombucha.
Inside Goya it quickly became apparent that this was a Good Venue that could be a Great Venue if it wasn’t in this fancy neighbourhood and catering to fancy straight people. The sound is excellent, they have cool techno tubes being run from the booth by a dedicated lighting technician, and the dancefloor has multiple levels to it, which always creates a fun vibe. Negatives included the availability of so-called ‘VIP tables’, which were really just normal tables cordoned off with a cheap airport security-line barrier, and very expensive drinks. Oh, and although the design of the concrete DJ booth was pretty cool, it did offer a prime view of the DJ’s legs through the middle, which is never a good look.
Eloi and Yayo from El Cuerpo Del Disco are very good DJs with very good taste, and they know how to get a party started. My highlight of their warm-up was actually one of the least ‘party-starting’ tunes they played: ‘Girlfriend Is Better’, a personal Talking Heads fav. (Though a suspiciously heteronormative title for this day of all days. Unless it was a coded lesbian message to the women in the room?) My friend Ewan remarked on how unexpectedly good the vocals and instrumentation sounded through the Funktion One soundsystem, and that’s something I’d definitely take into account in the unlikely event I ever play at this club again. But this time I’d planned to go clubby rather than selector-y, and given the direction the ECDD boys took their warm-up I was glad to have made that choice. They handed over at a modest 123bpm but with a pumping mood.
The crowd was indeed very mixed — lots of post-Orgullo gays early on but also plenty of dressed-up straights including groups of girlies with handbags and groups of men in shirts. To my eyes the crowd leaned older — probably the ECDD effect — though that changed as the night progressed. Whenever I see this kind of mix of people, I remind myself of the times I’ve had at Tresor where you can really get something of everything on the dancefloor and, on a good night, it somehow just works. As a DJ I relish the opportunity to play underground music to non-underground people in a place where they are half-expecting it. I had a feeling this would be one of those nights.
I’m not going to go into my set in detail, mainly because it was a bit of a testing ground for several upcoming gigs and I don’t want to show my hand just yet. That being said, here are some highlights:
This Leo Zero tune ‘Low Down’ that he dropped a couple of weeks ago and is already a shoo-in for most of my sets this summer. (Leo Zero also just put out a reworked instrumental of his incredible Bat For Lashes ‘Pearls Dream’ edit, though why you’d ever want to play just the instrumental I simply don’t know. As a friend of mine always says, instrumentals are internalised homophobia.)
Two new Trash BF aka Miles Mercer edits which should be out later this summer, following on from that crazy Solange one he did a couple of years ago, though on a very different genre tip.
Two Goldfrapp moments, including the Ewan Pearson Stripped Machine dub of ‘Strict Machine’, played specifically for my friend, also called Ewan:
My current favourite transition of MDIII’s ‘Set Me Free’ into Lime’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Lose You’: conversational, euphoric, bittersweet.
During Eloi and Yayoi’s set the lights had been relentlessly red, so I asked the lighting technician to switch it up a bit and bring in some pinks, blues and greens, which from my vantage point helped to lift the mood in the room. There was really only one moment where I felt a bit of restlessness from the straight quarters of the crowd, when I played a stretch of bassier, non-4/4 music, but otherwise everyone seemed into it. I had one request near the end of my set from a girl who held up her phone saying simply: DURAN DURAN. “I wish!” I mouthed back at her.
My final tune was one of the Trash BF edits by Miles, this one a breaky version of ‘Autumn Sweater’ by Yo La Tengo. I mixed it in and stood back so that the Recreo DJs could take over. They proceeded to execute a drawn-out mix into a disco-y tech house track sampling ‘I’ll Always Love My Mama’ by The Intruders (essentially an updated version of DJ Lil John’s ‘Mamma’s Luv’), with Ira Kaplan of YLT’s cloying vocals warbling away over the top of the pounding beat. I found this absolutely hilarious. When I explained to Eloi that I was playing a Yo La Tengo edit he replied: “That’s the most heterosexual thing I’ve ever heard.” On rejoining the dancefloor I realised that many of the older gays had made their exit during my set (I hope because of the hour, and not because of the music), leaving a much younger, straighter demographic behind. But this made total sense for the more functional tech house that the Recreo guys came on to play. The whole situation felt very intersectional but in the silliest of ways. I loved it.
Whatever thoughts the mixedness of Saturday’s crowd may have provoked — many, it would seem — that was most decidedly NOT an issue I had to grapple with at the party I went to on Sunday night. At that party, everyone looked the same.
My Pleasure is basically a circuit party, though I’ve been qualifying that to everyone I’ve described it to by saying the music at this one is — ostensibly — good. Circuit parties, for those not in the know, are big gay events that have posters like this:
They involve hundreds if not thousands of muscled-up gay men dancing to lowest common denominator Generic Gay Music with loads of flashing lights, gogo boys and occasional fetishy stage shows to distract from the relentless homogeneity of it all. No one wears a shirt, mixed drinks are like 15+ EUR and the vibe ranges from monotonous to predatory.
