Twisted - sweet pretty country acid house music in Brixton

Twisted (or Twisted a.m.) was a late 1990s/early 00s club night in Brixton playing a unique mixture of what the Alabama 3 once called 'Sweet pretty country acid house music'. It took place originally in legendary late night drinking den Brady's (formerly known as the Railway Hotel) on Atlantic Road, and was described in a 1998 article in the Independent by Oliver Bennett:

'Over the past few years, club life has become a bit corporate, with VIP rooms, sponsors and in-it-for-the-dough promoters and DJs. Where is the enthusiasm, the chaos, in this brave new world of blinking technology and oiled abdominals? The answer is that you have to dig a little. For instance, at a back bar in Brixton, Twisted club heralds a return to the spilt beer and out- by-midnight approach to nightlife that ruled in the Seventies and early Eighties. But it adds its own unique contemporary hybrid in the music it favours: country and western, mixed with dance tracks. "I've always loved country and I want to show that it isn't a dead music form," says Tim Perry, co-founder of Twisted with Piers Hawkins. "Jazz blues and world music have all crept into dance music, so why not a few country chords?"... Perry and Hawkins have had great fun thinking up names for their genre, among them Pharma Country, Honky Skunk, Trailer Trash, Swamp Hop, Fucked-Up Country and Bubba Beats. "I'm reminded of the Blues Brothers joke, where they say they play both kinds of music - country and western," says Perry, "except that we play country and techno." Patsy Cline, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton spin alongside dance sounds like Fatboy Slim and Orbital, interspersed with live acts like the local acid-country supremos Alabama 3 and guest appearances from the likes of Chip "Wild Thing" Taylor' (Independent, 15 March 1998)'.
Alabama 3 set the chemical country template with their debut Exile on Coldharbour Lane album in 1997 (Brixton's Coldharbour Lane is just round the corner from Brady's), and indeed their song Peace in the Valley gave the club it's name: 'she feels so twisted, she ain't never gonna fix it, she's just waiting for the light to shine on a brand new day'. Their genius was (and still is) to recognise that country's melancholic tales of addiction and redemption could speak to a generation coming down from ecstatic peaks.

The band were strongly associated with the club, and truth to be told were arguably the only outfit who successfully integrated electronic sounds with proper Hank Williams-style heartache. Just bringing in a few country elements to clod-hopping 4:4 beats was a recipe for Cotton Eye Joe-style cheese in less skilled hands.

So the music policy at Twisted was more a case of playing country alongside techno and hip hop, rather than lots of attempted country/dance music hybrids. For instance at the night featured on this flyer (which I was at with my late friend Katy Watson), Hank Wangford played a straight country set.

Twisted 1998 - 'This ain't no disco, this ain't no line dance, this ain't no foolin' around'

This review comes from On magazine, 1997:

‘Genre-bending reaches its illogical conclusion in the deep south (of London) with a new club for techno honkies. Expect chemical country, trailer trash, two step and honkyskunk. At their last hoedown they had the Million Gram Session from the Larry Love Showband fronted by the Alabama 3 singer himself with the Reverend D Wayne Love at his side. Jesus, there must have been a dozen people on the stage at one time, with others from from Alabama 3, BJ Cole on pedal steel, Fliss (from Joli Blon) on fiddle, Hacker on harmonica and guitar and loads others. Slim happened to look in on the club and when they realised he had an accordion in his car, the big man from the Cyder Co was co-opted into the band. Top night –a world-class group of musicans in Brady’s Saloon. Was it a dream? When you hear that they managed to play stuff from Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb and Lefty Frizzell next to Spiritualized, Underworld and Deep Dish, you’ll get an idea of how open things are at this particular ranch’.

The Railway/Brady's closed down in 1999 and remained empty for many years later before briefly becoming a branch of Wahaca (full story at Urban 75 - from where the photo below was sourced)*. Along with the George Canning (now Hootananny), it was a place where drinking went on late into the Brixton night. The front bar in its Railway days was mostly frequented by older African Caribbean men, playing pool in front of murals of island scenes. The back bar was more Irish/squatters/SW9 itinerants - I remember being in there one night at a London Celtic Supporters Club social with a band called Athenrye banging our republican songs. There was also a band called the Dead B Specials who used to hang out there.

Its relaunch as Bradys music bar later in the 1990s didn't signify much change apart from a few candles in bottles - it was still messy and drunken with the occasional punch up and the less occasional table being knocked over.

Twisted meanwhile relocated to the Windmill in Blenheim Gardens a sthe Twisted A.M. Lounger. I remember seeing American singer Chris Mills there in 2000 (flyer below), and Kelly Hogan and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts around the same time. Twisted co-founder Tim Perry has been running the music at the Windmill ever since, providing a platform for so many up and coming bands.

[updated July 2022]

Classic Party Scenes (8): The Girl with Green Eyes

The Girl with Green Eyes, starring Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave, is a 1964 film based on Edna O'Brien's novel The Lonely Girl about a brief affair between a working class shop girl up from the country and an older landowner.

It might not win too many prizes for its Irish accents, but it does retain some interest for its Dublin street scenes, and a great episode based around a night out dancing in a nightclub. Dancers are seen twisting on the floor to a live showband, and later in couples.

The scene is the Four Provinces Ballroom (or as it says on the sign 4 Provinces), which was apparently in Dublin's Harcourt Street and later became known as the Television Club before it was demolished in around 1990.

The Rita Tushingham character has to sit out the dancing, as she's forgotten her dancing shoes, but I love her modish look in this scene with button down collar, tie and braces.

The nightclub scene kicks in around 6:30 into the film.



Lots more Dublin music and cultural history at Come here to me!

George Robey: a lost London venue

At 240 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park in North London there is currently a semi derelict pub. Before it closed it was known as the George Robey (and before that The Clarence Tavern) and was for many years an important music venue, particularly known for punk gigs. You can even download a 1983 set recorded a the pub by anarcho-punk band Omega Tribe at the excellent Kill Your Puppy.

Club wise it was probably best known for Club Dog, which brought the free festival/squatter spirit indoors from the mid-1980s and became one of the first places where that scene, with its psychedelic and world music vibe, began to cross over with the emerging rave scene. In 1996 the pub briefly became the Powerhaus, part of the Mean Fiddler group, and then closed down.

