X-Box Big Day Out 2007

The premise, quite simply, is to build a terrifying near-vertical ramp and whittle down the suicidal lunatics who are prepared to take on the force of gravity over the course of the week. DJs will play the kind of music that snowboard dudes enjoy, people will pose a bit, do gentle runs and generally hang out. By night everyone will zoom around the clubs to see the big name DJs the sponsors have paid for. So not so much your temporary-village, tents and mud style-festival but more an especially good time and place to take your snowboarding holiday.  

The music is predominantly breaky with drum'n'bass and hip-hop offering the most tapered styles, as appeals to that yoof demographic. Not too may skiers around, presumably they're off somewhere in skintights, frightened by the BPM. It's all the same people here that you see in Koh Phang Yang for the full moon parties and backstage Glastonbury: a heady mix of rich-o trustifarians, shark-eyed corporates, blaggers, professional snowboarders, good-time girls and seasonaires. There's freebies galore, endless posturing and lots of people going small on the slopes in the spankingist gear. 

The gigs are pretty hard to get into if you don't have sweet hook ups with the people that for four days really matter. The unadvertised Scissor Sisters gig on Wednesday is apparently an intimate, siege-like affair in which they sparkle to just 200 people while outside the commoners scrabble and insist their names are down. Word on this corporate, essentially private, belly rub is that the New York spangle jackers put on an outstanding show. But not so much on the slopes where they allegedly moved like Captain Haddock.  

For most of the time the X-Box Big Day Out is really just a week of better than usual après ski. On Thursday though the vibe changes and the thing begins to feel like a proper festival, or at least a big free-party in a blizzard. Scratch Perverts wow crowds with cut ups and multi deck mayhem, perhaps even persuading a few of the hedge funders to buy their new album when they arrive back at Gatwick. The Nextmen aren't quite so good but still manage to get the ski boots wiggling. Old skool mountain quakers Fabio and Grooverider are on stage doing the old back-to-back special with MC GQ. The crowd, a few thousand of them, are going bananas; leaping over the front barriers, hurling themselves belly first down the slopes, slipping and sliding, winding and a-grinding, loving the drum'n'bass rhythms of this pioneering pair. And it's all outside, at the bottom of the black run, in a raging blizzard. It's brilliant. 

Thursday's after-party is at the Graille, Val D'Isere's classiest club, with a lit square dance floor and staffed entirely by joy boys in chaps. It's all free drinks and corporate glad handing inside, pint-sized 12-year-old pro riders smoking weed in the corners, playing X-boxes and generally funning it up. It's the week's hot ticket but again you're not getting in unless you know somebody. Meanwhile, across town in Dicks Tea Bar DJ Die and the Full Cycle crew are playing dub plates and crowd-pleasing hip-hop. 

All in all it's an odd affair, not least trying to get your head around the anomaly as to why a games console company, which let's face it leeches off lazy couch potatoes, is trying to be all outdoorsy and active. We're not complaining, of course, and if given a few months off work could think of no better way to spend it than boarding by day and gaming off the injuries. The week was immeasurably improved by the 50-year snow storm that swept the Alps, not that there were too many people on the first lifts. Good times.