Category Archives: Classic Clubs

CLASSIC CLUBS: The Starck Club

703 McKinney Avenue, Dallas, 1984-89

In the backdraft of the disco era, in a city known more for oil and politics than wild club culture, one of history’s most unlikely nightclubs was born. Built by a kitchen extractor magnate and envisioned by future design legend Phillippe Starck – he of three-legged lemon-squeezer fame – Dallas’s Starck Club rivalled Studio 54 for its mix of the monied and the magnificent. And it owed much of its success to an unlimited supply of a new drug called ecstasy, which it sold legally over the bar.

For five years between 1984 and 1989, the Starck Club sat at the epicentre of Dallas nightlife, channelling the hedonism of Studio, the novelty of New York’s Mudd Club, the style of Le Palace in Paris, and the innovation of Manchester’s Hacienda. It pre-empted a new wave of US dancefloor culture powered by a brand-new drug, and embodied a wild and revolutionary spirit that made it like no other place in the world.

By the early eighties, mainstream disco was losing favour and while there were vibrant underground dance scenes around the US, most of America thrilled to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Dallas at that time was best known for the TV show of the same name, the Cowboys football team and the JFK assassination (probably in that order). But thanks to the vision of local businessman Blake Woodall, a nightspot opened that signalled a new chapter in American club culture.

The Starck brought together cutting-edge Eurocentric electronic music, new wave and acid house in a purpose-built setting designed by French architect and industrial designer Phillipe Starck. “It was uniquely perched at the nexus of money, sin, sexual politics, style, recreational chemicals, and strange new musical hybrids,” Dallas musician and video director Greg Synodis told Jeff Liles in the Dallas Observer. “The Starck Club influenced people’s tastes and acceptance of what was right or wrong.” A draw for anyone who landed in the city, nothing was off limits, including then-legal ecstasy aka X, key to the club’s success, but also at the heart of its downfall.

At the turn of the decade, Blake Woodall was looking for something a little more exciting than taking over the local, albeit highly profitable, Vent-A-Hood family kitchen extractor business. He decided to open a nightclub slap bang in the centre of his hometown. But knew it was no small undertaking. “There was a design aspect, a music aspect, a fashion aspect, management aspect,” Woodall told RBMA. He managed to pull in some big-name backers including Stevie Nicks, as well as younger investors like Christina de Limur (aka Sita) who connected him to a then-unknown industrial designer destined for greatness. “I brought Philippe Starck to the deal, built the Club – my official title: conceptual engineer – and was a night manager from ’84,” she explained. “The point of the whole thing was to bring a little Paris to Texas. Bring something exotic, something different. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble worth taking,” she told the Dallas Observer. “We were at the right place at the right time. Dallas was like a boomtown then.”

Having found the perfect location – under the Woodall-Rodgers freeway – Woodall left Starck to work his magic. All went smoothly until, part-way through construction, the Frenchman was called back to Paris to work on the French President’s residence. While seemingly frustrating, the breathing space proved serendipitous – financial daggers had been drawn as costs ballooned, and while he was awaiting Starck’s return, Woodall paid a trip to Ibiza. “I was awed by the culture, the fashion and the music, and how it seemed so international,” he recalled. “We were listening to music from Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles. It was a remarkable music scene, and I made the decision at that point that would be the music aspect of our project.”

Before the grand opening night, a couple of jigsaw pieces were still missing. The first was Door Bitch. Woodall recruited the ‘Parisian Queen of Punk’, the late Edwige Belmore, doorwoman at Le Palace and frontwoman of Mathématiques Modernes who would turn away punters even when the dancefloor was half-empty. “I loved the original door girl,” Starck DJ Mark Ridlen remembered. “She would be doing the Watusi to my random mix one minute, and the next be manhandling an unruly cokehead to the nearest exit.”

The other was, of course, the music. With an opening night set to feature Stevie Nicks, Grace Jones and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra performing live, Starck recruited compatriot Philippe Krootchey on the decks. A model for Pierre and Gilles’ and a permanent fixture in the Paris clubs, Krootchey was also a musician, releasing ‘Dance on the Groove (And Do The Funk)’ as part of Love International. However, after many delays he failed to made it to the Starck’s opening night. Instead, on the advice of Grace Jones’ manager, at the last minute they pulled in New York-based Kerry Jaggers, who would be resident for the next six months.

The Dallas Morning News described the opening night as the kind of party Jay Gatsby might have thrown. To the fore was Starck’s radical design. A marble staircase led to a colossal bisected circular door which by all accounts took some welly to get open. “Once you entered beyond the red velvet curtain, it was an amazing labyrinth of walkways and hallways of a shrouded interior made up of translucent white curtains which made up cubicles,” remembered a patron on DiscoMusic.com. Kubrickian in essence.

But it was the dancefloor that really wowed the crowd. Sunk 12 feet below the DJ booth, the dancefloor housed the subwoofers, creating the sensation of actually being inside the sound system. And the floor was bisected by a giant arch which was placed there provocatively to create division. “It was the Capulets and the Montagues,” David Muir, another Starck DJ and regular told RBMA. “We didn’t go over and dance on that side and they didn’t come over and dance on our side. It was two separate worlds.” The other great talking point was the unisex bathroom. With stalls divided by glass blocks and motion sensitive TVs, people were very much left to do what they wanted. “There were honestly people that came into that club, went to the bathroom, stayed for two and a half hours, and when they left the bathroom went home,” General Manager Greg McCone added. “Never even went in the club.”

Despite the extravagant opening night, it took a while for word to spread. A strict door policy was in place, as much to protect the patrons as to create hype. “If you were of the gay culture you would want to know you were welcome,” Woodall explained. “If you were a business guy you would want to know you’re welcome. I had this idea that inside there would be green hair and then there would be some of the most remarkable, political people in the world.” In Dallas at that time, to have a dancefloor where drag queens rubbed shoulders with celebrities and aspiring politicos marked a truly watershed moment – all inhibitions and pre-conceptions to be left at the door. “There’d never been a mix of straight and gay crowds in a dance club, and it was just open season,” patron and doorman Nick Hamblen told the Dallas Observer. “I’m gay, and it was nice to go to a bar that was so incredibly mixed. The Starck Club opened the door and we never turned back.”

The dynamic of the place encouraged a broader, wilder and more creative crowd. “Part of the design and desire was to have a complete mix of all spectrums of people,” David Hynds, who ran the club’s art dept. told D Magazine. “The club was so ahead of its time, a Saturday night looked like Halloween,” remembered McCone. “People were in drag as Marie Antoinette or dressed up in tight suits painted green like Mars men. They’d come in naked with a terrycloth bathrobe on.” The club hosted fashion shows, plays, performance art. Local artists were invited in and there was an anything goes attitude. “We had these funky theme parties,” Ridlen told D Magazine. “We would make it look like a grocery store or we would make it look like a rodeo. We’d have these fun themes with appropriate music. We’d always have video exhibits, people showing their art videos. We had events just for that.”

Word quickly spread that the Starck was the hottest place in town, and by the time Grace Jones returned a couple of months later, it was the final push that was needed. Jones arrived late, very late, and insisted that the air conditioning was turned off. But she dazzled the crowd. And soon the Starck was a must for any celebrity who happened to be in Dallas – Rob Lowe, Robert Plant, Annie Lennox, Tom Cruise and Prince were all spotted. A Young Republicans fundraiser was held there with future prez George W Bush in tow. Thanks to its futuristic design, the club even featured in classic ’80s dystopian sci-fi Robocop!

The club’s other secret weapon was, famously, ecstasy. In 1984, when DJ Kerry Jaggers arrived from New York a friend gave him some with the instruction: “Spread that around. It will make it more fun.” Still legal in the US, ecstasy was made freely available at the Starck, sold by the bartenders who proudly advertised their side hustle with the t-shirt slogan “I got X.” “The money was crazy,” bartender Craig Depoi told the Dallas Observer. “Every night I’d make 600 to 800 bucks. People would slide ten or twenty hits of legal X across the bar in matchbooks.” The drug’s abundance was thanks to the crusader-like efforts of Michael Clegg, one of a group of Boston chemists who had investigated the therapeutic benefits of the drug and gone on to become one of its key producers (as well as rebranding it from Empathy to Ecstasy). Though now legendary for it, the Starck was not alone. “It was easy and clean, and all of the clubs in town were making it available to their clientele,” Mike Graff told Liles. “The whole city was overtaken by this phenomenon,” Wade Hampton told RBMA. “Southern Methodist University was completely knee-deep in ecstasy. You’ve got the children of politicians and you’ve got the parents trying to see what the kids are up to – it wasn’t unusual to see your parent’s friends out at Starck.”

As well as Grace Jones and Stevie Nicks, live gigs included Kid Creole and the Coconuts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the Starck wasn’t really set up for live music. The stage was encumbered with large pillars, the acoustics were all wrong and the audience was thirty feet below. Unsurprisingly then, when it came to music it was all about the men behind the decks.

Despite failing to make the opening night, Frenchman Phillipe Krootchey was an early resident, but his punky approach meant he didn’t last long. “He would play something three times in a row and kind of sloppily scratch, throw people off in their rhythm while they were dancing. People would boo, and I thought, ‘That’s great!’” Mark Ridlen told the Dallas Observer.

Ridlen himself also played there, adopting a similarly raucous, anything-goes style. “He had more of this punchy flavour that was probably more suited for the bombastic desires of a Dallas crowd,” says Wade Hampton, producer of the unreleased documentary The Starck Project.

