Red Bulletin Magazine October 2013 Clubbing Timeline 1979 - 2013 hi res

I N T O

T H E

N I G H T

T H E D O M I N A T I O N

O F T H E D A N C E F L O O R

C R E A M

British clubland 1978-2013. Story by Bill Brewster

Timeline by Phil Dudman

055-54-60_1013feature-UK_HistoryofClubbing 55 13.09.13 00:33

1978 Bowie night

launches on Tuesdays at Billy’s club in Soho,

London. It became the first ‘club night’ of its kind in the UK.

1979 The Blitz Club opens

in Covent Garden. The Sugar Hill Gang

release Rappers Delight, hip-hop’s

first big hit.

It spread like wildfire, and house music went from being a secret held by clued-up kids to mass hysteria. Acid house and the ecstasy taken with it changed Britain. It democratised the dancefloor and killed the door policy. Suddenly it was fun to go dancing and everyone was invited. From those small clubs in the big cities came the giant raves that fanned out from industrial wastelands and into the M25 orbital belt: Biology, Sunrise and Genesis, while in places like the south coast, Sterns in Worthing and the Zap in Brighton stood tall. In the north, the party spread from Manchester out to Blackburn, where abandoned warehouses and industrial units became party centres for one night only: Unit 7, Sett End, Bubble Factory, more commercialised versions of the original parties.

In 1991, there was an influx of money into the development of clubs, which led to the opening of the Ministry Of Sound and the launch of gay all-nighter Trade. There was also a split in house music between a harder-edged sound and the more traditional Chicago/New York recordings. The harder music would eventually morph into techno and one of Britain’s first indigenous dance genres, drum ’n’ bass. Fabio recalls his and Grooverider’s early radical experiments in sound at their club, Rage: “It was just the craziest mixture of extreme madness. The old school crowd at Rage left, so it went from being this posey night with loads of well-dressed people, to being ghetto.”

P O S T P U N K

“ It went from being this posey night with loads of well-dressed people to being ghetto”

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On the techno side, clubs like Pure in Edinburgh, helmed by Twitch and Brainstorm, Morley in Yorkshire’s legendary Orbit, House Of God in Birmingham and London’s Lost, led by Steve Bicknell, carried the torch. Then, as the government’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill stopped thousands of young people dancing in fields, so began the era of the superclub. There was Renaissance in Mansfield, Golden in Stoke and Cream in Liverpool, while Shindig in Newcastle and Leeds’ Back To Basics finely balanced punk rock attitude with superclub success. Celebratory night Twice As Nice brought back the dress-up vibe and helped propel UK garage into the charts. House music had a stranglehold on the UK club scene for the rest of the 1990s, despite some resistance.

Pure’s JD Twitch showed his disaffection with house music’s dominance by launching a Sunday evening club in Glasgow with friend JG Wilkes, called Optimo, dedicated to playing, well, pretty much anything. In Manchester, Haçienda refugees the Unabombers founded the long-running night The Electric Chair, while in London there was Gilles Peterson’s That’s How It Is, Coldcut’s epic Stealth and DJ Harvey’s New Hard Left (both in Hoxton club The Blue Note).

House music’s bubble burst on New Year’s Eve 1999, when clubs attempting to cash-in on the millennium celebrations by overcharging (some tickets were as high as £150), saw in 2000 with half-empty dancefloors. One of the real successes of the new era, which eschewed superstar DJs in favour of an avowedly underground approach, was Fabric in London’s Smithfield. While Home, which launched at the same time, brought in Danny Tenaglia and Paul Oakenfold, failed and closed shortly after opening, Fabric is still thriving today.

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1981Norman Jay and

brother Joey set up the Good Times Sound

System at Notting Hill Carnival. Wigan

Casino closes.

1982The Haçienda in

Manchester opens in May, destined to

become one of the most famous and

influential nightclubs.

1984 Madonna makes her UK debut at

The Haçienda. UK TV show Ear Say

documents 18-30 holidaymakers in Ibiza.

1980 Duran Duran rehearse

in the day and DJ at night at the Rum

Runner club in Birmingham. The Face

magazine launches.

1983On Channel 4’s The

Tube, DJ Greg Wilson introduces DJ mixing

to the nation. His Funk Night later launches

at the Haçienda.

1985Pirate radio station Kiss FM launches.

Alumni: Norman Jay, Tim Westwood, Trevor Nelson, Dave Pearce,

Gilles Peterson.

