| The 40 In 40 Days Project. | ||
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23. The Club Residencies (1987-1989) |
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The Au Pairs |
My first
regular DJ-ing gig was a monthly Monday night affair at the Garage club
in Nottingham (now The Lizard Lounge). It was organised by the local gay
youth group, who couldn’t afford a “proper” DJ, and so I was asked
on the understanding that I would give my services for free. I jumped at
the chance. The first night, in Spring 1987, was an
instant success, and the night ran for around five months before the
Garage decided it wasn’t doing any more “special” nights, and
pulled the plug. Unfortunately, no-one thought to tell me about this, so
I spent about an hour outside the locked front door one evening, sitting
on my record boxes, wondering what the hell was going on. Yes, I’m
still pissed off about it. Can you tell? In January 1988, my friend Mark and I
decided to approach another club ourselves, with a view to hosting our
own night. Mark would promote the night and would man the door, and I
would DJ. We chose the Barracuda in Hurts Yard (now a salsa club), and
started off on monthly Mondays once again. This time, we had to build
our own crowd, and earn some money into the process (not least to fund
my record collection, as I wasn’t on any record company mailing
lists). This meant building some sort of identity for the night, which
we named Get Happy. To help achieve this, we created huge banners with
“smiley” faces painted on them, and festooned the club with them. We
also got a batch of smiley badges made up, and gave them to everyone at
the door on the way in. And all of this several months before the Acid
House “Summer of Love” – what eerie prescience! After a couple of months, we went from
monthly to fortnightly Mondays, changing the name of the night to Fever
in the process. And this, for me, was when the nights really started to
come together with their own unique identity. We were promoting the
nights as “for lesbians, gay men and their friends”, with a jokey
strapline on the flyers proclaiming that we were “An Equal
Opportunities Dancefloor”. The idea was to provide an alternative to
the commercial gay scene, which was still churning out a diet of
diabolically poor Hi-Energy. Our musical policy was therefore to play
every other style of music apart from Hi-Energy. At the time, such
ventures were completely unknown outside London, and were thin on the
ground even in London, so we felt we were doing something groundbreaking
and necessary. The timing was just right. In the first
half of 1988, the Stop Clause 28 campaign started up, grew massive, and
(in my opinion) changed British gay society forever. Faced with a
clearly defined threat, the lesbian and gay communities were forced to
come together and show confidence and strength as a movement. Previously
marginalised and woolly notions of gay “community” and gay
“pride” became tangible and directly relevant. It was a worrying and
yet exciting time to be “out and proud”. In Nottingham, activity
around the Clause 28 campaign was also giving birth to a whole new
extended social grouping of lesbians and gay men, who felt
disenfranchised by the tiny and miserable “scene” that was on offer.
So, (naturally!) they all flocked to Fever.
Looking out from behind my decks, I
could see (formerly) separatist dykes in “ethnic” waistcoats
grooving next to fashion bunnies in lycra cycling shorts. We had a
“theatre crowd”, from whatever production was running at Nottingham
Playhouse. We had a whole bunch of straight people, who felt just as
much a part of the night as anyone else. An equal opportunities
dancefloor indeed! I played music ranging from house to hip-hop to disco
to funk to indie to Motown to pop to kitsch and even to bhangra, with a
particular focus on newly emergent women rappers such as Roxanne Shanté,
Salt ‘N Pepa and the Cookie Crew (whose “Females” was a particular
favourite). Ee, it were bloody great. The only frustration was that, having
created my ideal club night, I was unable to take part in it myself,
being stuck behind the decks, stone cold sober, concentrating on every
detail of what was going on, trying to gauge the mood of the crowd,
trading off big hits with retro classics and underground club tracks,
identifying key dancers in the crowd and playing to them shamelessly,
fending off requests for songs I didn’t want to play, and eagerly
seizing requests for songs I did want to play. If the night went
particularly well, I could be buzzing off it for the rest of the week,
replaying the best moments in my head and thinking “We did that!” The Barracuda was sold, and we
transferred Fever to the newest, hippest club in town, Eden (later
Kitsch, later the Double Bubble). The new residency was for alternate
Thursdays, and not long afterwards, this became every Thursday. We
stayed put while Eden’s hipness slowly faded around us (the Kool Kat
had opened by then and was cleaning up), but Fever remained solid – by
the very end, we were their most successful night. It’s funny though
– Fever at Eden was certainly the bigger success, but it is actually
Fever at the Barracuda which I look back on with the most fondness.
After Eden was sold, Mark decided he didn’t want to carry on promoting the night at a new venue. Mainly because he’d realised he was actually straight after all, and although his girlfriend was nothing but supportive, it was all getting a bit weird. I hooked up with Eden’s former manager, but nothing really gelled. In any case, I had taken DJ-ing as far as I wanted to take it by then. I had achieved all my objectives. The next step would have been to take it all much more seriously – buy some decks, learn to mix properly, start the hustling, self-promoting and bullshitting that would have been necessary. I always hated the promoting side of the operation, and have always felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of “talking myself up”. Besides, I’d had it up to here with people who work in nightclubs. There was a particular blend of arrogance and incompetence about them which I was beginning to find insufferable. So, I hung up my slipmats, went into retirement, and waited for the next breed of ambitious club kids to replace me. I have only DJ-ed twice in the past ten years – often enough to remind me that, great as it was for a while, walking away from it was the right thing for me to do. |