Kerry Jaggers brought a style of DJing that wasn’t bound to four to the floor. “We weren’t afraid of playing below 110 beats per minute,” he recalled to RBMA. “Most DJs would say, ‘Oh, no, that’s too slow. You can’t play that in a club!’” He didn’t shy away from playing more commercial tracks either – The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’, Billy Idol’s ‘Eyes Without A Face’ and even Nik Kershaw were aired there.

It was his successor, San Antonian DJ Rick Squillante, who put The Starck on the map musically. “Rick was a very Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops type of guy,” said Jaggers, who brought him to the Starck. “I had to kind of trick them together, but that was one of the best things that I probably ever did to that club.” Squillante would go on to head Virgin Records New York dance division in the ’90s, signing key tracks by Josh Wink and Armand Van Helden and helming Janet Jackson’s rise to superstar status. In Dallas, playing what became known as “Starck music”, Squillante brought a mix of deep disco, new wave and European synthpop to the club. He played Trevor Horn, Pet Shop Boys, Echo & the Bunnymen, Bauhaus and Malcolm McLaren – music that the Starck crowd had never heard before. They called it “Eurotech”. “He was playing music you couldn’t hear at any other local club… that you couldn’t hear at any other club in America – until he made it relevant,” Don Nedler, who (briefly) reopened the club in 1996, told the Dallas Observer. But while he may have had the crowd eating out of his hand, Squillante wasn’t what you would call a technician. He didn’t really mix, preferring to spend his time hosting breakaway parties in his booth. But he was always in control, deftly switching between tracks and often playing for ten or eleven hours straight. “Rick would be talking to all these people and would turn away with 30 seconds left of music, walk over, pull a record out, throw it on, and it would be right on cue and mix right into a new track,” Starck regular David Muir told RBMA.

Christina de Limur and DJ Rick Squillante

As the eighties advanced so did the music, and while Squillante was highly lauded, his successor, “GoGo” Mike DuPriest was perhaps even more influential. Embracing acid house and the burgeoning rave culture, he shifted from the melody aesthetic of Squillante to the pulsating rhythm of house music. Often using three turntables, DuPriest acted as the inspiration for many local DJs who took the new music and spread it across the US – Red Eye, Rob Vaughan, Cle Acklin, JT Donaldson, DJ Merritt, Ronnie Bruno and DJ Daisy – moved by his unmatched knowledge for this new music and flawless choice of records. “Chicago house tracks by Frankie Knuckles and Fast Eddie, Detroit Techno tracks from Derrick May and Juan Atkins alongside UK Acid House artists like 808 State, S’ Express, Baby Ford and The Beatmasters,” Jeff K told Liles in 2009. “Having come to Dallas from NYC, Mike DuPriest had the knowledge of these records and understood the movement that was upon us.” And it wasn’t just his choice in tunes; it was a whole new approach to playing music. “He was also blessed with the skill and technique to phrase, mix and generate emotion unlike any DJ I’d ever seen before,” continues Jeff K. “Prior to Starck, electronic dance music had never made me cry. That final night of Starck Club with Mike DuPriest at the helm, I wept like a child.”

All good things must come to an end and by 1986 the writing was on the wall. This was partly down to the fact the Starck was so fun, innovative and audacious that it had spawned a wealth of new clubs in Dallas and its novelty was diminished. It was also partly down to MDMA. The Club’s open drug sales meant the DEA got very antsy about it. MDMA became a Schedule 1 narcotic on July 1st, 1985, and a year later the Starck was raided. The club was served with a no-dance ban in April 1987 which they embraced by running a “No Dance” party. It carried on for a while but following one last hurrah with who else but Grace Jones, it closed its doors on July 11 1989.

“It was fun being one of the owners of one of the most remarkable nightclubs in the world,” Blake Woodall told RMBA. “Then I started seeing how big it was getting, how almost out of control it was.” Christina de Limur agrees. “All these things do have a lifespan. We had a good run.”

CLASSIC CLUBS: Crackers

203 Wardour Street, London 1973-81

“Noone else could do what I was doing at that time, that type of music what I was playing. It attracted the good soul people to come down and have a good boogie, show what they can do,” George Power told BBC documentary The Last Pirates of his time at Crackers nightclub. “People come here to dance, express themselves let themselves go – whether you were gay, straight or bisexual it was just something unique.”

Crackers has made its way into London clubbing folklore for the fact it inspired a generation of soul boys to sally forth and transform the future of British music. With its first-rate musical credentials, it enticed white and black music lovers to come together on the dancefloor like never before, in a scene that helped black kids develop their own sense of Britishness. There were a few clubs around London that were channelling the same aesthetic of danceable and hot-off-the-press jazz, soul and funk – Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, the 100 Club, the Electric Ballroom – but it was Crackers, located in the heart of Soho and presided over first by Mark Roman and then the much-revered George Power, that became the scene’s heart and soul.

Back in the early ’70s, as northern soul was thriving in the top half of the UK, a different breed of swing-heavy, funk-inflected soul took hold down South. Moving out from suburban clubs like Chris Hill’s Goldmine in Canvey Island, this blossoming soul movement and its largely white following started gathering for weekenders at venues across the country including Caister and Prestatyn, led by the ‘Soul Mafia’ of Hill and his coterie of likeminded DJs, Robbie Vincent, Greg Edwards, DJ Froggy and a young Pete Tong.

But while these parties concentrated on almost exclusively black music, as the scene grew, black dancers felt edged out. “The Soul Mafia things tended to be white beer boys in T-shirts, dancing to the obvious big records,” says soulboy and Crackers regular Terry Farley. The West End was a similar story, thanks to blatantly racist door policies.

*George Power would go on to a long career in radio, launching Kiss FM with Gordon Mac, as well as Mi-Soul, London Greek radio and Crackers Radio*

“They wanted the blackness, without the black,” agrees Good Times’ soundsystem DJ and early soul boy Norman Jay. “It was great for white kids to like black music, but they didn’t want black kids in there for some reason.” Norman recalls how things changed as football terrace culture infiltrated the scene. “I can remember the earliest things at the Goldmine in Canvey Island, and it was almost exclusively black. If you look at photos of Canvey Island circa ’74 it’s black. Within a few years the clientele had changed.”

For the black kids who went to Crackers, soul represented a move away from the reggae that was the staple of their neighbourhoods. “I was kind of divided,” says Fabio, one half of the legendary drum and bass duo, Fabio and Grooverider. “I felt reggae and soul music, but in them days, you couldn’t really be both, you had to be one or the other.” So much so that he used to lie about going to soul clubs. “A cousin of mine used to go to soul clubs, and she used to sneak me in and I never used to tell anybody.” Dancer and DJ Cleveland Anderson felt a similar divided loyalty. “It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own, I was drawn to the soul.”

Crackers was where many British clubbers experienced a truly mixed crowd for the first time. “Blues parties [all-night ska and reggae house parties] you didn’t meet any white people in there,” says Fabio. “It was 99 percent black. But this was 50/50. That was the first time I’d ever seen that. And the first time I saw colour didn’t really matter. You could go out with a white girl and it weren’t no big thing.”

“Crackers was much more urban, a heavier London,” recalled Gilles Peterson on The Last Pirates. “A blacker London. It was less what I was used to but equally it was really exciting, and it was a whole other world.”

There’s almost no visual record of Crackers. This classic piece of archive was actually shot in Brixton’s Cloud’s club, but it features many of the great dancers of the scene.

The club was slap-bang in the middle of Soho, at the Oxford Street end of Wardour Street. Not much to look at, it was essentially a basement dive that housed a cramped dancefloor for 200 revellers – a stark contrast to some of the more swish West End clubs of the era. “Upon arrival we’d go down a short flight of stairs and the first thing that greeted you was the smell of sausages and chips,” says Farley (the food was a licensing loophole). “The carpets were dirty and sticky. The sound system whilst loud lacked any real clarity and the high end would always leave you with ringing ears the next day.”

“Crackers was more about dancing, it wasn’t to do with girls really,” remembers Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B. “For us it was just purely about the music: getting that early music before anybody else. It was mainly for dancers, because it wasn’t where you came to meet people, it was where the dancers came to burn.”

It was also markedly different from northern soul, a scene based on unearthing rare soul from the ’60s. “The difference between us and those northern kids is that we were into new things,” says Norman Jay. “New music, new sounds, new clothes. We didn’t want to look back. Looking back was rock’n’roll and dinosaurs. We wanted the latest, the hippest.”

And that’s certainly what was delivered at Crackers. George Power would be its best-known DJ, but it was Essex-born Mark Roman who set the wheels in motion in 1973. He was drafted from a residency in Leytonstone to spin records six nights a week, and given carte blanche to play pretty much whatever he wanted – which was anything from deep soul to jazz-funk to fusion to proto-disco.

It was on Tuesday nights when it started to get serious – with Roman impressing collectors and dancers alike. On Tuesdays he would play US imports only and had no hesitation in sitting the jazz-fusion of Grover Washington Jr next to the out and out funk of Bobby Byrd and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.

Other tunes he made his own include Juggy Jones’ ‘Inside America’, The Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’, Donald Byrd’s ‘Change Makes You Wanna Hustle’, David Ruffin’s ‘Walk Away from Love’, Dooley Silverspoon’s ‘As Long As You Know,’ Fatback Band’s ‘Going Home To See My Baby’, Black Blood’s ‘A.I.E.’ and Crystal Glass’ ‘Crystal World’.

“He never mixed but kind of segued the tracks, so it was this seamless mixture of funk and soul,” says Fabio. “It was amazing.”