My main memories of the place are of a club called The Far Side, which I went to a few times in 1994/5. It was one of those places where DJs and sound systems from the squat/free party scene played, like the Liberator DJs . I've just scanned in a couple of spacey flyers which give a feel for it -'Get over to the Far Side - revel without a pause - spinning trippy trancey techno, delightfully deep house and pleasurable progressive for your entertainment'. The flyer for September 1994 (below) also has the topical Fight the Criminal Justice Bill slogan at the bottom.

September 1994 flyer

Frankly my memories of all the places I went to at that time tend to blur a little, but I do recall some great music and searching for a bagel round Finsbury Park before getting the first train back to Brixton the next morning.

January 1995 flyer

See also London RIP (picture of Robey today from Ewan-M at Flickr)

Update:

Some good stuff in comments, particularly liked this one: 'I played there a few times, twice with a band called Spirithouse and then as a live electronic techno/house duo supporting the Mad Professor at the Club Dog 6th Birthday bash. The Robey was the nearest venue to us on Green Lanes, we'd walk across Finsbury Park, drop some acid, neck two cans of brew and show our UB40s for discount entry. We got to know Bob and Mike and blagged a gig and got paid £50. TBH we would have probably paid that to play there!' Flyer for said night below (1992 I think).

Dancing at the Peckham Experiment

Here's an interesting chapter in London dancing history - a dancehall in a groundbreaking health centre in South London. The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, South London (1935-50) has been seen by many as a precursor of the National Health Service. Some have argued though that it was in fact more radical than the NHS, including the anarchist Colin Ward who sadly died last month. He reviewed the main book about the Centre (Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham Experiment by Allison Stallibrass) in New Statesman and Society, September 29th 1989, and indeed recalled his own visit there for a meeting of the London Anarchist Group. For him the Peckham Experiment was an exercise in mutual aid and self-help preferable to the top-down bureaucratic model of the NHS. The building still stand in St Marys Road, but has been converted to flats. Here's his review:

Kenneth Clarke expostulated to a radio interviewer the other day: ‘We’ve never run the health service as some kind of workers’ cooperative.’ More’s the pity, I would say. But the real tragedy is that we have never run a health service, only an illness service. By stressing the word health, I don’t mean preventive medicine. I mean the pursuit of the conditions for personal, family and social well-being. There was one unforgettable experiment in this direction, and it died with the foundation of the NHS. This was the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham.

For people like me, curious about the preconditions for resourcefulness and independence, it was a verification of our deepest convictions. The founders were a husband-and-wife pair of doctors, Innes Pearse and George Scoot Williamson. In 1938, they wrote about their Family Health Club: ‘It seems that ‘a sort of anarchy’ is the first condition in any experiment in human applied biology. This condition is also that to which our members most readily respond…’

It began much earlier, in 1926, when after welfare work in south London they concluded that most urban dwellers were so ‘de-vitalised’ that babies were born deficient in health. To study the characteristics of health they devised the idea of a family club, to be joined on two conditions, first, that the whole family must join; and second, that families must agree to a periodic medical examination.They started in a small house run as a club until 1929. The next step was to raise the money from charitable trusts to move to a purpose-built family club big enough to be self-supporting from subscriptions. By 1935 they had raised the cash and built the Pioneer Health Centre, designed by Sir Owen Williams. It was glass-walled inside and out, as the Peckham biologists needed to observe what members actually did. The centre of the building was a swimming pool, and there was a theatre, a gymnasium and a children’s nursery on the ground floor, with dance halls, a cafeteria, a library and medical rooms.

It ran from 1935 to 1939, and after the war from 1946 to 1950. It ended in 1951 after all efforts to get it adopted by local authorities or the NHS had failed. Since ‘health centres’ had become part of official doctrine after the National Health Service Act of 1946, the directors approached the Ministry of Health to incorporate it into official provision.

They failed for five reasons: first, it was concerned exclusively with the study and cultivation of health, not with the treatment of disease; second, it was based exclusively on the integrated family, not on the individual; third, it was based exclusively on a locality, it had no ‘open door’; fourth, its basis was contributory (2s 6d – 12 and a half pence – per family per week), not free; and fifth, it was based on autonomous administration, and so didn’t conform to the NHS structure.

The centre died but the idea did not. Pioneer Health Centre Ltd still exists and in the past ten years has ensured the republication by the Scottish Academic Press of all the old Peckham reports. The same publishers have just brought out, at £7.95, a new study called Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham experiment. The author is Allison Stallibrass, a Peckham veteran and author of that modern classic of child development, The Self-Respecting Child.Her book is fascinating from several points of view. First, she has sought out people who were members as children or young parents and gathered their recollections of what the place meant in their lives. It is an enormously impressive testimony. Second, she shows how ahead of their time the Peckham pioneers were.

They were founder members of the Soil Association and took on a farm to ensure that members could buy nutritious bread, milk and vegetables and to provide holidays in the sun. Fifty years later, old Peckham hands remember that delicious bread. Third, she demonstrates how the preoccupation with the family was not a limiting, but an enlarging, factor. Members gradually accepted all the children as part of the family, while children and adolescents related to all the adults.Finally, she asks and ventures answers to the question: could we replicate the experiences of Peckham today? The original building cost about a fifth of the typical super-cinema of the period, though it was expensive to run. A modern equivalent would be far more useful in any community than the standard local ‘leisure centre’ which caters for a narrow band of the population and has no links with the ideology of self-catering, health-counselling, personal and social autonomy.

I only went there once, in 1949. I listened to Scott Williamson wittily addressing a meeting of the London Anarchist Group, and I visited Innes Pearse when she retired to Argos Hill windmill in Sussex. I never realised until I read this book that they must be considered as the truly creative figures in 20th century social medicine.

See also: Anarchism and the welfare state: the Peckham Health Centre by David Goodway:

'A different age group had caused mayhem on the opening of the new Centre in 1935, when the building was still uncompleted and much of the equipment intended for the children had still to arrive. Each day after school there was an invasion by crowds of kids, aged from seven to sixteen, who ran along the long open spaces and up and down the staircases, screaming, committing minor vandalism and making thorough nuisances of themselves. All the adults urged strong disciplinary measures - all except Williamson, who insisted that order would eventually be implemented by the children themselves as they responded to stimuli provided for them.

