EXCLUSIVE: Churchill Spring Ball headliner announced

The headliner for Churchill College Spring Ball has been announced – Artful Dodger.

The R&B/garage two-man act will be returning to Churchill on 14th February 2015, four years after their last appearance at the event.

The duo shot to low-level fame with a remix of chill garage track ‘Movin’ Too Fast’ in 2000, which climbed to Number 2 in the UK Singles Chart.

The Spring Ball launch last week – where the theme, Dystopia, was announced – saw an impressive transformation of the Hall into a CCTV surveillance chamber, complete with waiters in biohazard suits, Big Brother-style eye decorations and a thoroughly dyst-urbing ‘welcome to the regime’ video.

Banter levels had to be taken down a notch as the entire formal was recorded and broadcast live on a fuck-off big projector

Chilling

The Tab sat down with one of the Presidents of Spring Ball, Tom Clarke, to find out what the hype was all about.

So, who’s the headliner this year?

This year, very excitingly, we’ll be playing host to the Artful Dodger who is obviously a really big name in Cambridge, a really big hype man so hopefully he’s going to create a good atmosphere. We do have a second headliner lined up who’s in a completely different genre of music and will hopefully bring a lot to the earlier half of the event, but we’ll be releasing that a later date.

What kind of ballgoer do you think this act will attract?

So we’re aiming the event at the kind of person who wants a really good party with a great atmosphere, which is what we went for last year – and sold out. Basically, it’s for people who want to just have a lot of fun and get hyped at something which is not gonna be the kind of sophisticated quiet affair that many May Week balls offer.

Comparing a May ball to Spring ball is like comparing a ‘cheeky’ glass of Prosecco to a pyramid of Jägerbombs washed down with a few shots of tequila – less classy, less respectable but definitely more YOLO

So dystopia – how did you come up with the theme, and what does it promise to deliver?

The theme was really strongly pushed by the arts team because obviously the college, being built in 1958, has a lot of Cold War era architecture that makes it perfectly suited for the kind of brutalist, Stalin-type ideas attached to the dystopia theme. But also we’re incorporating a lot of stuff from popular dystopian films everyone will recognise, like The Hunger Games and Gotham City in Dark Knight Rises, so there’s a lot of things there we’re going to be playing on.

Möller Centre: brutalist as fuck, apparently

Rumour has it the Union is planning to hold a Valentine’s Day ball on the same night, a week ahead of their Bicentenary Ball, at a cheaper price than Spring Ball. Why should people come here instead?

Well, if the Union are planning an event at short notice as a sort of pre-hype to their actual main ball, it’s obviously not going to be of the same calibre as a proper college ball. And people have been to Churchill before so they know what a good show we put on, whereas everyone knows the Union’s a bit hit-and-miss.

Spring Ball tickets are available online at the lower price of £75 until 30th November, after which time they will go up to £79.