It took a while to get going. “Tuesday nights had a big fat zero people when I started,” Roman told Terry Farley. But then it all changed. “One night in the middle of winter we had over a thousand people there… the walls were wet with water dripping down them. That night was like no other night I have ever known, it was so rammed I used to have to piss in a glass under the decks I had no chance of getting through the crowd and back in time.”

And while Tuesday attracted the diehards, it was the Friday lunchtime dance sessions that made Crackers famous. “I used to play all my new stuff,” remembers Mark Roman on SixMillionSteps.com. “Somehow it just went down. The hot summer of ’76 was when it really peaked.” It was customary to see kids bunking off school, uniforms screwed up in duffle bags, while the grown-ups awarded themselves a half-day. DJ and producer Ashley Beedle remembers changing into his Bowie trousers in the school toilets at lunchtime. And social media is awash with similar stories. “Went every Sunday and Friday lunchtimes while still at school 1979/80,” recalls Crackers regular Lynn Gant. “Went in lunch break when started work in Holborn, then stayed until 3pm. Told friend to tell boss I was ill!”

As well as the music, Crackers was known for its forward-thinking fashions, with many an outfit patently ahead of its time. Much of the fashions that would become known as punk started here. Bondage trousers, army surplus, fluorescent colours, clear plastic jelly sandals. There was an overall atmosphere of tolerance and freedom. “It wasn’t a gay club per se, but it was hip and fashionable,” Norman Jay told RBMA’s Stephen Titmus. “Yes, the music was brilliant, but it was the coming together of different social groups and races. That was what was groundbreaking.”

By the mid-’70s, Crackers was pulling in punters on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Friday lunchtimes, as dancers flitted from one West End soul venue to another. But while they may have been dedicated to the cause, they weren’t helping Crackers turn a profit, and many remember when they turned the cold-water taps off to encourage spending at the bar. This coincided with a clash between Roman and new management who were not only unhappy at the low bar takings but were also less than delighted with his music choices, and so it was that in late 1976 Roman and Crackers went their separate ways and he moved back to Leytonstone’s Jaws, taking half the crowd with him.

As well as George Power, a fair few DJs passed through Crackers’ doors, including Andy Hunter, Pepe, and latterly, Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. “Andy Hunter, he was just amazing,” recalls Cleveland Anderson. “He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall. Boy he could throw music down. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the new tunes that the heads would like and also the girls would like.” But he soon became disillusioned with the way that the music world was going and when he left George Power stepped in to the limelight.

Power had been thrust into the multi-ethnic community of North London when he arrived from Greece aged just 15, and before long had immersed himself into DJ culture, ending up with quite a following at a club called Bumbles in Wood Green. When he left here for Crackers in 1976, Power brought with him a gay and black crowd. The music had moved from the slower funk vibe into disco, and he was quite a bit older than the kids on his dancefloor. Despite seemingly corny shoutouts – ‘Wang dang dooey, shoobedy on down’ – his music and his over-the-top flamboyance endeared himself to the Crackers’ crowd. They knew that under his wing they would hear the best music, dance in peace and come together.

“A very strange guy,” says Jazzie B. “Quite hard and a little bit militant. But very cutting edge, and he was very into that whole black thing, the whole black scene.” And this gave Crackers a big pull. “He was totally on the button, understood what black kids were about,” says Jay. “He became a legend. In our eyes, inner city urban kids, George Power was more important than any Chris Hill or Robbie Vincent. They didn’t mean anything to us. They weren’t as cutting-edge, or as up to the minute as George.”

Even his predecessor agrees. “Over many years he showed he was a true soul man,” Mark Roman told Soul Survivors magazine (??). “George was more of a person’s DJ than a lone wolf like myself. George had the knack of getting others involved, and that was his strength I guess.” And he played everything from Philly soul to jazz-funk to the staples of what were to become rare groove, including Reuben Wilson’s ‘Got to Get Your Own’. “When George took over, it went slightly more specialised,” says Cleveland Anderson. “George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘What’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff.”

And when the music got more ‘hardcore’ so did the vibe. “The amount of girls at the club diminished and the vibe became edgier,” says Farley. “Full of young kids from some of London’s toughest estates, peace and love was not the mantra.” The trouble came from all quarters. “Towards the end of the ’70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls were leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs,” says Cleveland Anderson. “Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!” But Power was no fool when it came to looking after himself, and the club. “He had the hardest geezers around him,” remembers Jazzie B. “And always women you’d never fuck with on the door. At the end of the day no matter what you did you wouldn’t mess about with the scene.”

And while dancing was always essential to Crackers, it was when Power came in that the serious dancers really took their place at the forefront. To dance here was not a casual thing. “There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing,” remembers Cleveland Anderson. “The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side.” The style of dancing was a real contrast to the high-octane amphetamine driven Northern soul. “The southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed,” wrote Robert Elms in The Way We Wore. “The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn’t cut it, you didn’t go anywhere near the floor.”

For some the dancing wasn’t just recreation, it was their day job too. “A lot of them used to go to dance classes, Pineapple studios, ballet Rambert” says Norman Jay. “All those guys were the first black dancers to feature in pop videos.”

Horace, Franklin, Trevor Shakes, Tommy McDonald, and future DJ star Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson: the best dancers enjoyed a fame that often eclipsed the DJ. And competition between them was fierce. Cleveland Anderson recalls a time when Horace came down to reclaim his crown. “There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.”

George was good to his dancers. “He would use them to break certain records and focus upon them during the session, made them feel special and they stayed loyal,” says Farley. He was also generous to Anderson, encouraging him to make the move from dancer to DJ. “That’s how I started, basically, as a warmup DJ, and I did that for years and years and years for no money. It wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to play my records.”

The great Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson rose from the dancefloor of Crackers to become one of London’s best-known DJs through the ’90s

By the late ’70s, 230 Wardour Street was leaning heavily towards punk as its Vortex nights started to become more well-attended. Crackers finally closed its doors in 1981 as the key players were let loose taking the soul, jazz-funk scene to the next level. Norman Jay went on to build the Good Times soundsystem with his brother Joey; Jazzie B formed the Soul II Soul collective and set up residency at Covent Garden’s Africa Centre; Fabio went from soul boy to jungle forefather; and Paul Trouble Anderson became a key DJ on the rave scene. It’s fascinating to consider what direction these pioneers might have gone in without their time at Crackers. As for George Power, he continued his mission to bring the dancefloor to the forefront of popular culture as he helped set up Kiss FM and of course continued to DJ, eventually setting up Crackers radio. Sadly, neither Power nor Roman are with us today, but their legacy most definitely lives on. “At the time you didn’t know that in 20-odd years you’d still be referring to this place. It was just a place you went to on a Saturday afternoon and had a wicked time in there,” says Fabio. Norman Jay sums it up best. “We felt this was home, this was our place,” he says. “We belonged, we were wanted.”

The Crackers community is very much alive and well, with Crackers Radio broadcasting wondrous soul 24-hours daily, and throwing parties and events in the heart of Soho.

CLASSIC CLUBS: Sub Club

22 Jamaica St, Glasgow, 1987-present

‘The music still batters the senses, pushing boundaries, constantly reinventing and setting the tone for what’s coming round the next corner,’ says Mike Grieve, head honcho at Glasgow’s Sub Club, possibly the world’s longest-running club of its kind. ‘This is the space where underground clubs really exist, breaking new music, creating new energies, inspiring new ideas, and forging new friendships all along the way.’ With this level of excitement after almost thirty years, it’s not difficult to see why the Sub Club has firmly established itself as a Glasgow, dare we say Scottish, dance music institution.

Located on 22 Jamaica Street, the Sub Club, or ‘Subbie’, became central to the club culture explosion in ’90s Glasgow. The scene had been set thirty years before when it opened as afterhours speakeasy Le Cave – supposedly graced by the likes of Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong. By the early ’80s the same dancefloor was playing host to the likes of Primal Scream as the indie-centric Lucifer’s. In 1986 DJ Harri – who is still resident all these years later – moved in armed with his record box of dub, hip-hop and soul, and a year later in 1987 the Sub Club opened its doors.

But it was the advent of house music that really changed everything as Glasgow (along with the rest of the UK) began to experience a monumental shift in dancefloor culture. Within a couple of years, the Sub Club had become a beacon for every top house DJ in the world. Larry Heard, Derrick Carter, Sneak, Juan Atkins – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it wasn’t just the guest appearances that made the Sub what it was. It was what it created. It was here that Slam found a home and it provided the birthplace for Optimo’s beloved Espacio. It’s hard to understate the importance of the Sub.

Back when it opened in 1987, house music domination was a little way away. With its rise seemingly less engineered than elsewhere in the UK, house began to seep into the consciousness of Scottish clubbers via a less direct route – gay clubs, hi-energy and Italo-disco. ‘My first encounters with house music were in gay clubs, because they were the best places to hear good music,’ explained Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch of Optimo in 2018. ‘There was a club called Bennetts, which lasted until relatively recently… hi-energy and Italo was the dominant sound in gay clubs but also in mainstream straight clubs.’ This led to a more organic rise of party culture. ‘I think initially the DJs who were playing it perhaps weren’t even aware this was this new thing, it was just that these records coming from Chicago fitted in and didn’t sound rabidly different from the Italo-disco they’d been playing.’ Around the same time, people started creating their own raves. ‘Before any house clubs per se, there was a lot of house parties… people would throw big parties, put up a few UV lights, get a load of ecstasy. Those were the first proper house music parties in Glasgow that I went to.’