To this end [Lucy H.] Crocker was taken on the staff with the brief to resolve the problem. She was to discover that unsupervised children were excluded from the two places in the building, the swimming-pool and the gym, they found most appealing. Her solution was to develop a 'ticket system' whereby children could gain access to a preferred activity on obtaining a signed chit on each occasion from a member of staff cognisant of their physical abilities. This necessitated the children's continual interaction with an orderly, rational adult society and was found to foster responsibility, apparatus being returned to its designated place without request. 'The child is quick to respond to a mutually sustained order in society', as Pearse and Crocker were to put it. Within eighteen months of the reopening the screaming and running were no more and 'there were at last signs of order', Crocker recalled: 'not the quietness due to external discipline but the hum of active children going about their own business'.

This handling of the rowdy schoolchildren exemplifies the fifth condition on which the 'Peckham Experiment' depended: the maintenance of autonomy, autonomy not just for the adults but for their children also. Williamson and Pearse had no doubt that as biologists studying the human organism they had to deal 'with free agents', for 'any imposed action or activity becomes a study of authority, discipline or instruction...not the study of free agents plus their self-created environment'. In 1938, possibly foolhardily, they spoke warmly of 'a sort of anarchy', believing that 'a very strict "anarchy"...will permit the emergence of order through spontaneous action...' But although Williamson spoke to the London Anarchist Group on several occasions during the 1940s - chaired by John Hewetson, the GP editor of Freedom - he objected vehemently to the paper's coverage in 1951 of the announcement of the winding-up of the Centre (articles for which Colin Ward was primarily responsible), and which pointed to its anarchist, indeed revolutionary, nature. Williamson proclaimed: 'I am not an anarchist, nor do I believe in anarchy - not even the Kropotkin type'.

In truth, Williamson seems like A.S. Neill, the progressive educationalist, to have been an anarchist in both theory and practice, while denying he was one. Frances Donaldson (whose husband Jack was to manage the social floors in the Centre until they were running smoothly) had this to say about his remarkable disposition:

"...his lack of paternalismas far as this is humanly possible, was complete. He was not interested in how people should behave, or in how they might be made to behave, but only in how they did behave in any given circumstance...this made for a kind of democracy in the Centre which I doubt has ever been seen anywhere else...He had a rooted objection to the leader in society, regarding him as someone who pushed around the human material he wished to study in spontaneous action, and who exerted the force of his personality to drive more ordinary people out of the true of their natural behaviour into activities unsuited to them and which they half-consciously disliked. "

So while the 'health overhauls' enabled individuals to learn what they might be suffering from, the doctors did not direct them what to do, allowing them to make informed, autonomous choices. A visitor, who learned from Williamson that a man had 'a most dreadful hernia', asked why then had it not been treated and was told: 'It's his hernia. It's up to him when he wants to get it fixed up'. The condition of autonomy goes far to explain why the people of Peckham regarded the Centre as their own, filling the building with their autonomous activity. Clubs were formed and run by their members for a great range of pastimes, including camping, badminton, boxing, fencing and tap-dancing, while skills would be shared in, for example, dressmaking, woodwork, first aid and choral singing.'

The Pioneer Health Foundation site, which has lots more information, states that the polished cork tiles covering the floors were ideal for dancing, and that 'Amongst the many who made the most of it were the teenagers, freed at last from the streets, using the whole building intensively, exploring the whole community, and visibly thriving on it. The whole edifice used to rock on Saturday nights when the Long Room was packed with dancers, of all ages, dancing to the strains of the Centre's own band, directed by a most energetic member, a bookmaker by profession' (Jack Donaldson).

Photos from Pioneer Health Foundation - not sure when they were taken, I am guessing 1940s. Cross-posted from Transpontine on account of the dance content.

Ministry of Sound under threat?

South London club the Ministry of Sound is objecting to a proposed building development which it claims could threaten its future. As part of the regeneration programme for the Elephant and Castle area, developer Oakmayne is planning a 41 storey block, to include 335 flats, next to the club.

According to an article in Southwark News (18 February 2010):

'Lohan Presencer, Ministry of Sound CEO, fears placing so many residents in an 'enterprise quarter' for businesses will force his club to pack up and leave. He said: "The bottom line is we are very fortunate to exist in a non residential area. If there are 300 residential apartments directly opposite the Ministry of Sound, and if any one of those residents had any issue with somebody outside their apartment at three or four in the morning they could legitimately complain to the Environmental Health Officer.They could take that to a licence committee and challenge our licence. If our licence is challenged and it has a sufficient lobby behind it, regardless of our history here, we could lose it."

A report by Southwark Council officers regarding the plans confirmed this. It stated 'The MofS will therefore be open to enforcement action under the nuisance provisions of the Environmental Protection Act'.'

Misery Unsound

Personally I have always been decidedly ambivalent about the Ministry for its role in pioneering the 1990s superclub phenomenon, with incessant branding, VIP lounges, and multiple mechanisms to fleece punters. In their case too, there were stories of dubious competitive practices. A court heard allegations in January 1999 that the Ministry had sent an undercover team with newspaper reporters to try and prove evidence of drug dealing at arch rival Cream in Liverpool (Mixmag, Feb 1999). And we've mentioned here before that in 1995 they hosted the police launch of an anti-drugs campaign on the back of a stage managed police raid on Club UK days before.

Then there's the dodgy political connections. MoS was set up by old Etonian James Palumbo, son of the property developer Lord Palumbo. He hired his cousin James Bethell (the 5th Baron Bethell) as Managing Director, a Tory activist who worked for Conservative Central Office in the 1997 election and later stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for Tooting in the 2005 election. Palumbo hedged his bets though in 1997, lending Labour's Peter Mandelson a chauffeur-driven car during the election.

Still nobody can deny it's been an important club for dance music for nearly twenty years, and like most people who have been out dancing in London in that time I've had some memorable nights there. I particularly remember going there shortly after my daughter was born. The look on the bouncer's face when my partner had to explain what the breast pump in her handbag was for was priceless.

