Our man in London, DJ Dialate, checked out the cream of the world's DJ crop in London, which was home to this year's DMC DJ finals. The contendors came from around the globe after a series of knockout rounds held in their home countries. This is what Dialate thought of 'em... (in order of appearance):

DJ Khalid (Morroco)
His shit was tight with juggles and scratches and the set was great for the first 3 minutes. In the end it just wasn't up to the levels of the rest of the competitors.

DJ Acid (Malaysia)
DJ Acid tried hard to impress - he came out attempting to beat juggle at light speed, but ended up just making a huge racket. He was really arrogant, but shouldn't have been because he sucked.

DJ Razor (Germany)
Delivered a technical set with good juggles, not so amazing scratches, and things fell apart at the end.

DJ Raw (New Zealand)
Raw came out with quite a tight opening 3 minutes, I recognized some of his set was copied from Craze's last year, so originality wasnt 100%. The set started to get a bit noisy in the last 3 minutes.

Rockid (Holland)
This Japanese kid from Holland rocked, real nice scratching and impressive beat juggling, overall the set was creative and musical and had loads of people going "OOH OOH OOH".

Mr Thing (UK)
The UK champ, ex-Scratch Pervert, came out dissing all the kids that use break records. His set was clever but not exactly jaw-dropping. Clever juggling but very scarce on the scratching.

Hanger (Japan)
The man from Japan. His set was confusing to say the least. Very futuristic. I can't begin to explain what he did, I think it was way too technical for most. It didn't sound good to listen to, but you could see there was a lot of preparation. At one point he switched off the volume and started spinning both records backwards, when they were going reallly fast he switched the volume up and started using the faders really quickly, the outcome was like the symphony orchestra!!

DJ Pump (Canada)
Did some rocking shit with some old James Brown records. His whole big thing was 6 minutes on 2 records, tight routine, good juggling making new beats and sounds and cool scratching... lots of potential.

Klever (USA)
Klever was not the best US decknician I've seen, he definitely didn't come close to P-Trix (last year's US champ). Some good juggling and scratching but nothing to write home about - I was hoping for more from the US of A!

DJ Noize (Denmark)
Noize made his return to the competition after a 5 year abscence. His shit was tight, constructing full paragraphs out of sentence snippets. Impressive. His juggling and scratching was tight. He put the needle on his sticker markers to create a scratching noise, when it came off the marker and went on to the record the sample said "and it didnt even make a single scratch". Unfortunately his Ortofon needles started jumping towards the end of the set and he lost confidence. A great set besides the jumping.

DJ Pone (France)
Pone's set was nothing compared to last years', probably because he had seen a bit of Craze's routine in the dressing rooms... this is what he said: "In the dressing room Craze showed me some of his stuff. I thought I might as well go home there and then"! He was doing some cool juggles but when the crowd didnt respond he got aggravated and stopped trying.

DJ Dexta (Australia)
Dexta used everything from the Beatles as an intro to Jimmy Hendrix for beat juggles to old school jazz. This kid is the next world champ, FO SHO. A lot of people think he should've taken it this year (myself included). Very creative and musical, his skills were mad tight, and he was definitely the crowd favorite with a standing ovation for 2-3 minutes after his set.

Craze (USA) - Defending champion
As usual Craze was one step ahead of the rest. His beat juggling was amazing, using mostly big beat samples, and with two different tracks at the same time he created completely new tracks. His scratching was on another level, he used a technique called needle dropping where he picked up the needle just after he scratched the sample, then dropped the needle back at the beginning of the sample. Very impressive!

The judges were nearly unanimous in choosing Craze as the Champion (50 points), Dexter landed second place (26 points) and Mr. Thing came third (14 points). Craze made history by becoming the only champion to win 3 times in a row - most impressive. South Africa wasnt even included in the prelims because of lack of DJs and interest...