The attitude to playing music was also changing. ‘I was always interested in mixing myself but the musical styles at the time were more eclectic and it wasn’t always possible until house took hold,’ remembered Stuart McMillan, one half of techno pioneers Slam. Key inspiration at this time was local mixmaster prodigy Paul Welsh: ‘I took part in the DMC mixing championships in the early ’80s. I started DJing when I was 12 at the local youth club, so that would’ve been late ’70s and I don’t even know if mixing was a big thing then – I was just learning the ropes.’ One of the judges was the legendary James Hamilton of Record Mirror – who had inadvertently introduced the young Welsh to the concept. ‘I had a good long chat with him because he was my hero. He used to do that page in Record Mirror and give you the BPM, so he saved you all the work!’ says Welsh. ‘It was trial and error when I started mixing records myself, but I didn’t fully understand that to get good at it you had to have a good understanding of tempos.’ All the same, he soon became the man to learn from when he played 22 Jamaica Street in one of its earlier incarnations – the Jamaica Inn. ‘He blew me away with how he could put records together in such a smooth fashion,’ says Harri, Sub Club legend and long-time resident. ‘He said you’re really good at holding down the beat, but you’re missing the bars. Pointing that out to me was a total revelation.’

It wasn’t long before this spread to the dancefloor. ‘Sunday night in a place called Fury Murry’s,’ remembers Harri. ‘It was fifty pence to get in and it was called Ten Bob Bop. They were playing a fair bit of house. It was probably the first exclusively acid and house night.’ Fury Murry’s also put on another night called Black Market – an early home for pre-Slam McMillan and Meikle. ‘When they started that night, I was still playing a cross section of things and then there was a deluge of house and also learning how to mix it properly,’ says Harri. ‘It started to take over, in tandem with ecstasy arriving. The two things together just made sense and went hand in hand.’

The Sub Club started off as a night at Lucifer’s but just a year later on April Fool’s Day 1987, 22 Jamaica Street re-opened as the Sub Club. All the vital ingredients were in place. Harri had joined in 1986 with his mate Gerri MacLaughlin when it was Lucifer’s. ‘We called the night ”Deep Box.” At the start of the night, we’d play reggae and northern soul and then stuff like “Rhythim Is Rhythim” mixed in with it, but it wasn’t exclusively house.‘ Paul Welsh was there too. ‘We used to do a Friday night. Harri would play mainly house and I’d play hip hop and jazz. I know this was going on in London cos I used to go to London regularly on record buying trips and I met people like Patrick Forge and Gilles Peterson and Paul Murphy.’ Current owners Mike Grieve and Paul Crawford remember the transition on their site. ‘At first it was a mix of soul, funk and hip hop with an occasional house track thrown in, then acid house blew up and that was just crazy – smiley t-shirts, kaftans, flares, whistles, smoke, strobes and a full night of acid house music. It completely changed clubbing and that was certainly a defining moment.’

Slam arrived in 1989 and things really began to change. Both regulars, McMillan remembers that it wasn’t really about the club itself back then so much as the nights that they put on. ‘Harri and Gerry had a night called Deep Box. and Graham Wilson and Nick Peacock were the residents at Lucifer’s. I was always that kid standing at the side watching. Trying to find out what the records were called.’ By this point the pair were playing Fury Murry’s. ‘It was a real mish-mash of music from House to disco rare groove and some cool hip-hop cuts like Spoony G’s the Godfather,’ McMillan said. ‘The only night the club could give us was a Wednesday night, but when you’re keen, you’re keen. We managed to fill that quite a few times.’ Steven Sweetman then started his UFO night at Tin Pan Alley where Jon DaSilva and Harri were residents and coaxed Macmillan and Orde across giving birth to their reinvention as Slam. ‘I never really liked the name,’ says McMillan, ‘but it was ideal for the night as the name was taken from Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ EP. We ran that for about 5-6 months and now has become a legendary night…the scene went from quite underground to utter hysteria in the space of months. You really could feel you were living through some sort of revolution.’

By 1990, the Sub Club was thriving – Slam’s JOY became a Friday night banker from 1989, while Harri took over the Saturday night residency a year later. And it wasn’t long before the two joined forces. ‘They started a new night at the Sub Club called Atlantis, which was all about house, acid house with a slight Balearic feel,’ says McIvor. But it took a while to get going. ‘For the first few months it wasn’t that busy and then we got these UV lights and big white drapes and the club felt like you were in a big tent,’ remembers Harri. ‘The night that really kicked off for us in that club was Stuart and myself warming up for Stone Roses. They played at Glasgow Green and asked Stuart and I to do the warm-up for them and we’d never heard of them. Then we did the after party at Atlantis and we had a queue round the block and from that night on we had a queue every Saturday for the next four years.’

Atlantis, by Nick Peacock (also the header image)

This all coincided with a novel time in the City’s history. ‘Glasgow was the European Capital of Culture, so we had a 5am license for the whole year, which was unheard of in those days,’ Slam told Do Music Yourself. ‘We quickly attracted a second wave of new house music fans to join the acid house early adopters who had lasted the pace. It was at a special point in time for the scene – a point where indie bands were just as likely to get on one and join the party as ravers and clubbers.’ McIvor remembers the change. ‘The nights in the Sub Club were the ones were you felt something revolutionary was happening and everything’s changing. The dress code is changing, the attitude is changing. Before then it had been very much about what you were wearing, fashion, looking a bit moody and suddenly it was all wiped away.’

Sadly, it wasn’t long before Slam started to lose interest in big parties and moved back underground, heading to the nearby Arches and shifting to a more techno-centric focus. Harri stayed put, launching his new night Subculture in 1994 with Domenic and Oscar Fullone and which, remarkably, is still going strong to this day. ‘The owners of the club offered me the Saturday night with whoever I wanted to do it with,’ explained Harri in 2018. ‘After a few years Oscar left to do Mish Mash, so for the last 22 years Dominic and I have been doing it on our own. We’ve had our peaks and troughs, but they’ve always stood by us.’

Troughs indeed including a fire (started in the pub next door) in 1999 that wiped the club out for three years. ‘Paul got a phone call that the building next door was on fire and we headed straight there,’ remembered Mike Grieve in 2007 (Previously a promoter in Aberdeen and long-time associate of Harri’s Grieve took over the club in the early 1990s). ‘We never thought it was going to be that bad. In fact, we all went into MacSorleys bar for a pint while the fire brigade put it out … or so we thought.’ Three years later the club reopened. ‘It allowed us to reopen the venue with brand new fit-out and an unbelievable sound system.’

It wasn’t the first time the Sub had had a revamp. In 1997 they had a second bar installed and ‘the sticky carpet’ removed and then nine years later they had a Bodysonic dancefloor installed – road tested by Derrick Carter no less. But the Sub was far from being showy. In fact, that was a large part of its appeal particular in the era of the superclub. ‘Our punters preferred the intimacy and community of the Sub Club,’ explained Grieve and Crawford. ‘The club has always had a strong policy of inclusion – if you come down for a party, with a friendly attitude, then you’re in. It’s not about following fads or fashion. The DJs are constantly pushing music forward, seeking new tunes and sounds that will keep people dancing.’ Harri agrees on that front. ‘I might only be playing four hours a week but I’m certainly putting in a lot more than that trying to find a new music.’ And for a while it was the place everyone wanted to be. ‘I remember the captain of the Scottish football team, off his face, trying to order drinks at the cloakroom.’

Today the Sub Club’s most celebrated residents are Optimo, aka JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, with their much-loved Espacio night, which ran every Sunday until 2010. Named after the Liquid Liquid song, the duo’s big appeal was their ability to take tracks from any genre and work them together – which wowed crowds and became their calling card. Both Wilkes and Twitch had cut their teeth playing techno, but by 1997 were ready for more musical freedom. As DJmag put it, alongside techno and house you might expect to hear anything from post-punk and new wave, to dub, electroclash, Afrobeat and more. ‘Ambient Eno cuts could slot in seamlessly alongside an industrial Cabaret Voltaire banger, a Fela Kuti jam or a straight-up classic pop hit.’

It took time for the word to spread but by the time Optimo returned to the venue after the fire, queues would form around the block. ‘Their musical policy had a huge influence on my DJing and my taste in music,’ Richard Birchard aka Hudson Mohawke, who worked the Sub Club bar in Optimo’s heyday, told The Guardian. ‘The way they crafted their sets opened me up to so many things. Their influence spreads far, but they don’t often get the credit they deserve – there are plenty of people out there now doing pretend versions of Optimo sets to huge festival crowds.’ As their reputation grew, a who’s who of established names played: from good mate James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, through to Franz Ferdinand, Peaches, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, ESG and even Rachel Stevens. But rather than let the rot set in, the duo decided to call it a day in 2010 – parodying a David Cameron campaign poster for the announcement: ‘Optimo (Espacio) 1997-2010: Getting out before the Tories get in.’

Other residencies included the The Yard with Stuart McCorisken and Gareth Sommerville in 1995, Sensu from 2007, techno residency Animal Farm, The I AM, Thunder Disco, Don’t Drop – all local faces mixed with a list of A-Class musical guests as long as your arm including Carl Cox, Green Velvet, Juan Atkins, Kerri Chandler and of course, Liquid Liquid.

Still going strong today and showing no signs of tiring, it seems that the Sub has come to represent everything that’s so vibrant and unique about the Scottish club scene. ‘I love the Sub Club. I’ve had some amazing nights there over the years,’ says Irvine Welsh. ‘Whatever genre of music it hosts, it always pulls along a great crowd of party animals who really know their stuff. Sometimes, the perception on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall is that Scotland just do the Highland fling of a weekend.’

