After the debacle that was Sandance this time last year, logistical chaos is in danger of becoming as much of a New Year's Eve tradition as Auld Lang Syne.
So it was at the city’s undisputed biggest 2015 prelude, the hashtag-tastic #DXBNYE at Meydan. We’d love to tell you more about how the chirpy British pop-rap songstress Charli XCX won over a new legion of fans, but sadly we spent more than an hour being misdirected around Meydan by countless staff who had no clue where the entrance for our ticket category was located.
We got inside in time to catch the second half of an energetic performance by Sky Blu. He cajoled the crowd into a karaoke rendition of Queen's We Will Rock You and lifted the energy levels significantly with a helping of Latino flavours, even if he did rather come off as a pound-shop Cypress Hill on the first train to chart-dance hell.
A veneer of quality followed, gladly, once Pharrell arrived with trademark charisma to take us through to midnight. The ghosts of his painfully lacklustre, illness-afflicted performance in Abu Dhabi in November were largely banished. That said, there was still a sensation of his live set being akin to Pharrell karaoke – Pharrelloake? – thanks to his insistence on mining many of his cameo moments from a lengthy back catalogue. Hence, the spectacle of the likes of Hot in Herre without Nelly and Hollaback Girl sans Gwen Stefani grated a little, among his solo and N*E*R*D* tunes.
Busta Rhymes waddled out for a guest verse or two at least, and with such a consummate hands-in-the-air soundtrack, it has to be said that few of Dubai’s party people shared our gripes.
While it would have been fitting to end 2014 with the year's biggest tune, proceedings ground slightly awkwardly to a halt for a midnight countdown led by the comperes Giuliana and Bill Rancic, preceded by the odd sight of Pharrell milling around the stage beatboxing. Instead, Happy was the first noise of 2015; Get Lucky also featured in an encore that nobody actually had the chance to cheer for.
The veteran Rhymes was back shortly afterwards for his own set, looking rather more rotund and sporting a growl an octave lower than we remembered. Yet bangers such as Break Ya Neck were rendered something of a sideshow by the truly spectacular fireworks visible in the distance at the Burj Khalifa. Rhymes asked the crowd to "make some noise", but with thousands of onlookers united in pointing their cameraphones towards the horizon, he was subsequently forced to call a temporary halt to his hip-hop history lesson.
It was a fittingly incongruous end to the live action at an event with such a bafflingly eclectic line-up. And in many ways, #DXBNYE was a quintessential New Year’s Eve experience: memorable, messy, chaotic and kinetic, if not always for the reasons one would have expected.
aworkman@thenational.ae