D R E S S I N G U P

R a R E G R o o v E

t h E waG

D E L I R I U M

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ta B o o


1998Clubs become

festivals: Cream does Creamfields;

Ministry of Sound vs Gatecrasher staged

near Leeds.

1987Ibiza-inspired house clubs Sch-oom (later Shoom) and Project, and warehouse party

Hedonism, appear in London.

1999 Human Traffic

documents a weekend of fun in UK clubland.

Fabric nightclub opens in London’s

Charterhouse Street.

1988The second Summer

of Love heralds a cultural high for

the acid house generation and a

moral tabloid panic.

2001UK garage apex at FWD» at London’s

Velvet Rooms. Fatboy Slim attracts 60,000

to Big Beach Boutique in Brighton.

1990 The Public

Entertainments Act is used to bring an

injunction against a rave in Norfolk, giving

rise to superclubs.

1997Gatecrasher buys

the Republic venue in Sheffield. Daft Punk

make their UK bow at the Glasgow Arches. The Haçienda closes.

1986Pete Tong compiles The House Sound of Chicago, Vol. 1,

Britain’s first house music compilation.

2000Ministry of Sound’s huge, free NYE party

in the Millennium Dome in stark contrast

to failed superclub bashes in 1999.

1989 Raindance is held at a circus tent on September 16 in

Beckton, East London – Britain’s first legal

all-night rave.

2002MBE for services to

music for Norman Jay. Second Big Beach Boutique attracts

250,000: one person dies, over 100 injured.

A C C I E E E E E D !

D r E s s I n g D o w n

H o U s E

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2004Mylo releases seminal

Destroy Rock & Roll album to critical acclaim. Stealth

nightclub opens in Nottingham.

1993Tribal Gathering

at Lower Pertwood Farm, Wiltshire, has 25,000 attendees.

Gatecrasher launches in rural Worcestershire.

2005Digital Mystikz

launch the DMZ night at Mass in Brixton,

London: a milestone in the development

of dubstep.

2007UK smoking ban forces a rethink. Smoke rises

over Sheffield as Gatecrasher catches

fire and is later demolished.

1995Dance Tent erected at

Glastonbury. Skint Records’ club night

The Big Beat Boutique opens at Brighton’s

Concorde club.

1996Norman Cook

introduces Fatboy Slim. Trainspotting soundtrack boosts

Underworld and Born Slippy.

2003Orbit closes. Cult house night Circo Loco moves from

Monday mornings in Ibiza to a residency

at Ministry Of Sound.

1992 More beginnings:

Cream in Liverpool; Renaissance

in Mansfield; the DJ mix CD: Mixmag

Live Vol. 1.

2006Openings: Below, for daytime deep house, at the Rainbow Pub,

Birmingham; The Warehouse Project

in Manchester opens.

1994 Criminal Justice

Bill introduced to ‘discourage’ outdoor raves. Drum ’n’ bass

label Metalheadz is founded.

1991 Beginnings: Glasgow

Arches; Back To Basics and Orbit in Leeds; Ministry Of Sound in London;

Pete Tong’s Radio 1.

d R U M ’ n ’ B A S S

SPECTRUM

M I n I ST RY

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S U P E R C L U B S

C R E A M F I E L d S

FA B R I C

2008Turnmills closes.

The Cross, Canvas and The Key shut after

a final NYE blow-out ahead of venue redevelopment.

R AV E

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The fallout from the superclub era was summed up by the success of Gatecrasher in Sheffield. It had become so big, clubbing was no longer cool. It needed to go underground again. And it did.

FWD>>, the proto-dubstep club which began in 2001 at London’s Velvet Rooms, but soon became synonymous with Thursdays across town at Plastic People amid an acrid fog of weed. It was not only the place that incubated the sounds of everyone from Wiley to Skream, but it retained its own intimate atmosphere. “There was a real community,” says style journalist Emma Warren. “There was a sense that people felt it was theirs.”

Large clubs have opened and closed, while small basements flicker with strobe delights. The superclub may never return. The success of Shoreditch has led to the London clubbing scene reaching farther into the most unlikely of settings. Elsewhere, the small parties and the DJ collectives have stopped waiting to be discovered and are now doing it for themselves. It’s really how all good clubs begin: with a lot of heart and very little else. Celebrate Red Bull Music Academy’s 15th birthday and UK clubbing history at Revolutions in Sound on the EDF Energy London Eye on November 14. Each capsule will be kitted out like a UK club, from Danny Rampling’s Shoom and Steve Strange’s The Blitz Club to Fabric and Motion. All 30 will be streamed live online. www.revolutionsinsound.com

2011June sees

Secretsundaze celebrate 10 years of colourful house and techno parties

across London.