There doesn't seem to be an immediate danger of the club having to close, but they are right to identify that there is a medium term threat. When the warehouse was converted to a club in 1991, it's neighbours were civil servants in office buildings that were empty at weekends. An influx of residents, particularly the kind of well-connected wealthier citizens who know how to get their own way, would doubtless result in complaints and attempts to restrict the club's licence.

There is a broader issue here of how nightlife in cities tends to flourish in economically marginal zones, such as abandoned/converted warehouses and railway arches. As land values increase and areas are gentrified, these spaces are squeezed out along with the musicking/dancing cultures they sustain. We have already seen this happen around Kings Cross in London, and similar developments have been noted in Paris. Will South London's clubs around the Elephant, London Bridge and Vauxhall be next?

Update, November 2013: this row is still rumbling on. Southwark Council refused the development planning permission, but London Mayor Boris Johnson has called the decision in - which means that he takes the power away from the local council to decide whether or not it goes ahead. Decision is due this month- so the Ministry is crawling to Johnson with this hideous superhero image... Of course Johnson is another old Etonian like James Palumbo (who is still Chairman of the Ministry of Sound group).

More proof of Palumbo's political promiscuity - on top of his previous Tory and Labour links outlined above,  last month he was made a Liberal Democrat life Peer ( 'Baron Palumbo of Southwark') on the back of donating more than £700,000 to the Liberal Democrats. Yes he now has political power in the House of Lords without a single vote being cast for him thanks to making money from people dancing. That's democracy folks...

Up a Tree in New Orleans

I have been to a few parties in my time, but dancing in a tree house is something I haven't done.
In the past year there's been a series of parties in New Orleans in a big tree house in the grounds of the NOLA Art House, an old Creole mansion (built c.1870) where loads of artists live and work. The tree house is a 5 storey structure, apparently including a pool (not sure if that's up the tree or on the ground nearby).

The place looks amazing. According to one party goer: 'For anyone who's been in the tree house, the fact that anything at all is keeping it up is only slightly reassuring. When the installation is full of people dancing to music spun by DJs, the whole structure reverberates with the beat. The shaking is not so fun when you're standing on an isolated pod and the only person who can help you off is busy taking pictures of your terrified face'.

Lot's more about it here. They are having a Mardi Gras Festival of the Rising Sun in February - prompted by the story that the The House is said in several guidebooks to be the original House of the Rising Sun. Sadly I'm in New Cross rather than New Orleans, but if you're in the area check it out.

Dancing Ledge

Are there many dancing places in the landscape? Obviously there are many places where people have danced in the open air, but what about places that actually have a dance-related name? Dancing Ledge in Dorset is one such place. Situated on the Isle of Purbeck a couple of miles south of Langton Matravers, it is a place created by quarrying. The removal of stone has created a flat surface next to the sea likened to a ballroom dancefloor, hence the name.

Not sure how often people have actually danced there - it is a bit of a climb down the rocks - but in 'Old Swanage: Past and Present' (1910), W.M. Hardy mentions a picnic and dancing on the ledge with music from the Swanage Brass and Reed Band and 'a plentiful repast, consisting of lobster tea, salad and liquid refreshments'.

Derek Jarman was very fond of this place, calling his autobiography after it and filming parts of The Angelic Conversation and his punk movie Jubilee there. At the end of the latter, Queen Elizabeth I and John Dee walk at the Ledge, the queen declaring: 'All my heart rejoiceth at the roar of the surf on the shingles marvellous sweet music it is to my ears - what joy there is in the embrace of water and earth'.

Clubbed to Death

I've posted this before at my south east London blog, Transpontine, but am reposting here as a follow up to the earlier Club UK post on crime, drugs and London clubbing.

Raving Lunacy: Clubbed to death – adventures on the rave scene (2000) is by Dave Courtney - sometime East Dulwich resident, former Southwark Council dustman (at Grove Vale depot), and celebrity villain. Must admit I’m not big on the loveable gangster genre, violence isn’t glamorous - it’s brutal, bloody and leaves behind grieving children who are damaged for life. In this book, Courtney plays up to his image and some of the stories can no doubt be taken with a pinch of salt. Still, he does a service in documenting the early days of acid house and raving in late 80s/early 90s South London.

By his own account, Courtney went to some of the first 'acid house' events in London - Shoom in Thrale Street, Southwark and the parties held in old prison museum in Clink Street by London Bridge: 'The Clink was wicked... Very druggy and very housey place, full of proper hardcore havin'-it-larger's in there. And it was good cos it had all these individual cells so it was like having loads of little VIP lounges'.

Soon he started a club of his own: 'near the Elephant and Castle, I found a viaduct arch beneath the mainline railway track running over John Ruskin Street... The Arches was the first all-night, illegal rave in London... All the other clubs in London shut at about 2 am but mine was still banging at 8 o'clock in the morning! ... Under this great big curved, black and red railway arch roof there was the scaffolding gantry holding the DJ on the decks, massive speakers either side and the lights hanging above; and below that this heaving mass of lunatics just going completely mental, arms in the air, whistles and foghorns blowing... Steam and joint smoke hung like a fucking fog, people were dancing on speakers and scaffolding... we'd have a girl walking round in a Playboy Bunny outfit with an ice-cream tray round her neck full of ready-rolled spliffs for a quid each - Get yer Joints 'ere!' And big plastic dustbins filled to the top with ice and free apples and Ice-pops... we had a mad mixture of people: from hardcore ravers, professional clubbers, black geezers, white geezers, plenty of women, football hooligan nutters going all smiley, hardnuts softened by Ecstasy... I had names DJing there before they became superstar DJs like they are now - Danny Rampling, Carl Cox, Fabio & Grooverider, Brandon Block'.

The police at the nearby Carter Street station were not happy, and eventually it was raided by 'army of 150 police, with some fuckers called No 3 Area Territorial Support Group in flameproof overalls, bulletproof body armour and steel hel­mets with radio microphones, carrying an angle grinder, a hydraulic ram, sledgehammer'. 26 people were arrested and one person was apparently later jailed for five years for his part in running the club.

