by Dave Haslam
The Haçienda’s role in the history of house music, the excitements of the Madchester era, and even the rejuvenation of the city, were fully fixed in the public mind. Like other significant clubs, it had acted as a catalyst. When it closed, a number of people inspired by the Haçienda were central to what was happening in Manchester and elsewhere – DJs, musicians, journalists, graphic designers, fashion designers, poets, promoters, photographers – and there are numerous examples of the club’s legacy, the unfolding stories, including the rise of the Chemical Brothers.
Less than a year from the start of the Heavenly Social, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons released their debut album Exit Planet Dust, which eventually sold over a million copies worldwide. The following year they released a compilation, Live at the Social Volume 1 through Heavenly. It was the sound of joyful genrehopping, drawing on the spirit of the music they’d heard when they’d first walked through the Haçienda doors and made the club their home, as well as evidence of the Social’s influence on what became known as ‘big beat’ (later exemplified by Fatboy Slim’s hits).
The Chemical Brothers were soon in high demand but discovered that on the club circuit they’d have to tailor their sets to the crowd. The eclectic approach they’d displayed in the early days at the Heavenly Social wouldn’t transfer to the bigger rooms when people, whether or not they had MDMA coursing through their body, expected full-on euphoric house. ‘We got thrown off the decks at Space in Ibiza, at nine in the morning,’ says Ed. ‘Everyone really wanted to go for it and we were playing Barry White records and stuff. So we learned pretty quickly that we had to rethink those kind of gigs. James and Darren put us on at the main room at Cream, the first time, and that’s when we really had to step it up, and that’s when we became as we are now, more full-on.’
Throughout this history we’ve seen instances of the composition and sound of the music people were writing and recording being inspired or deriving from what they heard and witnessed at clubs. The experiences, the sights, sounds and dynamics of the big-room dancefloors had an effect on the music the Chemical Brothers were making. One Saturday they went to Gatecrasher in Sheffield, where trance DJ Paul van Dyk was on the decks. ‘The amount of energy there was phenomenal,’ says Ed. ‘When you see that kind of energy, of course it can seep through, and around “Hey Boy . . .” it did seep through into the production, that . . .’
He pauses, trying to find the right word for the sense of uplifting rush that polished trance encapsulated. Finally, he says, ‘whoosh’. He says what seeped into the Chemical Brothers’ sound at the time of ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ was ‘the whoosh of what we heard being played there’. Released in 1999, the single ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ spent nearly three months in the UK charts. By this time they weren’t just DJing, they had a live show too.
Live presentation of electronic dance music has gone a long way beyond the three-song PA circuit of 1991. Imaginative shows created by the Shamen, and the Megadog events, had demonstrated the potential for winning over a rock audience for acts with a full set, some stagecraft and a truck full of visuals. The Prodigy’s career moved on a long way after their live debut in an old bingo hall in Coventry. Their second album, Music for the Jilted Generation, went to Number One in the UK album chart the week of release. Their third – which included the single ‘Firestarter’ – was released in 1997, the same year the band had a headlining slot at the Glastonbury Festival, having developed something of a crossover appeal to rock fans, and proving to be a strong live arena and festival act. They went on to headline Creamfields in 2006 and 2013.
In recent years, the Chemical Brothers have had headline slots at both Glastonbury and Creamfields. Ed Simons identifies Orbital’s performance at Glastonbury in 1994 as a watershed moment, although he’s aware there are some gig-goers still a little resistant to electronic dance music on major live stages and acts performing with elements pre-programmed, just as some people were aghast when Cabaret Voltaire turned up onstage without a drummer. Ed never thought he’d be a performer, but now embraces and enjoys the experience. ‘What we took from rave culture was that idea that whatever you’re doing, music or whatever, it’s still about bringing people together, to feel that unity. I still think that’s important.’
The success of clubs including Gatecrasher and Cream and, through 1999, the ubiquity of ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ – and its refrain ‘superstar DJs here we go’ – as well as the announcement of two big new club launches in London in the final months of 1999, were grounds for believing that dance music was still booming at the end of the 1990s. The big parties planned for Millennium Eve were being talked up by the dance music magazines of the time, which included Mixmag, DJ, Muzik, Ministry and Jockey Slut.