Fred Deakin spent a life in clubs

Starting out as a student club runner in Edinburgh in the 1980s, Fred Deakin has built a formidable career as a DJ, producer, graphic designer and lecturer. This charity shop polymath was responsible for numerous clubs, including Misery, the self-styled worst club in the world, Thunderball, Blue and Impotent Fury, all of which he distilled into his award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Club Life (now about to show in London). Alongside Nick Franglen, he formed the humour-laced Lemon Jelly, who went on to be nominated for a Mercury Music Prize and BRIT Award. Subsequently, he has worked as a lecturer, though he still keeps his hand in looking for vinyl treasures in bargain bins and charity shops the world over. He is Britain’s leading Nana Mouskouri fan.

Interview by Bill, 02.11.20 and 11.10.2024

How was the Club Life conceived and then how how did you construct the idea?
Well I kind of had the idea in lockdown because I was just feeling isolated as we all were and I realised fairly quickly that we were all going to be stuck at home and in these little bubbles for the foreseeable and then when we reemerged clubbing was going to be the last thing on the list. It made me take stock and I remembered all the nights I’d run and all the nights I’d been to in my late teens and 20s and even 30s and just how special they were. They weren’t necessarily huge big name clubs that we all talk about, they were just the clubs that me and my mates put on for our friends and our community and that whole history had vanished into the mists of time. I just wanted to sort of pay tribute to clubbing

It’s a young person’s game to some degree. So, okay, Club Life is not a club. Is it me standing on stage telling a bunch of stories about clubbing? But does that honour the spirit of the clubs themselves? What about if I tell some stories and set the scene, describe my history of running clubs and then we have a little club section where we actually recreate some of the clubs at the time. If I want to get through sort of eight different club nights in the space of an evening, how’s that going to work?

So what about if I have a cast of young people dressed in the clothes of each particular genre coming on and representing those clubbers, and then if the audience wants to get up and dance with them and be part of that club, then they can. Well that’s an interesting idea, maybe that would work. So I had the idea and the big moment where it was going to happen was when I applied to Summerhall, an Edinburgh venue, who I’d been talking to. I teamed up with a great director and my old mate Davie Miller who was in Finitribe back in the day. I’d written a script and we put it on its feet in front of a bunch of Edinburgh people and it was a bit shambolic. It’s definitely a hybrid of club and theatre. DJing’s such a unique art form in many ways because you’re right there and you’ve got instant feedback. With something like this, though, you take it on board after each show. We did four scratch shows. I could only afford to do three day rehearsals. Then we had three days with me, Sita Piaraccini, our amazing director, and the cast of five where we basically had to go, ‘Okay, how does this work?’

Okay, so tell me about the Edinburgh run. How many shows did you do? And did it build up momentum as it went along?
Well, first of all, it’s incredibly competitive. It’s possibly the most competitive audience marketplace on this planet. You’ve got, I think, 3,000 shows and apparently the average audience is six people. So that’s a lot of shows that are completely empty. We had that classic Edinburgh experience where our first show in 100 seat venue, we had eight people. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is so painful.’

However, you can still put on a good show, whereas five people in a club is a shit club. It doesn’t matter who’s DJing. You, me and Jesus, it’s still a shit club with five people in it. So we had eight people on the first night and it was depressing, but they all stayed for the full two and a half hours and six of those eight people were on the dancefloor pretty much every time they could be. Then about halfway through the run, a reviewer came, the fire alarm went off in the middle of the show and we had a load of 17 year olds who were in celebrating a birthday party and I was just terrified. We had 30 people in total, the 17 year olds were half the audience, so I was terrified they were going to leave. Anyway, we then got a five-star review from the Scotsman, which was great. It started to get busier, but then we got a Fringe First, for innovation and outstanding new writing. It was an incredible thing to get because it was always a punt. Even in the scratch shows, I was going, is this ever going to work? Is this just another stupid Fred idea? But that was validation. So then people wanted to come and the last two weeks were sold out. So that is your classic Fringe journey.

What are the kind of things that you think that they’re learning from it?
Well, it’s a story of how somebody, in this case me, fell in love with clubbing and then found a way to have a sustainable mini-career in that world and also do some really interesting and exciting things without compromising. And that, to me, was always the gift of clubbing, because you get out of uni or school and you’ve got to support yourself and then you go into a job and nine times out of 10, it’s a horrible experience and you hate it. And you go, really? Is this the rest of my life? Of course, for the lucky ones, like you and me, you can find a way out. Doing what I loved and managing to generate enough money to be able to pay the rent and buy some records. That was all I wanted for my 20s, to be accepted, to serve the community of beautiful people around me, to have some fun, making stuff that I cared about. Clubbing gave me the possibility to do all of that. And I would argue, I learned a whole bunch of other skills that I could then turn into a slightly more professional career. I didn’t realise I was learning anything at all, but actually I was learning about audience interaction, I was learning about user experience, learning about creating a brand loyalty

How did your DJ career start?
I’d made the equation. A) I love records, I love music. I wanna spend all my money on records.
B) I do not have very much money.
C) If the records could earn me some cash, I could then spend the money on more records.
D) Become a DJ.
And at that point, again, as we both know, there weren’t that many DJs. It was quite unusual to be a DJ. And it took a certain amount of courage to step up behind the turntables. And I was just managing to dip my toe in the water. When I got to Edinburgh, I told everybody I was a London DJ, which was kind of true. I had DJed at my little sister’s 11th birthday in her primary school, which I rocked. I got a little residency at a club run by White Cube’s Jay Jopling, when he was a student. But ultimately, I soon realised that the only way to do it was to run my own night. So I gritted my teeth and found a mate, and we hired a venue, and started running a night. The first night we were too scared to charge admission, we just handed out free tickets. And everyone came and that was it. We were off to the races.

When did you arrive in Edinburgh?
I was there 1984 to 94. I started running clubs pretty much as soon as I got there. Initially there were only two clubs, two nights, when I first got there. There was Allan Campbell’s Hoochie Coochie, which was the big one that everyone knew about. I think he did that on a Friday and a Saturday and he put gigs on as well and that’s where all the Edinburgh contingent went. You had all the minor pop stars, like Fire Engines and Win, James Locke out of the Chimes and Paul Haig. Then there was a hairdressers’ night on a Sunday called Manifestos. I went to Manifestos on my 20th birthday and went: Oh these are my people. This is my tribe. These are proper clubbers. The fact that it was on a Sunday, because hairdressers had Monday off so that was their Saturday night. They played the good music (the Hoochie did as well) but it was much more into the dance side of things. It was a little bit casual and there were straight up trendies. I couldn’t tell you who was DJing, I can picture their faces, but can’t remember.

Yogi Haughton played there didn’t he?
He might’ve done but I don’t remember. Everyone was into the rare groove but Manifestos was more into the proto-house, things like ‘Sexomatic’ by the Bar-Kays, electro-ey stuff, Full Force, Prelude-y more than hip hop. They also played mainstream stuff as well like Swing Out Sister. The hairdressers’ couldn’t resist that bob. That was my first night. Hoochie Coochie and Manifesto were it and then Juan and Ernesto started up a latin jazz club called El Cambalache that was a big hit. Suddenly there was competition and the club scene started to grow. My first night was Blue and that was fun but then I started doing crazy shit like much more irreverent. Yogi used to call me Wacky Abba Fred. I saw Mark Moore at Taboo [in London] playing Abba and I thought to myself that’s the future cos it blew everyone’s minds BITD when everyone thought Abba was the devil. So I started breaking those boundaries. I was flirting with that, playing things like ‘Copacabana’. The nights I was doing explored real eclecticism, but also playing cool stuff like Malcolm X and George Clinton.

And then house happened and it was definitely a whoah what is this?! I was one of the first to play it in Scotland because we had the A&R guy who put out the House Sound of Chicago, he came to Scotland and blagged his way onto the guest list. We were doing a night at Stirling Castle. He gave me an armful of vinyl and in return he wanted to get him and all his mates in on the list. As a result, I had promo copies of the House Sound Of Chicago. The rule of thumb in Edinburgh at the time was I’d check out what was happening in London and then about three to six months later do it in Edinburgh when they were ready for it. So we were playing house as a background thing but we hadn’t really got it yet.

Now what was the big shift? I think it was Slam. They did a party and had the balls to charge £15. They were the first people to say, we’re putting on an event and it can’t be a fiver to get in, it has to be £15. At the time it was like, what the fuck are you talking about?! No one’s gonna pay £15. They had the balls to do it and got away with it. So what we were doing was running clubs on the same scale as those clubs and I was playing acid house but I wasn’t playing just acid house, whereas Slam were pure housers. So we were getting crowds of two thousand which was pretty good for Edinburgh.

So word got out in Glasgow that this club Thunderball was doing well so we and Slam sat down with Tennants and they sponsored a tour, which actually fell apart a bit. I think that was when Slam first started using the Arches. I think it would be fair to say acid house hit Glasgow in a proper way, before Edinburgh. The music was getting played in Edinburgh, but the whole cultural shift in Edinburgh didn’t happen until it had hit the same scale as Glasgow.