Later he was involved in putting on free open-air raves - 'I bought a massive removal van with a diesel generator ·and drove in on to fields or grasslands. Tooting Common was one. Peckham Rye was another... I'd open up the back of the lorry, set up the DJs decks and put these dirty big speakers outside. We'd get eight, nine hundred people up there really going [or it. Speakers booming it all out. And cos I didn't charge no one the law had a job Slopping me doing it. It just started attracting loads of gay blokes, which is something I hadn't counted on. But then it was the Common, the well known shag-spot for gay geezers doing some fresh air cruising, so I guess it made sense'.

He also ran a club for a while at the Fitness Centre in Southwark Park Road: 'It used to be the hottest place. It was this windowless basement space made for about 30 geezers to work out in; not two hundred people to get off their tits'.

Then he put on a club called 'Crazy Mondays', at Futures on Deptford Broadway, a club owned by Harry Hayward (later as a 'retired gangster', the Chair of Deptford Action Group for the Elderly): 'It ran from 6 a.m. Monday morning till about 2 p.m. in the afternoon... there was villains, hardcore ravers, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, lap dancers, strippers, drag queens, club owners, club promoters, club dancers, celebrities, sports stars (Nigel Benn and Gary Mason were there), doormen, bar staff, waitresses, croupiers, gamblers, cab drivers, sex club people - basically, mostly everyone that had· worked over the weekend in the nightclub trade watching other people having a good time, all came down to mine to have their own'.

Courtney was evidently in that generation of crooks who saw the money-making opportunities in the club scene but he is also obviously a true believer, extolling the wonders of ecstasy and raving in breaking down racism in London and challenging his own anti-gay prejudice.

Club UK in Wandsworth: Love, Ecstasy and Crime

Heading out to Kew Gardens over Christmas, we drove through Wandsworth. As always on that journey through South West London, my partner and I reminisced incredulously about how we used to drag ourselves for miles across the capital by public transport to visit that part of the city. And we weren't alone - because from 1993 to 1996, Wandsworth was the home of Club UK, attracting people from all over London and beyond to queue in Buckhold Road next to the Arndale Shopping Centre.

Like many new clubs at this time, it was launched in a blaze of publicity about its luxurious decor and facilities. Like most, the reality was that the money was mainly spent on the sound system, and it was in fact a 'utilitarian, cavernous warehouse' (to quote DJ magazine), with 3 different music rooms - the 'techno room', the 'pop art room' and the main room. Promoter was Sean McClusky, who was also involved with the Leisure Lounge in Holborn and previously The Brain in Soho (he had also been drummer in 1980s band JoBoxers).

There were two main nights. On Fridays, it was Final Frontier, a techno/trance night put on by Universe (who promoted the Tribal Gathering festivals with the Mean Fiddler). The flyer below exemplifies the rhetoric of that scene, with its talk of a 'our weekly marriage of spirituality and technology in perfect harmony' and its call for 'No rules, no limits and no sell out'.

Final Frontier flyer, January 1995 (click to enlarge)

Saturdays was a house night, with a dominant soundtrack of the kind of anthems despised as 'handbag house' by tedious musos, but which I loved (and indeed still do). Yes lots of disco diva vocals and four to floor rhythms. When I think of Saturday nights at Club UK, the tracks that come to mind are things like Your Loving Arms by Billy Ray Martin (the Junior Vasquez Soundfactory mix), To the Beat of the Drum by La Luna, Wildchild's Renegade Master, Push the Feeling On by the Nightcrawlers. Oh and that piano break track with the sample of Blur's Girls and Boys (Pianoman - Blurred).

Club UK flyer, February 1995 (click to enlarge)

What made Club UK special was a crowd of 1400 people for which the term 'up for it' seems completely inadequate. I can still vividly picture walking in there for the first time on a Saturday night - as soon as we stepped through the doors it felt like we were in the middle of an explosion of energy. The track playing was Reach Up (Papa's got a brand new pigbag) by Perfecto Allstarz - the whole place was erupting, there didn't seem to be any sense of a separate dancefloor, everybody in the place was dancing including the bar staff. You would meet all kinds of people there from public school kids (there were press reports of Etonians being suspended for taking drugs there) to squaddies - I remember on that first visit chatting to a couple who had done a bunk from a local children's home to be there.

Club UK was the opposite of cool, in every sense of the word. It was a sweatbox with little or no air conditioning, condensation dripping off the ceilings and sometimes unbearably hot and crowded. One night when we there they had to open the fire exit into the Arndale to let people breathe - so there was an impromtu chill out area on a balcony overlooking the deserted shopping centre (pretty sure this was on their second birthday party, July 1st 1995, with Danny Rampling playing). I remember sucking ice pops to try and cool down. The place was ecstasy fuelled, so many people would go the whole night without buying a drink. Many dubious clubs at that time used to turn off the water in the bathrooms so that people had to buy water from the bar. I don't recall Club UK going to that extreme, but sometimes the cold water taps were reduced to a dribble and they certainly made a small fortune selling their own brand of bottled water. Like in many clubs, there were many random acts of kindness as strangers offered each other sips of water on the dancefloor.

South London Press, 17 October 1995 (click to enlarge)

One hazard was the sporadic police raids. The first one was in December 1994 on a Friday night. Then in October 1995, 150 police raided it on a Saturday. Operation Blade involved dogs, horses, and the Territorial Support Group. 800 clubbers were turned out on to the streets, and many searched. 10 people were arrested. The police raid on Club UK was carried out with TV cameras in attendance, correctly described by the clubowners as a 'media circus'. It seems the raid was deliberately timed to provide a story on which to hang the launch two days later of a new anti-drugs campaign called SNAP (Say no and phone). Ironically the police launched this campaign at Club UK's South London rival, The Ministry of Sound, a place where drug use was just as widespread.

 

Mixmag, November 1995 (click to enlarge)

With hindsight, there were though some dodgy people around Club UK. As in the United States when prohibition of alcohol led to the Mafia control of drinking clubs, the prohibition of drugs like ecstasy created a huge market for UK gangsters to fill.