In September 1999 Home on Leicester Square opened in the heart of the West End. Darren Hughes fronted the club, but despite (or perhaps because of) a marketing campaign that drew such characters to the club as Chris Eubank, Paul Gascoigne and the guy who plays Ricky on the TV soap EastEnders, it didn’t quite work out – it also triggered major changes at Cream. Originally, it had been a Cream project – a London venue for the Liverpool-based brand – but as the search for premises and negotiations with business partners began the process drove James and Darren apart. Eventually, in June 1998, Darren pulled out of Cream altogether, and set up Home with Ron McCulloch. He took Cream resident DJ Paul Oakenfold, who was hot property, topping the ‘Best DJ in the World’ poll in DJ magazine in 1998, as he would again in 1999. It’s believed that every Saturday night Paul was being paid £20,000.
The other club launch in London in 1999 was Fabric, a three-room venue built near Smithfield Market, which owes its existence to Keith Reilly – the former owner of a CD and tape manufacturing business which he sold in 1989 – and Cameron Leslie. Fabric became a big club that wasn’t a superclub by avoiding superstar DJs or Paul van Dyk and trance and euphoric breakdowns, and events sponsored by Lynx.
DJ fees for New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium were astronomical. Judge Jules got paid £100,000 for playing Gatecrasher. Fatboy Slim pocketed £140,000 for four gigs in one night, and Shoom founder Danny Rampling took £50,000 for a gig in Cape Town. Promoters were paying these fees in the expectation of a big payday, but that isn’t what transpired. In the face of terrible ticket sales, Geoff Oakes was forced to cancel a big Renaissance event at Trentham Gardens in Staffordshire and downsize to the Nottingham city centre club Media, in the process suffering a loss of £200,000. Cream’s events in Brixton and Cardiff were poorly attended. Gatecrasher’s New Year’s Eve event in Sheffield was a disaster.
There was a sense of iconoclasm in the air, a backlash against the greed of DJs and superclubs, but the issue wasn’t just the money, there was also a perception that what had started as a cultural revolution had become boring and conservative. Ministry, the monthly dance music magazine launched by Ministry of Sound, reflected dance music’s retreat from any socially progressive ideals it might once have aspired to, invariably featuring drug surveys and pictures of DJs with their new cars inside the magazine, and bikini-clad girls on the front cover. It was as if the magazine had lost heart in the music.
The backlash affected more than just the superclubs and superstar DJs; several quality nights that had contributed a lot to the 1990s came to an end, including Pure in Edinburgh and Progress in Derby. In 2002 the Que Club in Birmingham closed (it reopened with a refit in 2007). In 2002 Trade at Turnmills came to an end, and Tall Paul of Turnmills admitted, ‘The era of the superstar DJ and so-called superclub has come to a dramatic end.’ Turnmills eventually closed in March 2008.
In 2002, three years after Darren Hughes’ departure, Cream closed its weekly night, but revived its business by concentrating on occasional nights, and the annual Creamfields festival (which has survived and prospered). In the meantime, things weren’t going well for Darren; Home on Leicester Square was losing its way and struggled financially. After eighteen months of trading, the venue was £11m in the red. Carrying
all those losses, Home went into receivership in April 2001, although the timing of the move was triggered by an emergency meeting of Westminster Council ruling that the club should close with immediate effect after a police surveillance operation found ‘open and serious Class A drug-dealing and usage’. Darren moved to Ibiza and relaunched Sundays at Space with a new organisation called We Love, and a new resident DJ: Sasha.
In June 2007, Gatecrasher in Sheffield, the club that had helped the Chemical Brothers to put some whoosh in ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’, was destroyed in a fire believed to have started in the DJ box. But the best days were over for Gatecrasher, having lost the loyalty of its customers and its status as an industry leader even though it had expanded its operations, establishing new venues called Bed in Sheffield and Leeds. Gatecrasher hit serious financial trouble, and in April 2013 entered administration. The losses weren’t small; the club owed £3.5m to 233 creditors including DJs, agents and printers, and £500,000 to the Inland Revenue. Bed in Leeds had already proved to be problematic. West Yorkshire Trading Standards had raided the club and confiscated over 600 litres of counterfeit vodka (tests revealed that the alcohol contained isopropanol, tertiary butanol and chloroform). Gatecrasher were fined £5,000.
