Thinking back to my comments about Club UK I popped the words into Google and immediately found this quite interesting blog post about the place. I was too young and too uncool to have been to the place but I remember seeing the little blue water bottles at more exciting mates’ houses. The place certainly had good branding.
The dance music club scene was massive and expanding. I listened religiously to pirate radio stations which pumped out house and garage, techno, happy hardcore and drum and bass. You could get a “shout out” by phoning a pager or a mobile (pretty cutting edge in those days) and giving the name of the person you wanted to show respect to: shout out to the man like Tommy. There were even raves for under 18s! I went to one in summer ’95. It seems very odd in retrospect, especially considering that there was no booze but many of the kids there were probably pilled up to the eyeballs. In my naivety I didn’t see any wrongdoing but it must have been a festival of MDMA. It took place at a huge venue in suburban Surrey. There were two massive rooms, one playing happy hardcore (my scene) and one concentrating on drum and bass. Rumour had it that the “vibe” in the D&B room was bad and there had been fighting whereas the mood in the happy hardcore room was, well, happy. A couple of my mates went shopping beforehand and bought workmen’s dayglo vests, white gloves and whistles. I wore my Global Hypercolor t-shirt.
By the late 1990s the superclubs were well-established. Cream, the Hacienda, Ministry of Sound. It was boom time for dance music. I am far too old for clubbing these days and have totally lost touch with it. Does Cream still have queues snaking through inner Liverpool’s decrepit streets on a Saturday night? Are there still make-shift warehouse squat raves in abandoned buildings in unfashionable parts of London? Do clubs still generate amazing flyers to advertise their events? I wouldn’t know how to find out.
UPDATE: A reader has just emailed me this link to a ’10s edition of the dance club apparently set up by the chaps behind Sanky’s Soap. He says “the location and timings mean you can get the train from Euston, arriving when it has opened and get the first train back to London when it has finished the next morning”. Sounds like somewhere to engage with to encourage my mid-life crisis… The web site is worth a click if only to see a pixelated white dove flickering across the screen.
XX A couple of my mates went shopping beforehand and bought workmen’s dayglo vests, white gloves and whistles.XX
ahhhh..Why?
It was de rigeur!
Before I left the Met I went to see Status Quo at Wembley with my mate Animal. We both wore ex military stock camo jackets so we could smuggle in a dozen cans of Fosters apiece. The support band was The Pretty Things. It was so loud we had tinnitus for 3 days. Hang on, am I commenting on the wrong blog? Oh yes, I do apologise. Cheerio
Right blog, wrong aeon
Only three days?
Right! I’ll now console myself by making 2 eggs, bacon and beans whilst listening to Quadrophenia…….
I had that on my iBrick this morning, along with The Story of The Clash (Part 1)…
Ah yes the 1990′s, how well I recall discovering “gabba” courtesy of Darrien Kelly who lived in the flat below me, noisy sod he was …. I liked most of it, and even now still listen to a bit of Scooter (although not strictly the same.)
I always thought that gabba was deliberately OTT. I doubted that many people genuinely liked it apart from being able to say that they were into the most extreme form of dance…
Quality! I am now watching Disney/Pixar’s “Cars” – how rock and roll is that? I must have just gone off the scale on your sadometer.
I think I’ll take the First on that one, if you don’t mind…
The link is a good post – I say nothing ..