In December 1995, three men were found shot dead in a Range Rover in a country lane near Rettendon in Essex: Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe. There are different versions of why they were killed, as they had many enemies from their involvement in violence and drug smuggling. But it is well established that Tucker ran security at Club UK. According to Tony Thompson in 'Bloggs 19: the story of the Essex Range Rover Triple Murders' (London: Warner, 2000), 'Controlling the doors of a club instantly means that you control who sells drugs inside. Tucker began to charge dealers 'rent' of around £1000 per week in return for granting them exclusive access to the club... in March 1994, twenty-year old Kevin Jones died at Club UK in south London after taking ecstasy. In a bid to track the source, police put two of the club's suspected dealers under surveillance and discovered they had been paying Tony Tucker, the man responsible for security at the club, £1000 per weekend for the exclusive rights to sell ecstasy and cocaine'. Thompson also suggests that Tucker supplied the ecstasy to a dealer at Raquels nightclub in Basildon, the source of the infamous E that caused the death in November 1995 of Leah Betts at her 18th birthday party.

The Rettendon events are fictionalised in Jake Arnott's novel True Crime, where one of the characters declares: 'It's who runs the doors, Gaz. That's what this thing is going to be all about. It doesn't matter who runs the club, who promotes the event or whatever. It's who's in control of security, that's going to be the thing. That way you decide who can bring in drugs and deal inside the place'.

 
The fulll story of criminal gangs in the 1990s club explosion remains untold. That gangsters like Tucker controlled the drugs trade in clubs is not surprizing, but as they made more and more money it seems likely that some must have crossed over to investing profits in buying and running clubs. It would be interesting to know where some of the money came from for some of the high profile new clubs that opened in that period. And its a sobering thought that in any counter-culture/alternative scene where drugs are prominent, you are only ever a few degrees of separation away from a thug with a gun.

But still... who can forget those nights in Wandsworth.

The pop art room at Club UK

More memories, flyers and mixes on the Final Frontier and Club UK groups at Facebook. Great to remember all the good nights, but let's not forget those who didn't make it: Andreas Bouzis (18) and Kevin Jones (20) who died after collapsing at the club.

See also Clubbed to Death

Astoria closes

I've mentioned before that the Astoria in London was threatened with closure, but now it has actually happened. This week's Demolition Ball was the final gig. Earlier in the week 'Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records, said the Astoria, which opened as a cinema in 1927 and became a concert venue in 1976, had "a lot of soul and character". He added: "In Paris or Mexico places like this don't get knocked down, they get revamped. It's criminal they're knocking down these iconic buildings." For years it hosted the G.A.Y. club - with its guest appearances from Kylie Minogue and other gay pop faves, as well as gigs by the likes of Nirvana, Belle & Sebastian, Augustus Pablo (first London gig), Madonna, Blur and Richey Edwards in his final appearance with the Manic Street Preachers in 1994. It was also a ballroom during and after the Second World War.

The 2000-capacity Astoria is being bulldozed as part of a railway scheme, along with two neighbouring spaces which will also disappear - the 1000-capacity Astoria2 club (formerly LA2) and the Metro , a cellar club where mod/soul/indie night Blow Up has been running since 1993.

Lots more Astoria memories here

'Wild Beatnik Parties', London 1964

'Beatnik Parties took over Nash House - Wild Parties Held

In the past week some 15 young people have been arrested and charged with various offences under the Vagrancy Act in connexion with 6 Carlton House Terrace, London… The handsome Nash terrace which for the past three weeks has been the scene of wild beatnik parties, overlooks the Mall near the Duke of York’s Steps. Early this century it was a private address. Then some of the houses were taken by clubs, including the Savage Club, the Union Club and Crockfords. Today many of the houses including No.6 are vacant...

Yesterday morning the door to No.6 was open and there was a strong smell of beer. Inside, among the dirt and falling wallpaper, piles of sacking had been placed on the floor and slept on. There were jagged gaps in the grimy windowpanes.

The young people in their jeans and sandals had moved off. Some of them were drowsing in a favourite corner of Trafalgar Square. They sat on a low wall, wiggling bare feet in the sun, most of them grubby and unshaven, and told me about the wild parties that had been drawing people like themselves from all over the country to the deserted house.

Art of Living Soft

The sessions began around midnight, after the public houses closed, and went on most of the night. Those who wanted to sleep used sacks. Afterwards they all moved off to the parks to sleep, then assembled in Trafalgar Square to wait for the next night.

A few of them were students. One girl with long, fair hair relatively clean, and brushed, said she was an art student from Birmingham, in London for five weeks. Another girl in a leather jacked grimaced and said she was a clerk from Newcastle, down for the weekend. Three young men were unemployed. One boasted with a Scots voice that he was an art student – he was studying the art of living without work…

The Carlton House Terrace days, they feel, are over – the place will be heavily watched by the police. ‘After all this publicity’, the Scotsman said, waving a Sunday newspaper in the air, ‘we’ll have to find another place. But it won’t be difficult. There’s plenty of empty houses’

Source: Times (London), 31 August 1964; the building is now the headquarters of the Royal Society. The Institute of Contemporary Arts is also based in Carlton House Terrace. In June 1977, the Squatters Action Council took over number 14 Carlton Terrace, but were evicted by the Police Special Patrol Group who claimed they posed a security risk as the building was on the route of the Queen's Silver Jubilee procession (source: Squatting: The Real Story).

End of The End

Central London club The End is closing in January 2009, 13 years after it opened in West Central Street and became one of the top places in town for electronic dance music in all its various shades. It seems that the owners just want to move on to other things in their lives and have received an unspecified lucrative offer for the premises... hopefully it will not simply be replaced by luxury flats or office space.

Clubs open and close all the time, still many are worrying that more seem to be closing than opening in London at the moment, and there certainly aren't many with the kind of serious sound system and broad electronica policy offered at The End. When the club opened in 1995, dance music was a license to print money and a mixture of gangsters, dealers and music biz entrepreneurs were opening up spaces all over the place. Few of these have survived, and with dance music returning to a niche love affair fewer are opening. The End was driven by music enthusiasts with founders including Mr C (DJ and sometime member of The Shamen), Layo Paskin (of Layo and Bushwacka DJ fame).

I remember going to the famous Sunday gay club DTPM in the early days of The End. Other club nights have included Trash (where Scissor Sisters played an early London gig), Twice as Nice (where footballer David Beckham once DJ'd - apparently he played Wookie's Battle) and Fatboy Slim's Skint- all this plus very long DJ sets from the likes of Laurent Garnier and Richie Hawtin.