We did a night in the Fruitmarket Gallery, we managed to blag five nights in there and it’s a pretty amazing venue, right by the station and it’s huge. It felt like a rave cos it’s a big box with high ceilings. I was DJing with a guy named Peter Ellen who used to run Fopp and he did a night called Hoover that didn’t really work but was great. He was very adventurous with his music. He was a fantastic DJ. I’m a crowdpleaser whereas he was like fuck everyone else, I’m playing this weird glitchy house music. For a while he was persona non grata and the crowd didn’t follow him, but when acid house happened he was suddenly this prophet. He then did a night called Acid at Shady Ladies which was the big popular venue. Everyone went there on a Friday and Saturday, a reliable student night. He started it and it went through the roof. I remember going there the week after that front page tabloid story and of course everybody in Britain immediately wanted to go to an acid house club after reading that. Everybody had suddenly drunk the Kool-Aid, sweat was dripping from the ceiling and I remember seeing Juan, who was famous for running cool, acid jazz, Latin clubs, with a bandanna on and sweat dripping. It was at that point where everyone was thinking well, am I an imposter? Who gives a shit, this is too much fun to not do. I would say that was the first proper acid house club. But then Peter and his co-promoters had a visit from the constabulary who said: You cannot run a club called Acid and I will shut you the fuck down and put you in jail if this is still running next week. So they shut the club down and re-opened as Deep but it didn’t have the same naughty cache. That’s my memory of the start of house, but Slam were streets ahead.

What effect did the presence of casuals have in Edinburgh?
Well for me it had a massive impact. Thunderball was my big hit. Blue was me copying what was happening in London, whereas Thunderball was me doing my own thing with my co-promoters. We had all sorts of stupid stuff, casinos, bouncy castles, so it was very like a rave except it wasn’t acid house all night. Anyway we were getting crowds of two thousand and we ran it at the Assembly Rooms which is a big festival venue which they split up into about eight theatres but we took the whole place and rammed it. It was quite a big deal in Edinburgh at the time without wanting to blow my own trumpet. We didn’t do it every week but every other month. And then casuals came and bust it up. We were definitely targeted, I know it for a fact. At the last minute we were trying to get some bikers to bring some bikes to have on stage. The night was for charity. They said yeah we’d love to do that. But as soon as I said it was Thunderball at the Assembly Rooms one of them said oh we’re not coming. We’ve heard about the violence. I said, there’s never any violence at Thunderball what are you talking about? Anyway, on the night about 12.30, the violence started. We had security but they bottled it. They were using cans they’d bought from the bar as missiles. I was playing 2 In A Room at the time and I thought I’d incited them by playing house. It happened once, then the security tried to deal with it, then it happened again, and we thought fuck this, and shut the club down. Fortunately, because it was a charity night we didn’t have to give the money back because it would’ve bankrupted us. After that we promoted another event in the Corn Exchange which no one had used before. Having sold out the previous event we couldn’t sell tickets for this cos everyone stayed away because of the violence. So it ended that club stone dead and broke my heart because it was my first big hit. I carried on running clubs but never on that scale. One of the guys from a rival club Spanish Harlem, then said oh you should’ve had better security and better organisation and we’re glad the casuals came and did your club over ha ha. Everyone else had been really sympathetic because the Edinburgh scene was actually quite tight. The thing is acid house wasn’t as much of a revelation, in my experience, as it was in London because I found Scotland to be more egalitarian than London so it was less a revelation than it had been down there.

When did you move back down to London?
Well, I moved down to London to do a degree at St Martins, because I realised that clubbing was not necessarily going to be something that I could do the rest of my life. I was ill in my late 20s, I had leukemia. That was a wake up call, because when I went back to my old life, I discovered that I couldn’t indulge in the way that I had before. I’d had this escape, the luckiest and then continue to give my health a battering with stimulants and alcohol was undoubtedly a stupid thing to do. I made all these posters and flyers for my clubs. That was always my thing. And there was very much a DIY culture coming out post-punk as well. We just had this kind of thing, didn’t we? It was like photocopy, cut-up aesthetic that you made your flyers, you made your posters, you usually just stole an image from some book or something that looks interesting, photocopied it up, stuck some type on it. Bosh, there you go. So I did that for a while and then I started going a bit more intricate about it and also realising that this was probably infringing everybody’s copyright. I never studied design, I never studied art, but slowly through making all these flyers and posters I got my chops up. So I came down London to do a Masters at St. Martin’s, I moved back in with my mum and started working for Ian Swift, Swifty, so I got to know all the acid jazz lot and Gilles and everybody and I was designing Straight No Chaser and lots of record sleeves and that was fun and I met a lot of nice people.

The first time I ever saw your artwork was when I think your sister Camilla did a magazine, but I can’t remember the name of it.
It was called Gear. Gear was my idea actually because I had this, I was doing all my flyers and posters on a photocopier and there’s a thing called a colour cartridge photocopier which is arcane technology now, but you could change the cartridge from black to red and then blue and then if you put a piece of paper through three times you could get a black pass, a red pass and a blue pass. So I had been making all my posters and flyers on this photocopier. This was 1989 and ’90, and she was deep in it, she was right in the thick of things, really caning it every night and having a brilliant time. I could see that something very interesting was happening and whenever I went back to her flat, she had Boys Own, Most Excellent, and Herb Garden, and all the fanzines that were such a big part of that culture, so I said to Camilla, ‘Look, why don’t we make a house fanzine of our own, you can write it and interview everybody, because you know everybody on the scene, and I’ll design it, and then you’ve got a lovely piece of work to show to your journalism employers.’ So yeah we decided to do it and the first issue I did the whole thing. It 24 or 32 pages, A4 size, and I did 200 copies of it. I spent a week standing by photocopier just going kachunk kachunk kachunk. But it came out really nicely and we had a lot of fun doing it and everyone loved it and Camila got a job with The Face and The Face wrote about it. We did three issues in total.

So how did you parlay that into the design studio, how or when did Airside happen?
I was working for Swifty and it was a studio setup andI don’t think he wasn’t really that into it because it was quite a lot of responsibility. I don’t think he’d disagree with me on that one. So that to a natural end. I was there two or three years in his studio and I learned a lot and a great time, and he’s a lovely guy. Then I left, and me and Nat and Alex started up Airside in 1998, and we just had a go at it. It was the first dot com boom, so there were no websites. The email was just about a thing, the internet was a thing, but we basically were very lucky. We had a big party to open, and loads of people came, and then… suddenly the phone was ringing the next day from people who’ve been at the party went, ‘Oh, yeah, someone said to us you gotta get a website. What’s a website? Do you guys do that? What can you do for a grand?’ So yeah, it was just very organic we’re very lucky there was this sudden need for people who could integrate design into this new digital world and make things like websites.

Okay, so so Where does Impotent Fury falling in this sort of timeline?
My friend Laura was being a little bit cheeky saying to me these Lonodn hipsters they think they know about irony, they think they’ve got attitude, we should show them some of the Edinburgh style so we started Impotent Fury which was the club with the wheel and with 12 different musical categories on it and they were very wide-ranging – and we had drum and bass and hip-hop obviously but then we also had like power ballads and I think we had good old British musical at one point where I just play a lot of Morecambe & Wise and Max Miller. My mate Sally would spin the wheel and another mate from the Mutoid Waste, Wreckage, he built us this massive wheel. Every half an hour she spun the wheel and if it was two in the morning and we’d just been half an hour of techno bangers and in the wheel came up with power ballads, then I’d pay half an hour of power ballads and it would be suddenly be ‘Move Closer’ by Phyllis Nelson. The wheel’s the boss, not me, it’s not my fault.

So where does Lemon Jelly fall in all of this?
Well, the Jelly was also happening at the same time, I was very lucky to have several plates spinning at the same time. Basically, the Jelly started because I was buying a lot of car boot vinyl, a lot of easy listening stuff and just hoovering up record collections, random stuff. I mean, I wasn’t the only one. I think Fatboy Slim was there as well and of course, Bentley Rhythm Ace. We’re doing it too. I was a massive hip hop head. I mean, we were very lucky to grow up with hip hop and seeing how you have those ultimate breaks and beats albums with all the compilations. And you went Oh, crikey, that break comes from that track there. So you kind of got a little insight into how hip hop was made, how it was constructed and how some sample. culture changed the way the music was made. And then, of course, I started hearing these breaks in these unusual places, like strange different records like Nana Mouskouri. So going beyond, most hip-hop samples funk and occasionally rock as well, but there is a key genre pool that certainly the early hip-hop goes to. Sure, PM Dawn sampled Spandau Ballet. So there are exceptions, but that was basically the way. But my brain kind of went, okay, so what if you start sampling stuff from other places, from different genres? What if you widen the net? And again, this is 25 years ago, so this is very much common practice now, but then it wasn’t quite so usual.

Nick [Franglen] was a mate. I knew him from my teenage gang, and I hadn’t seen him a lot since I left London. But he was deep in music production, and he worked as a kind of session musician and an engineer and programming people’s work. He worked with loads of really great people like Pulp and Blur. So I went round to his studio one day and I said, ‘I’ve got a couple of things I think would make a really interesting sample, do you fancy having a go and having a muck about?’ and he went, ‘Well why not? The first session we came up with, ’In The Bath’ which was our first track. We both thought, ‘Oh that was fun’. So I said, ‘Let’s make another couple’ and then I’ll screen print a handmade sleeve because that’s how I roll and we’ll see what happens and that was the beginning of it.

We did three EPs that became the first album. XL were fairly quick off the mark to come come around and we were definitely talking to them before the third EP came out. It was very clear exactly what we were about right from the outset. We were about joy we had a bit of sense of humour and we weren’t super banging, but we were in the dance space and we had this very strong visual aesthetic as well. If you liked it, then great. If you didn’t like it then fair enough. No problem

Lemon Jelly – Soft

The one that I remember in particular that might not even have been credited to Lemon Jelly was a cut up of Chicago that had a denim sleeve. Is that right?
We did a couple of Breezebox sessions with Mary-Anne Hobbs. It was great fun, and I was a very already digging in the soft rock category, which is very much the flavour du jour these days, but back then it was like, ‘No you can’t go anywhere near that stuff.’ We’d included If You Leave Me Now’ in one of our mixes, but we chopped it up, and it started sounding really good. Originally, there was a vocal sample from a religious record over the top of it on the actual mix. But we took that sample off, and it sounded great on its own. So we thought, ‘OK, let’s just do a couple of mash-ups.’ Richard X had just done the Sugarbabes, and that whole mash-up culture had just emerged. It was very new. So we thought, ‘Let’s put one out.’ And then Laura, the aforementioned chum, I went to her with this stupid idea about the denim sleeve. I thought, you know, if we bought 250 pairs of jeans, and then you could get four sleeves out of them, one for each pocket. And then we put a lemon-flavoured condom in each pocket. It was super fun. She hand-stitched some of the sleeves as well. It was an absolute bloody nightmare for her. She said she had blue bogeys at the end of it.