Home never made it to its second birthday party, Gatecrasher turned into a bit of a mess, but Fabric survived, although not without some scares. Its adventurous music policy won enough loyalty to enable it to make it through the acid house recession. Instead of featuring the same name DJs playing the same formulaic sets, Fabric tended to concentrate on incorporating some of the more marginal, niche club scenes into its programming.
Through the late 1990s, away from the big main rooms at the major clubs, there had been a few signs that formulas were being challenged. The compilation Live at the Social Volume 1 – including diverse tracks from the likes of Red Snapper and Cash Money – fed into a growing demand for eclectic DJs. Some of the DJs who had stepped off the circuit when acid house swept through the country made a return in the second half of the 1990s. Greg Wilson had stopped working and started selling some of his records, but found his place again with gigs including a guest slot at ‘Yellow’ at the Boardwalk in Manchester, and then, with more fanfare, at the Electric Chair at the Music Box. DJ Mr Scruff and others who would dig deep to find a selection of funk, breaks and soul, steering clear of the obvious, were rising in popularity.
This splintering had plenty of precedents. It was reminiscent of what had happened once the Mecca halls and the big dance orchestras dominated, only for self-organising music fans wanting to shake things up to find some basements in which to showcase weirder jazz. And in the aftermath of all-conquering disco music came the futurist nights, jazz funk and other small scenes through the 1980s.
The trend towards a fragmented nightclub scene picked up pace in the twenty-first century, especially once social media, podcasts and file-sharing gave routes to promoters, DJs and musicians, and others, to build networks outside the control of the major players. But even in the late 1990s, there were dozens of credible, rather than commercial, and marginal and small-scale club nights, each playing one or several underground genres, from deep house to breaks; Fabric made a point of booking DJs that represented that world.
At the Blue Note on Monday nights, Talvin Singh, together with promoter Sweety Kapoor, had established a night called ‘Anokha’, which Björk used to attend (Talvin had played percussion on her 1993 album Debut). Once at Anokha, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry turned up and grabbed the microphone (people who were there remember it was fun but also remember that once he had the microphone he wouldn’t relinquish it). In 1998 Singh released his solo debut album OK, which won him the Mercury Music Prize. His sound, tabla and other percussion, with drum & bass influence, was never going to be a superclub main-room sound, but it was perfect for Fabric.
Fabric was built on good first principles: not playing safe. Keith Reilly once explained the booking policy: ‘There are certain styles of music we don’t book because, quite frankly, you can hear them everywhere else.’ He also recalled a moment that he thought summed up the loyalty and quality of the crowd – a Friday when Talvin Singh was performing. ‘He lost a five-grand watch in the club. And someone handed it in. Talvin couldn’t believe it.’
One of the genres that flourished away from the superclubs was UK garage, an intriguing hybrid sound incorporating drum & bass and house, big basslines, syncopated rhythms and sweet, soulful vocals that bubbled up through clubs in London like ‘Twice As Nice’ at the Colosseum in Vauxhall, ‘Cookies & Cream’, and ‘Sun City’. Many of these were held on Sunday evenings, as this was the only night venues would hire out to what was then a fledgling scene.
The tougher end of UK garage – songs like So Solid Crew’s ‘Dilemma’, Wookie’s ‘Storm’ and the instrumental dub versions of hits like MJ Cole’s ‘Crazy Love’ – fed into grime and dubstep, which emerged via the evolving playlist at club nights like ‘FWD>>’ on Thursday nights at Plastic People in Shoreditch, and larger parties like the ‘DMZ’ nights at Mass in Brixton.
Dubstep was primarily, but not only, a London sound. There were a number of significant nights elsewhere, including ‘Subloaded’ in Bristol and ‘Murkage’ in Manchester. Word spread online, via radio shows and podcasts from the likes of Rinse FM, and specialist BBC DJs including Gilles Peterson and Mary Anne Hobbs. Journalist Alex Needham described dubstep to American readers of the magazine Interview as ‘less a party and more a sonic insurrection. Anyone who likes to experience music at mind-alteringly loud volumes should attend a dubstep night immediately. The latest sound to infect the London underground is a combination of skittering beats, ass-quaking bass lines and eerie atmospherics.’