See also Turnmills closes; Clubbing in Kings Cross: End of the Line

Turnmills closes

Another London nighttime landmark has closed, following the final weekend of Turmills - the famous club in Clerkenwell. The final record to be played last Monday afternoon was apparently Blue Monday by New Order. Landlord Derwent London is planning to convert the building into an office block.

Turnmills opened as a wine bar in 1985 and came into its own as a club from 1990 when it became the first in the country to be granted a licence to open 24 hours a day all year round. In the mid-1990s it became home to groundbreaking gay nights Trade and FF and then to the Friday house night The Gallery, which started in July 1994 and featured DJ 'Tall' Paul Newman - whose dad John Newman owned the club.

I spent some happy nights at The Gallery and techno club Eurobeat 2000 which was also held there for a while. The pages reproduced here are a hyperbolic article about The Gallery from Muzik magazine (July 1998 - click on them to read) which described it as 'the full-on Northern club night in the middle of London' on the basis of it being an attitude-free night of full-on hedonism in 'a cool venue full of twists, turns and little hideways to indulge in a "bit of the other"'. It is true that the dancefloor wasn't massive, but it didn't matter as there were speakers all over the place and people danced wherever they happen to be standing, by the bar or the pinball machine as well as on the dancefloor proper.

There was also a gallery overlooking the main part of the club. I remember sitting up there on The Gallery's first birthday night in 1995, watching Boy George (who is a tall bloke) walking though the crowd in a T-shirt saying "Hate is not my drug", shaking hands, and heading into the DJ booth to announce himself with Lippy Lou's Liberation, followed by a stampede to the dance floor. I remember wearing a silver sparkly top, girls with fairy wings and a man walking into the toilets wearing a dress and offering round a bowl of bonbons (at Easter 1996 they also gave out chocolate mini eggs at the door). Musically I remember pumped up mixes of disco classics I Feel Love and Do you wanna Funk, Insomnia by Faithless and more than anything else bouncing around under the lasers to Access by DJ Misjah & Tim.

In his book, London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd mentions Turnmills, seeing it as an inheritor of Clerkenwell's historic reputation for disrespectful nightlife and more broadly as 'the harbour for the outcast and those who wished to go beyond the law'. For Ackroyd, these continuities in London life 'suggest that there are certain kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves', a kind of spirit of place which he has referred to as a 'territorial imperative'. Whether this spirit of Clerkenwell will withstand property developers remains to be seen. Derwent London at least seem intent on exorcising the ghosts of Clerkenwell radical and salubrious past, stating that their business is 'to improve the desirability of people coming to these buildings'.

Back to the Classics (2): Beowulf

I went to see the new Beowulf movie recently. In 3D at London's Imax cinema it was quite impressive and I do think it captured the feel of an Anglo-Saxon warrior epic, even if it did depart somewhat from the storyline of the poem, composed sometime between the 8th and 11th century - sorry to say the sub-plot of heroes being seduced by an elf-shining Angela Jolie character doesn't feature in the original.

The poem and the film do though both emphasise the centrality of the mead hall, a combination of royal court with drinking, banqueting and music hall. A place of wine, women and song, or mead, maidens and minstrels. We are told that Hrothgar, the king, set his mind on 'a master mead-house, mightier far than ever was seen by the sons of earth'. The hall, 'high, gabled wide' was named Heorot - 'the Hart' or 'Stag', subsequently to be the name of many pubs down to the present day. The monster Grendel was prompted to attack out of jealousy for the pleasures to be had in the mead hall: 'with envy and anger an evil spirit endured the dole in his dark abode, that he heard each day the din of revel high in the hall: there harps rang out, clear song of the singer... So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life'. Grendel launches a murderous assault when the Danes after a long night 'outreveled to rest had gone'.

It is probable that an epic like Beowulf was originally recited to music and for the warriors in the poem to pass into the lays of minstrels as heroes was a form of immortality - to be sung about and remembered, as the legendary Beowulf still is over a thousand year of later. But the musicality of Beowulf is not confined to the deeds of harpists and minstrels, but is embedded in its language, especially the kennings - poetic descriptions of the everyday by which, for instance, the sea becomes 'the whale road', 'the swan road' or 'the gannet's bath'. These are the kind of figures that recur in English folk song over the centuries.

Quotes from Francis B. Gummere's translation from the Old English.

Electric Ballroom to be Demolished?

Camden Council in north London seem to have agreed last week to the demolition of The Electric Ballroom. I must admit I haven't been there since some acid jazz club in the 1990s, but it is a music venue with a long history. It apparently opened up as the Buffalo, an Irish dance hall in the 1930s, became The Carousel in the 1960s, and then The Electric Ballroom in 1978. Famous gigs there included 2 Tone nights in 1979 (with Madness, The Specials, Dexys Midnight Runners), followed by Joy Division, The Clash, Talking Heads, The Pogues, The Smiths in 1983, Public Enemy and loads of others. Clubwise, it hosted Jay Strongman's Warehouse funk sessions from 1983 then in the early 1990s the gothy Full Tilt and the housey Crush.

Its apparently impending demise follows the closure earlier this year of another famous London venue, the Hammersmith Palais.

Any good Electric Ballroom stories/memories?

All Night Rave, London 1966

We’ve previously noted how the word ‘rave’ was used in the late 40s and 50s for late night jazz parties in London and elsewhere. Moving into the 1960s, ‘rave’ continued to be used for parties on the emerging psychedelic scene

In October 1966 there was an ‘All-Night Rave’ at the Roundhouse in Camden (North London), a disused railway engine shed. The event was held to mark the launch of the underground newspaper International Times . On the bill were Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, both playing one of their first London gigs. In his ‘Watch Out Kids’ (1972), Mick Farren recalled the night:

‘It was a new kind of celebration. The Roundhouse, then, was a vast, filthy circular building. Loose bricks, lumps of masonry and old wooden cable drums littered the floor. Slide and movie projectors threw images on a screen of polythene sheeting that had been hung at the back of a rickety, makeshift stage. The only way into the building was up a single flight of shaky wooden stairs. At the top Miles and Hoppy passed our sugar cubes. According to legend one in twenty was dosed with acid. Mine wasn’t.