2012British club

culture features in Trainspotting director Danny Boyle’s London

Olympics opening ceremony.

2013About four million

people go clubbing in the UK each weekend. The industry is worth £2bn. Dance music as mainstream as rock.

2009The End in London

closes after 14 years. Cable opens in

London. House night Face launches at The Rainbow Courtyard.

2010Technics discontinues the SL-1210 turntable. Rinse FM goes legit

after 16 years as pirate radio. Boiler Room

start live DJ streams.

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60


sixty-nine Dean Street is an inauspicious place to start a revolution. Today it’s a posh Soho hotel, but back in 1978 it was Billy’s, a dilapidated nightclub. Yet the Bowie night that began here was a laboratory for every peacock and fancy dan this side of Birmingham New Street, and sent shockwaves into the music world, providing what seemed like half of all 1980s pop stars – Marilyn, Visage, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club, Hayzi Fantayzee, Sade, Bananarama. Mark Moore, later of S-Express, went with a friend: “She said, ‘We’re going to go to this great club, which is full of weirdos, freaks, rent boys and prostitutes.’”

It was the birth of the club night, the door picker and the

promoter-led party. Rusty Egan and Steve Strange took a dead Tuesday night and filled it with the flyer’s promise of ‘fame, fame, fame’, all to a soundtrack of Euro-disco and, of course, David Bowie. It inspired other clubs in London and beyond, most notably The Blitz Club, from which The New Romantics got their original name, Blitz Kids. In Manchester, there was the prototype for the Haçienda, Pips, while in Leeds at the Warehouse, the cloakroom boy, Marc Almond, was inspired to start Digital Disco, before finding fame with Soft Cell.

Until the arrival of acid house, most British DJs were obsessed with black America and its offspring: soul, funk, disco, electro, hip-hop. But by the early 1980s something split the jazz-funk scene and opened a path to the house music revolution. In some places it didn’t have a name, but in Manchester they called it electro-funk and then electro.

Greg Wilson in Manchester’s Legends club led the charge. And in London it was Tim Westwood who helped coax the city over from soul, with sessions at an Oxford Street hovel called Spatz. “Tim was in it from dot, man,” says drum ’n’ bass don Fabio. “He changed the game.” From Bristol came a crucial party crew The Wild Bunch which gave a platform to Nellee Hooper, who went on to work with Björk and Massive Attack.

All-dayers became an import aspect of 1980s clubbing. Various tribes from different cities united for large-scale events of up to 4,000 dancers. Regular events were staged at the Locarno in Birmingham, Nottingham Rock City as well as the National Soul Festival in Purley and the Caister Weekenders. They were an important outlet for a new form of music arriving from the US: house. “We played it alongside Mantronix or boogie,” says early house pioneer Rhythm Doctor. “It was faster, but it wasn’t seen as different.”

Manchester was an early adopter via DJs like Mike Pickering and Hewan Clarke at the Haçienda. In Nottingham, Selectadisc record shop employee Graeme Park played it alongside hip-hop, while in Sheffield, DJ Parrot featured it in varied sets that included everything from Cabaret Voltaire to electro. “You’d be thinking, ‘What is this?’” remembers Parrot. “But it seemed to fit perfectly.”

London was ruled by rare groove, a movement grown through pirate stations and warehouse parties. The music was often retro, rediscovering great funk and disco tunes such as I Believe In Miracles by The Jackson Sisters. At its helm were DJs like Judge Jules, Jazzie B and Norman Jay, whose Original Rare Groove Show was one of the best Monday night parties.

House had its supporters in the capital, among them was Mark Moore at Pyramid, who remembers it as a mission to convert: “People hated house music. It was all rare groove and hip-hop. I thought, ‘I’m not gonna give in.’ I’d play Strings Of Life and clear the floor.”

Then four DJs went to Ibiza for a week. Johnny Walker, Nicky Holloway, Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling, inspired by the sets at open-air Amnesia, resolved to bring the Ibiza vibe to London in clubs like Shoom, Future, Spectrum and The Trip.

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Red Bulletin Magazine October 2013 Clubbing Timeline 1979 - 2013 hi res

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