The urge to do something different, the energy of young promoters and music fans, and various influences and innovations continually refresh the soundtrack to a Saturday night, but some of the most important changes in nightlife have come as a result of changes in the licensing trade and government legislation. In the second half of the 1990s, the divide between pubs and clubs began to break down. Previously, pubs were required to close at 11 p.m. and customers moved on to clubs if they wanted to dance or to continue to drink, but new style café bars, taking advantage of more relaxed regulations, were opening with DJs and designated dancefloors, free entry, and a bar open until 1 or 2 a.m. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, for many chains and independent club owners, this was having a destructive effect, even on clubs with a long history.
Eighty years after it had first opened at the Streatham Locarno, and after he’d been owner for fifteen years, ghost-buster Fred Batt closed Caesars and put it up for sale in 2010. Further changes to the Licensing Act (in force from November 2005) increased the hours that pubs and bars could stay open, and gave nightclubs the potential to open until dawn. Fred claimed that a proportion of his potential clientele were remaining in bars rather than moving on to Caesars. When developers bought the site and were granted permission to knock it down to build a residential and retail development, marking the end of eighty years of history at the Streatham Locarno, Batt put the contents of the club up for sale, everything from a statue of a chariot and four horses that used to adorn the entrance (and once featured in a Spice Girls video) to the gold-legged chairs and a stuffed Siberian tiger.
Despite the travails and nightclub closures during the last fifteen years, clubland has an ability to rejuvenate itself. There are always people inspired by new music, great nights out and full dancefloors, and some of them proved resourceful enough to contribute to the next wave. Take the story of Yousef Zaher from Crosby, Merseyside, and his ‘Circus’ night. ‘Serious music and fun times’ is the club’s self-description.
One Friday at the beginning of the 1990s, aged sixteen, Yousef went over to Shelley’s. He didn’t get home until Tuesday and his mum asked him where he’d been. He told her the truth: he’d been to Stoke, and on to Derby and then Birmingham. Then Droitwich, and finally Gloucester (there w
as a girl involved, and she’d paid his train fare home). Just over ten years later, Yousef had a career as a DJ, had enjoyed a spell as a resident at Ministry of Sound, played regularly at Renaissance, and built a close relationship with Cream. In 2002, together with Richard McGinnis, he launched his own night, Circus. Yousef at Circus has played alongside iconic DJs like Sven Väth, Loco Dice, Heidi, Laurent Garnier, MK and Derrick Carter. And with Sasha – the DJ whose work had sent him into ecstasy and to Gloucester all those years before.
A decade and a half on from that millennium moment, which signalled a backlash against superstar DJs, disc-only nights are even more prevalent. DJs are still everywhere, from playing vinyl in the tiny basement of a hipster bar, to major high street clubs like Tiger Tiger where you can dance yourself dizzy to a DJ on a laptop feeding the dancefloor with obvious chart hits. On the thriving underground house music scene, DJs like MK and Cajmere – who were first talked about in the early and mid-1990s – are, twenty years later, filling bigger halls with younger fans. In addition, new DJs have made their mark. This has led to powerful match-ups, across generations and continents; clubbers attending a recent season of events at the Warehouse Project in Manchester had the opportunity to hear veteran DJs like Andy Weatherall, Kerri Chandler (USA) and Laurent Garnier, as well as Tale of Us (Berlin), Nina Kraviz (Russia), Yousef and Ben Pearce.
It appears the backlash against the big-name commercial DJs around the turn of the millennium has turned out to be temporary. If some of the star names from then have slipped from favour, a new set of superstar DJs has emerged, pulling bigger crowds and earning even bigger fees than their 1990s counterparts. By 2014, the ‘Best DJ in the World’ annual poll by DJ magazine was dominated by the likes of Hardwell, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Steve Aoki and Calvin Harris. Among those featuring in the top five in 1999, Paul Oakenfold had dropped out of the top hundred, and Paul van Dyk was hanging on in at Number 38. The highest-placed female DJs were Nervo, twin-sister DJs (Olivia and Miriam) who started out their career as songwriters (they cowrote ‘When Love Takes Over’, a hit for David Guetta).