A Jamaican steel band played on the stage… Paul McCartney came by in an Arab suit. For the first time in my life I saw joints being passed around openly in a public place… A band called Soft Machine played from the floor as a weird biker rode round and round them… Across the room an Italian film crew filmed a couple of nubile starlets stomping in a mess of pink emulsion paint. As we lurched into shot we were told by the producer ‘Fuck off, you’re spoiling the spontaneity’. We stumbled off to watch a bunch of freaks dragging an old horse-drawn cart around the building’.

Ibiza and Sheffield

Trouble for some of the biggest names on the European clubbing circuit. In Sheffield, Gatecrasher nightclub (formerly The Republic) burnt down this week.

Meanwhile in Ibiza, the authorities have closed down three of the island´s best-known clubs: Bora Bora and Amnesia for one month each; and DC10 for two months, effective immediately. The Government says its actions are a response to reports from local police and Guardia Civil of the use and sale of drugs in these clubs during the 2005/2006 seasons.

Drugs in clubs in Ibiza? Surely not! This reminds me of the scene in Casablanca where the police inspector (played by Claude Rains) orders the closure of Rick's Cafe with the words 'I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here'. The Ibiza tourist economy is based around drugs and dancing, but maybe that's the tension that is being played out here: while some factions of the local establishment benefit from this (club owners, mass tourism hotels) others would prefer to reposition Ibiza as more of an elite holiday destination - the argument comes down to 'can we make more money out of a small number of rich people or a large number of poorer people').

Rik Gunnell and The Flamingo

An obituary in The Guardian today for music promoter Rik Gunnell (1931-2007). The clubs he was involved in were critical in London music in the 1950s and 1960s, most famously The Flamingo in Wardour Street where 'In the club's basement, black and white people mingled to an extent unknown elsewhere in London in the 1960s. Judy Garland dropped in to the club's AllNighter, and Christine Keeler played off her lovers there. A who's who of British rock and R&B appeared at the Flamingo under his aegis and a breathtaking roll call of Americans, including Stevie Wonder, Bill Haley, Patti LaBelle, John Lee Hooker and Jerry Lee Lewis'.

Other clubs he was linked to included 'Studio 51, a jazz club where the new bebop was played' after World War Two; the 2-Way Jazz Club (from 1952); the Blue Room (also 1952), featuring modern jazz; The Star in Wardour Street; Club Basic in Charing Cross Road; and Leicester Square's Mapleton hotel. The latter became an all-nighter called Club Americana in 1955 , and Gunnell started extra nights there as Club M which became popular with 'African-American servicemen based then in Britain; and 'Caribbean and African settlers of the Windrush generation'. He moved to the Flamingo in 1958; when it closed in in 1967, Gunnell took over the Bag O'Nails in Kingly Street.

Good stuff on 1960s British r'n'b and soul at Brown Eyed Handsome Man.

Acoustic Tuning

An excellent line up at the Festival Hall on London's South Bank last Monday, with Bert Jansch, human beatbox Schlomo, Sonic Boom (who covered Kraftwerk's Hall of Mirrors) and Saint Etienne (pictured). Sarah Cracknell of the latter also sang a jazz arrangement of St E's Side Streets with the Tom Cawley Trio, and there was a 'Saint Etienne Quartet' folk version of the normally electronic Like a Motorway. I missed Billy Childish unfortunately.

The premise of the event was 'Acoustic Tuning', with the Festival Hall (built in 1951) having undergone an extensive refurbishment, partly to improve its sound qualities. The musical diversity of the programme was designed to 'fine tune the acoustic settings of the auditorium' and the audeince was asked to complete a questionnaire with prompts like 'Do you hear the sounds of each instrument clearly and without colouration or distortion?' For once the invisible musical instrument - the space in which music is performed - was foregrounded. And yes, it did all sound great.

The hall opens properly next month, with a film launch on 29th June of This is Tomorrow, tracing the history of the venue with Saint Etienne performing the soundtrack live.

Stone Age Dancefloors?

Last week I visited Nine Ladies Stone Circle on Stanton Moor in Derbyshire (pictured). This is one of many such sites in England to which is attached the legend that the stones are dancers, petrified ‘by a divine punishment because they have broken the rules of Sunday observance’ by dancing on the Sabbath. Similar stories have been told of the Merry Maidens and the Nine Stones in Cornwall, among other places.

These stories postdate the building of these monuments by thousands of years, and are a testimony to the fact that for the Church authorities dancing ‘was suspect because it encouraged sexual attraction, and became yet more wicked if it diverted people from their religious duties’ (Westwood and Simpson).

Nevertheless the notion that ‘standing stones are petrified motion, frozen music, arrested dancers’ (Stewart) may have some validity outside of later Christian folklore. It has been noted that stories may have arisen because ‘throughout the Medieval period people danced in a ring, so the visual analogy with a stone circle was striking’ (Westwood and Simpson), but ring dancing is a basic dance form that goes back much further. It is certainly possible that the creators of some stone circles were consciously seeking to represent dancers, perhaps to create a kind of permanent dance to reflect cosmic cycles of movement: ‘many such sites are aligned to stellar patterns and sightings, thus the dance of the stones reflects upon a geometric ground plan the dance of the stars’ (Stewart).

The circles may also have been specifically created as places for music and dance, as well as other purposes. There is some evidence from the emerging science of ‘acoustic archaeology’ of ‘resonance and echo effects in caves and megalithic monuments’ and that these may have been deliberately used or even designed by the people who made them: ‘in the light of the long prehistory of human interaction with sound, it becomes unreasonably conservative to doubt that there would be important acoustic aspects to megalithic monuments, or that the dramatic resonance of caves would have been ignored by Stone Age people’ (Deveraux)

It is generally presumed that stone circles would have been used for magico-ritual purposes, but this does not necessarily just mean solemn processions of druid-like priests. It is just as likely that all kinds of community seasonal festivities took place in such spaces, with the music and dancing associated with such rites in almost all known human cultures. So circles like Nine Ladies may be our oldest surviving dancefloors.

Sources:

Paul Deveraux (2001), Stone Age Soundtracks: the Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites

R.J. Stewart (1990), Music, Power, Harmony: a workbook of music and inner forces.

Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson (2005), The Lore of the Land: a guide to England’s Legends.