How many copies were there?
We did 1,000 in denim, I think.

That’s up there with New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ in terms of a loss-making venture.
It was fairly stupid. Most of the Jelly was operated on that principle. Because, we grew up with that. To us, Factory Records is like a golden icon, a blueprint of how to do things. And of course, that implied that you will probably never make any money. The Haçienda is another example of that. I think that you and I ran clubs for love first and foremost. And if the money comes later, then hooray. And sometimes it didn’t. And there’s definitely club promoters from a time I can think of where they were testing their business skills rather than their creative skills – and I don’t want to disrespect that. The older I get, the more I respect the business side of things. But I kind of feel the creativity has to have that priority. The ‘Soft’/‘Rock’ single was yet another example.

I’m assuming that it sells for loads of money on Discogs these days?
I haven’t looked but I think it’s three figures, certainly. There’s a lot of pressure on us to repress the the the Jelly albums and I think it probably will happen at some point but again I have to say I’m terrible because I like seeing them on Discogs for three figures. It gives me a little little boost of excitement when I see how expensive they are.

Obviously the other thing that happened was that you were on every gardening and cooking program for several years.
We were quite nervous about it at the time because we felt like we were being overexposed and there’s a thing called the blanket agreement which you can opt out of but what the blanket agreement basically says is anybody can use your any music you know 99.9% of music is under the blanket agreement and it means that if you’re a TV person you want to put a piece of music on the background you can just do it you don’t have to ask permission and pay a royalty, so we never really got approval of that stuff. Yet there was a part where we’re getting a little bit nervous about overexposure. Now there is no shame in anybody making any money out of music in any way they can because there’s so little money to be made out of any revenue stream so it’s interesting to see how the sellout notion is much less now.

“>Buy tickets for Fred Deakin’s Club Life here –>

CLASSIC CLUBS: Taboo

Maximus, Leicester Square, London, 1985-1987

‘Taboo thrived in a period of right-wing politics, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and it’s proof of a basic human need to have something to kick against,’ said Boy George in 2002. ‘That’s what made it such fun. It completely upped the ante and convinced us that we were somehow being terribly, terribly naughty.’

By the mid-80s, the euphoria of the new romantic era had dissipated leaving its bloated remains to float in a sea of power ballads, alternative rock and Stock Aitken and Waterman. In actual fact, the truly radical phase of new romanticism had passed long before Duran Duran, Culture Club, Visage or any of the bands that followed in their slipstream even made it to Top of the Pops, forming a distinct lineage from those nascent days of enw romanticism through to the establishment of Taboo.

Let the dandification begin: stylist and ace face Trojan with Taboo promoter Mark Lawrence ©Derek Ridgers

It all more or less started with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s Club for Heroes night at Billy’s in Soho’s Meard Street – once the infamous Mandrake, soon to become Gossip’s and just two doors down from 69 Dean Street’s Gargoyle Club. But in 1978, it was still Billy’s and when the pair were unceremoniously booted out after just a few months, they took up Tuesday night residency at Holborn’s Blitz wine bar and their circle moved with them. This was a new artistic crowd, turned on by the sounds of Roxy Music, Bowie, and bored by the nihilism of punk. While theirs was very much a DIY attitude, it was one that embraced colour, decadence and queerness concentrated on the art and fashion schools of London and the legendary Warren Street squats. This was the world of John Maybury, Jeremy Healy, Princess Julia, BodyMap and Judy Blame. Lesser household names than their musical contemporaries but all of whom went on to have an immeasurable impact on fashion and art throughout the 80s and 90s. ‘It was a mixture of people there,’ Julia, Blitz door boss, Taboo cloakroom attendant, DJ and all-round People’s Princess, told 10 Magazine in 2023. ‘People from the punk scene, rockabilly scene, soul scene, the gay disco scene. It was people who lived at the Warren Street squat, students from various fashion colleges. It was all word of mouth.’ But once the media began to infiltrate and the wannabe stars hit the big time, Blitz became a victim of its own success, losing its edge and leaving this alternative artistic community searching for a new home. It was the inimitable Leigh Bowery, waving the flag for queerness, decadence and hedonism, who answered the call.

The inimitable Leigh Bowery ©Derek Ridgers

Australian-born Bowery landed on these shores in 1980 armed with a sewing machine and hoping to make his way into the fashion business. He soon realised that his modern-day subversive dandy aesthetic was at odds with the mainstream and instead entrenched himself in London’s underground club scene using the dancefloor as his catwalk. Having missed the heyday of the Blitz, Bowery arrived in a flamboyant burst armed with a selection of headpieces, thick make-up and ludicrously high stilettos. ‘When he was hanging around with his friend Trojan, I thought they were a bit naff,’ said George in 2002. ‘I’d been painting my face blue years ago, darling! But I soon realised Leigh was taking things a lot further. He’d missed out on punk, he’d just missed the Blitz scene, so he knew that he was going to have to be extreme in order to make his mark. Well, he certainly did that!’

Bowery was not in the least interested in keeping things on the downlow and placed his and Tony Gordon’s new venture in the epicentre of the West End taking over Thursday night at Leicester Square’s Maximus. ‘London was going through a bit of a lull in terms of clubbing. Then Taboo opened. Leigh Bowery started it in 1985,’ George told Mark Ronson in Interview in 2008. ‘The first few weeks were no big deal. Then suddenly it was the place to be. There were queues outside.‘ Fat Tony agrees. ‘People go on about Taboo being amazing. Taboo was shit for months,’ he told DjHistory. ‘First three months, it was rubbish. No one went. There’d be about 20 or 30 of us there. And then suddenly what happened was it got in the papers and that was it. It went boom.’

Taboo embodied the very essence of what Bowery stood for and his maxim was ‘Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother’. ‘Most of the people who ran the night were gay, but the emphasis was on looking special,’ Dave Swindells told Archer magazine. ‘The meeter-greeter, Marc, would hold up a mirror and ask, ‘Would you let yourself in?’’ This was the gatekeeper disco aesthetic taken to the nth degree as polysexualism, queerness, diehard drug-taking and music all went hand in hand.

New York royalty Suzanne Bartsch welcomes Leigh for a visit

Bowery was of course the focal point, and his appearance was crucial to the reputation that he himself was generating. In the end, Bowery became the performance – ridding himself of his hair, his head acting as a canvas while his outfits became more extreme. ‘There was one peLana Pellayriod when my favourite fabric was flesh. Human flesh,’ said Bowery. ‘I didn’t wear any clothes for a while”. His fellow clubbers of course followed suit. ‘[They] didn’t just wear mad outfits,’ says Dave Haslam in Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues. ‘They became new people.’ Princess Julia was no stranger to subculture, but she remembers that Taboo was on the brink. ‘Even at the time, it felt quite insane, and I had this theory that it was something to do with Haley’s Comet.’

The interior was tacky with ‘[t]atty red velour banquettes, mirrors everywhere, strange light effects on the walls, three bars and a central dance floor with several cheap lights and a mirror ball,’ according to performance artist, Taboo cashier and close friend of Bowery, Sue Tilley as reported by Sofia Vranou. Check out the music clip of trans artist Lana Pellay’s ‘Pistol In My Pocket’, which was filmed on the premises. Dancing was strictly encouraged. Choreographer Michael Clark and David La Chapelle could be found go-go dancing. ‘Space Princess, Mark Lawrence and Mark Time who used to be in Hot Gossip and Jeffrey would do these dance routines at home,’ Mark Moore told DjHistory. ‘Teach it to a few friends so once they got into the club they’d take over the dancefloor and do this formation dancing to anyone willing to join in.’ And part of the appeal was its egalitarian approach. ‘At the time, the people were just as important as the club, as the DJs, as the music, they were the stars as much as anyone else,’ says Moore. That’s not to say there wasn’t a degree of celeb presence though, Janet Street Porter, John Galliano, Martin Fry and Fiona Russell Powell, journo from The Face all to be found on the Taboo dancefloor.

And what about the actual music? ‘All I can remember is Jeffrey [Hinton] playing everything he could get his hands on,’ Tallulah told DjHistory. ‘Including the slipmat.’ No genre was out of bounds as Hinton, Rachel Auburn, Princess Julia and others all took to the decks. Progressive for a time when female DJs were not a common feature. ‘It was totally cheesy, hi-NRG, Italo, some of it great, some of it atrocious but once you’d been in there and you were drunk or on ecstasy, it was fuckin’ amazing!’ said Moore. ‘I think what made it so great was Jeffrey would do his own edits where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top.’ Hinton agrees. ‘I loved sound effects at that time (I still do) so I would chop and mix up videos (video scratching they named it, I didn’t though),’ he told Taboo descendent Dalston Superstore. ‘I edited everything together: porn, Abba, operations, TV and film from around the world and my own stuff. I would project it over the dancefloor and mix it in with the music. Also, I would have tape cassettes playing sound effects and mix that into the music as well. The music would be quite random too. The whole effects was nuts, but then the club was nuts too.’ It was the dancefloor’s answer to John Waters. ‘Taboo was kind of celebrating trash, the kind of records you secretly loved, like ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, by Baccara, things that you probably shouldn’t like,’ George told Mark Ronson. ‘They weren’t credible records, but they worked. A lot of Donna Summer and things that maybe weren’t trendy anymore or weren’t hip in gay clubs, but you’d hear them at Taboo.’

