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
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.