At least, that’s what I believed circuit parties were like based on reports from friends who’d been to them. I personally never had, partly because I don’t like bad music, but mainly because I don’t have that kind of body and knew I wouldn’t ever fit in. They’re also really expensive, so why would I pay so much to go somewhere that I didn’t belong? Lucky for me, along came My Pleasure with the perfect opportunity to dip my toe in the circuit party world by booking my friend Enrique aka Leeon, who could put me and a friend on the guestlist for Sunday’s event at Sala BUT. This would be the last of five parties that My Pleasure had programmed across the city during Orgullo week, with previous nights featuring guests like Boys’ Shorts, Yen Sung, BASHKKA and Stathis. Those are all people I’ve seen DJ elsewhere and who I know are capable of playing good music. And Enrique, who was going to be playing b2b with his friend Confidential Recipe, is an excellent DJ. Musically, at least, My Pleasure seemed to have it down, so I was curious to see if, despite that, the reality of the party would live up (or down) to my expectations.
Well, it was everything I’ve described above, except I’d rank the vibe a few steps up from monotonous. In fact, during the three hours that I was in the club, the vibe was frequently pretty great, mainly because the music wasn’t terrible. The lights were terrible, the projections were terrible, the stage shows were pretty terrible, the drinks were terribly expensive. The composition of the crowd was exactly as I expected. But the sound was pretty great for a big room and the tunes were pretty good too. I wasn’t a big fan of a lot of what Pascal Moscheni played in the part of his set that we caught, but it definitely wasn’t dreck, and he even found space for both ‘Plastic Dreams’ and ‘Flawless’ as a closer. Sure he was playing speeding those tunes up to around 135bpm and unnecessarily riding the effects a lot, but I was expecting much, much worse.
The crowd was, to a man, shirtless. I had worn my special penis shirt, not just because it had penises on it, but because it’s one of only two fashionable shirts I own. But after 20 minutes or so I realised I felt more self-conscious with the shirt on than with it off, penises or no penises, so I took it off, even though I was one of only three skinny people in the room. Most of the men there had more muscle on their shoulders than I do on my entire body. “Hot!” I hear you say, and on paper I guess it could be, but when you’re so obviously not part of that group, after a while the muscles everywhere start to wear a bit thin. Everyone was also really TALL, which confused me because Spanish men aren’t known for their height. I felt small and invisible. I also looked out for women and found none until we went to the bar, where two of the staff were women. A little later I saw a woman photographer.
Luckily we bumped into Enrique before he started his set and he directed us to the front left of the stage where some friends of his were dancing, along with a group of people who were clearly friends of the organisers rather than general punters. Here, finally, were a handful of:
people with shirts on
men who didn’t look like they spend all day every day in the gym
short kings
women
Had we not located this reassuringly heterogenous zone, I wouldn’t have lasted much longer at the party. But being with these people made me feel a lot more at home and also afforded some protection from the giant men bulldozing past every time there was some action on stage. And what about that action? Well, the first hourly show we saw involved some soft whipping. The second had two half naked men forming a kind of horse-shaped sculpture ridden by a third person dressed as a kind of horror pierrot clown. The last show we caught involved a man being hung upside down by his feet and rotated slowly like a kebab. In my modest opinion none of it was very sexy or provocative, at least compared to the man hanging from his anus during Radio Slave’s set last year (so my friend informed me).
And speaking of Radio Slave, Enrique’s b2b partner Confidential Recipe has released on REKIDS and indeed played a pretty Radio Slavey sound — driving, programmatic, BIG. For the first hour or so of their set Enrique’s selections tempered that austerity with some funk, wooshy noises and trickly syncopation, even some basslines. No cheap tricks. We were loving it all and the crowd in general seemed down. But after that first hour and a half, after the man had been hung upside down on stage for an interminable length of time, and after I realised I was never going to spend another 15+ EUR on a mixed drink, the music started to get a bit more linear and banging and my general mood started to flatten. I had been up till 6am the night before and done two hours of bouldering that afternoon. The constant traffic of muscles pushing past started to irritate me and my feet dragged. I could tell that the rest of the party would be good — there were surprisingly few zombies or casualties, given proceedings had started at 6pm that afternoon. And I knew that if I persevered, Enrique and Carlos would surely end up in groovier territory. Indeed, a video Enrique sent me the day after showed the crowd jamming to a big house tune that I wish I’d stuck it out to hear. But I simply couldn’t stick it out.
So I said goodbye to my first ever (mini) circuit party, and to my first Orgullo weekend in six years. Did I pull? No. Did I feel more confident in my skin? Yes, after bouldering. Not so much, after My Pleasure. Did I feel proud of the progress the queer community has made towards achieving acceptance and equal rights for people from across the LGTV+ spectrum? Perhaps once, only fleetingly, during ‘El Ciclo Sin Fin’.
Happy Pride everyone.
Lovely post Joe. 'Girlfriend Is Better' is a party starter at my kinda party
Thanks Nick, and I'd wanna be at that party!