Ecstasy had also really begun to find its feet on the dancefloor. ‘I didn’t realise at the time it was so crazy because of the ecstasy, but in hindsight that makes sense,’ says Moore. ‘People would come back from New York – again a mixture of high life and low life – loaded with ecstasy and give them out to people.’ George agreed. ‘People were taking copious amounts of ecstasy, which had filtered over from New York,’ he told Ronson, ’and at a certain point you were more likely to spend most of the night in the toilets at the club’. Hinton himself was also a big fan of acid as he remembers one particularly eventful night. ‘I actually thought I was in my bedroom, I was easily believing the club was my home,’ he told Hero magazine. ‘I was playing the slipmat of the deck for about 20 minutes with headphones plugged into it – it was just making this awful grinding noise. Nobody batted an eyelid though! They just carried on dancing, they were used to unusual sounds and experiences on those nights.’

But alongside the euphoria of ecstasy came the blackness of heroin. There was a lot of self-destructive behaviour,’ said George in 2002. ‘It was all about extremes, outdoing each other. We tried every drug going.’ Fat Tony remembers how smack shut the whole thing down. ‘It was busy every week. Busy busy busy. Then it ended! Cos everyone was on heroin at that point – it was right in the deepest, darkest point. So Mark died who used to do the door. He died of a heroin overdose. Mark Lawrence died. Everyone who used to go there was popping off one by one.’ Aids was also really starting to hit hard. ‘I think we all went a little mad then, some people died after all that,’ said Princess Julia in 2010. ‘Aids was getting very ‘real’, death sentence, an air of inevitability. ’85, ’86. Drugs too, MDMA, heroine [sic] jack up.’

The book of the 2024 exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum

Eventually thanks to exposure in i-D magazine, the tabloids got wind of what was going on and drilled down hard on the drug use and what they deemed to be highly indecent behaviour. Management got scared and took away the key. Tony Gordon tried to move the party on, but Bowery wasn’t interested and so eighteen months after opening, Taboo was no more. ‘For me, Taboo had a major impact, not so much because of the music (though there were ace DJs) but because the collision of club cultures and personalities marked it out as a sort of highpoint of mid-’80s hedonism,’ said Dave Swindells. ‘They were happy to end up in a pile of vomit and booze at the end of the night. It was antifashion, in a sense,’ George told Ronson. Bowery died aged 33 of Aids but left an immeasurable legacy. Taboo was a bridge between the dying embers of the Blitz scene and a dawn of a new wave of underground alternative clubs including the Daisy Chain, Torture Garden and Kinky Gerlinky. And Bowery’s spirit lives on in today’s underground dancefloor culture with the words ‘if you label me, you negate me’ never more relevant.

Sarah Gregory

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CLASSIC CLUBS: The Dorian Gray

Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, 1978-2000

Before the Panorama Bar and Berghain and even long before the Front in Hamburg, there was the Dorian Gray in Frankfurt. Secreted in a terminal in Frankfurt Main Airport, the Gray opened during disco’s heyday, and ran through to 2000 when it finally closed. It was the crucible in which the German trance scene was defined and developed – plus, it was also the only location in Europe which had a Richard Long sound system. Sarah Gregory takes a soft landing to central Germany to find out more.

Think Dorian Gray, think Oscar Wilde’s immortal libertine. The ideal name then for a nightclub intended to be Germany’s answer to Studio 54. A club whose impact was so far-reaching that even today, the roots of Berlin’s Berghain can be traced all the way back to November 28, 1978, when The Gray opened its doors to the Hi-NRG beats of Sylvester’s disco anthem ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’.

‘As a DJ, I got to know hundreds of clubs,’ says DJ Dag, techno specialist and Gray resident from 1988-1993. ‘But none were as cool as Dorian Gray.’ Located in Hall C, Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport (and in turn providing the template for the airport club), the Gray was the brainchild of Gerd Schuler and Michael Presinger, who decided to create their own centre of musical decadence in the middle of Europe – spending 2.5 million Deutschmarks in the process (about £3m. in today’s money.)

‘It was all built very simply,’ says Ralf Holl, dancer and Gray resident from 1980-83, as he talked to Frankfurter Rundschau about the magical effect of dancing in darkness, the long hallway, the neon lights – even the smell! With three floors catering to every dancer’s need (Runningman, Studio 54 and Chillout), The Gray absolutely followed up on its promise of emulating New York’s disco powerhouse. ‘My life was just one huge party back then,‘ says the club’s first resident DJ, Bijan Blum. ‘I was constantly meeting people and there was a lot of partying.’ VIP Playboy and Formula 1 parties were staged there, beauty pageants for a while; even camels and elephants were brought in – a step-up from Bianca and her white horse.

And the comparisons don’t stop there. With a very similar door policy, security had no hesitation in turning hopeful punters away – not that that put people off trying. The Gray became the in-place for the hoi polloi of Frankfurt… and Roger Moore. But it wasn’t just about the moneyed or the social set, the Gray appealed to everyone – attracting converts and the newly initiated. Holl, for one, had been highly sceptical when he first crossed the threshold – a Zappa acolyte and vehemently not a fan of disco. But within 15 mins he was sold. ‘When you were in it, it was a world of its own,’ he remembers. ‘You forgot where you were for hours.’ He saw it as a place where people could be whatever they wanted. ‘The first gays were seen at Gray,’ Holl remembers.

Spanning two decades of immense cultural change, the musical content shifted accordingly. The late ’70s was all about disco, funk and soul – in keeping with its Studio 54 template, while the mid-80s saw a move to electronic music – house and techno – and by 1992, ‘urban’ had even found its place. With Blum instilled as the Gray’s first resident (having been courted by the club’s founders while playing at Malesh in Dusseldorf), seven-day work schedules were de rigueur, as the German courted the crowd with the likes of Chic’s ‘Le Freak’, ‘Dancer’ by Gino Soccio and Instant Funk’s ‘I Got My Mind Up’ from 9pm to 8am. Blum did manage the occasional night or two off though, as other early DJ spots were also taken by Michael Munzing, German producer and co-creator of Europop combo Snap! and Ulli Brenner. Plus, guest DJs often made an appearance. When Blum went to Aschaffenburg’s disco palace Aladdin’s, Peter Römer came over from Hamburg’s Trinity to fill his spot.

And despite the sensibility of excess, excess, excess, the music was never sidelined. Imported records was where the hits were, and Gray DJs would travel to ensure that they had all the latest; the rest of Europe providing the source. ‘The DJs went to Amsterdam and bought imported records that you couldn’t get here,’ says Holl. ‘You have to keep a store like that at such a high level for so long.’ Blum agrees. ‘I went to Amsterdam and Paris and flew to London especially.’ But the dancers in those early disco days trusted the DJs – ready to embark on whatever musical journey lay ahead. Some have called the club avant-garde and DJ Dag confirms that the freedom that was part of the club’s appeal. ‘I experimented,’ remembers DJ Dag. ‘That was possible at the Gray.’ As recalled in Frankfurter Rundschau, he would turn all the lights out, and as the fog started billowing would drop The Doors’ ‘Riders on the Storm’; Dag wasn’t averse to throwing in the odd whale song either.

DJ Dag at the Dorian Gray, 1992

What made the club even more special was its sound system – built by none other than Richard Long; student of Alex Rosner (who had constructed the Loft’s sound system) and sonic innovator for the Paradise Garage. The system was built on a JBL and Gauss-Alnico base with Thorens turntables inevitably giving way to Technics over time. And given that the club opened at the height of disco, there was a light system to match. Red, green and orange lights were reflected in the mirrors that adorned the dancefloor; lasers had their place too even renowned producer Alexander Metzger was a VJ there.

By the mid-1980s, the sound and general aesthetic of the Gray began to change as the music gradually shifted from disco to techno playing host to some of the great German DJs: the sadly-missed Mark Spoon (one half of Jam & Spoon and veteran Love Parader), Torsten Fenslau (originator of Culture Beat and ‘Mr Vain’) and of course, Frankfurt techno DJ and producer Sven Väth alongside other big names including Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox. DJ Dag is even credited with triggering a worldwide passion for trance at the beginning of the 90s. ‘Something completely new emerged in Frankfurt,’ says DJ Dag. Gone were the sequins and glitter – this was a wholesale change.

Welcome To The Dorian Gray by Crazy Malamute.

Alas, however, as is often the case, technical problems brought the club to a close in 2000. A fire at Dusseldorf airport had ushered in stricter fire regulations which put paid to the Gray – it would have just been too expensive to renovate – so the owners cut their losses. But that’s not before going out with one last big bang on New Year’s Eve climaxing with the vocal brilliance of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Lovin You’. The owners tried opening a new venue in Berlin in 2003, but it barely lasted a year, although a sister venue does live on in Stuttgart.

The Gray closing party in 2000.

At its peak, the Dorian Gray was packed out with over 2,500 dancers – at the forefront of the German dancefloor scene and an inspiration for clubs and DJs worldwide – a dedicated fanzine called Frontpage even sprang up. Sadly, largely forgotten in the minds of partygoers, without The Gray things may have been very different.

Sarah Gregory

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