glasshand

dj panic attack
Surely Trilliam is laughing at the fact that people are bemoaning the alleged death of London then only citing a few marginal venues with internet-led line ups as if that's the be all and end all of everything?

Oh yeah London's dead the only good venue is a ticket-only loft fuck off

what do you mean by internet-led? am i right in assuming that you say internet-led to mean like music-focused nights that people who follow music on the internet want to go to? in opposition to "nuum" house nights and to things that get people thru the door because of where they are (ie Leicester sq and some clubs round shoreditch)?
cuz i was trying to look further than just those sorts of nights while i was in london, and i couldn't find a whole lot worth recommending.

if you are using internet-led in opposition to the house nights or supposedly more underground things, i went to ava word in march when it was at xoyo. great crowd, people getting well into it, but it changed venues every month and now it seems to have migrated to birmingham! not saying that's the only underground house night worth checking, but using it as an example it doesn't bode well

i wasn't trying to reignite the london-hate for the sake of it, it's more that i think with all the good music coming out of it, the going out possibilities should just be so much better.
 
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Local Authority

bitch city
I've never actually understood the beef surrounding Fabric, sure it attracts the lowest common denominator but everyone there's having a good time and dancing which is more than I can say for other venues I've been too recently. It also has the best soundsystem I'd care to mention. Since Plex hasn't been in Corsica for a while they've filled up most of their weekends with house nights which gets a bit stale. Otherwise all round, crowd, soundsystem, events, ethos, programming, its hands down the best in London.

There was a sort of warehouse explosion over the past couple years, after loads of clubs went under and that's starting to contract which is why things are getting harder. Although with the death of brick lane, dalston high road is going from strength to strength. Dance Tunnel and The Waiting Rooms are consistently putting on good nights. In these times of doom and gloom people like wax poetical on the death of all things love but its really a case of hypochondriacs.

When Broken & Uneven started up I was speaking to Ajay and from what he said, if things go well I wouldn't be surprised if Studio Spaces becomes its home. I haven't been since last year and it had a few teething problems with the layout but its one of the best spaces I've seen. Autumn Street Studios is good too, even if it is a ridiculously out of the way.

Whatever happened to Plan B?
 

glasshand

dj panic attack
Granted I don't know much about the social dynamics of London, but surely a club/venue can reach across gentrification frontlines ... there has got to be some middle ground surely?

i think that is possible, and not to overstate it cuz i haven't been for a while but this is approachin what i thought of bussey building.

One a more general note. Does this dearth in venues/clubs in the capital tie into the lack of a new 'nuum-sound in any way. Old / old sounding house as a safe bet to fill floors?

been thinking about this as well.. but if the nuum sound is what's popular on the pirates, and what the guys who've been relatively underground on the djing scene since like jungle are playing- then it's audiorehab style deep house right now (which isn't exactly old sounding to me).

bicep style NY ripoff house definitely did take over a bit over the last year at some nights which i thought used to be a bit more varied in the years before
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Dunno man, went to Fabric the other day and I thought it was a fairly dismal experience. As soon as you queue up and go through all the rigmarole of getting in you're so obviously a money-making part of a corporate machinie - I guess that is always the case at a big club now but it feels so blatant here.
When I went ninety percent of the music was boring (I enjoyed Rashad and Spinn but they were only on for an hour) - the most interesting room is always the top one but because of the way it's a thoroughfare you can't dance, people are always pushing past you to go someplace or another. In fact I don't like the layout in general but that's personal taste so I won't go into that.
Plus, I thought the sound would be better, I'm no expert but it sounded surprisingly muddy to me when standing on the balcony looking at room 2 from on high.
At fifteen quid a ticket plus booking fee plus card handling fee I don't think I'll go back. In fact I wouldn't have gone then if it wasn't my friend's birthday. I used to go a lot when I moved to London in 2000 but after ten seconds in there all the things that pissed me off about it then came flooding back.

Edit: That was a reply to local authority
 

Local Authority

bitch city
Do you mean room 1 with the balcony? The speakers are placed just under the balcony which would explain the acoustics. On the floor however, its sounds beautiful. Saw RPR Soundsystem last year and they played this track with opera vocals, don't think that could have worked on any other club system, it sounded like the vocals were descending from the ceiling.

Almost everyone I've spoken to hates Fabric. The crowd can be iffy, I have had a few problems in there but those tend to be on Saturday nights with the typical tech house in room 1. Couple weekends ago went down for a friends birthday and saw Dillinja play a classic 90's set and I've rarely seen a better crowd. Even the shufflers and cutters in room 1 were a relief from the boring Central St Martins by way of Camberwell crowd you get in other parts of London.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Last time I went to Fabric I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I was just in the small room all night. The price of drinks is horrendous, though.

Lineup for this friday at fabric looks good - martyn in one room, slackk and bloom and logos et al in another room and four tet playing all night in room 1 (if you like that sort of thing).
 

Alfons

Way of the future
as the person providing the sound i wholeheartedly agree, but the venue has noise constraints and i was only allowed to plug in a fraction of what i came with :(

noise constraints are the hardest thing about london parties, have been for ages, it takes a very particular kind of venue to be immune from those problems. i'm happy the venue exists so have to respect their noise policy.

Ah, yeah someone told me this was not due to lack of power/speakers but a regulatory issue. Shame, music was great. Are noise constraints just due to proximity to residential areas or are there other factors?

Lineup for this friday at fabric looks good - martyn in one room, slackk and bloom and logos et al in another room and four tet playing all night in room 1 (if you like that sort of thing).

Yeah, was just thinking this, they do have lots of great lineups and a good system as someone mentioned.
 

crofton

Well-known member
I think it boils down to residents phoning up the council and complaining. If you're a venue that can get very expensive/problematic very quickly. And it tends to be pretty weighted towards the complainer so not much defence you can provide. I'm sure many people here have anecdotes about their own or other people's nights which have fallen foul of this in one way or another. Railway arches make good venues - the walls are very thick and of course trains are quite noisy too...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Do you mean room 1 with the balcony? The speakers are placed just under the balcony which would explain the acoustics. On the floor however, its sounds beautiful. Saw RPR Soundsystem last year and they played this track with opera vocals, don't think that could have worked on any other club system, it sounded like the vocals were descending from the ceiling."
Could be room 1, I don't know. Either way it sounded bad from up there and somewhat better elsewhere but not as good as I was expecting.
 

Elijah

Butterz
I'm certainly not going to mourn that shithole, had some really terrible nights there. On one occasion it seemed to be staffed entirely by people who got turned away from the army for being too aggressive and not intelligent enough, I mean actually deliberately malicious as well as incompetent, and another time they shut a couple of hours early because they weren't taking enough at the bar! Some of the rankest club bogs I've ever seen, too. Absolute shower of cunts.

That's how I feel about Fire. It's a shame you had bad ones at Cable as there were some good nights there.
 

benjybars

village elder.
I think it boils down to residents phoning up the council and complaining. If you're a venue that can get very expensive/problematic very quickly. And it tends to be pretty weighted towards the complainer so not much defence you can provide. I'm sure many people here have anecdotes about their own or other people's nights which have fallen foul of this in one way or another. Railway arches make good venues - the walls are very thick and of course trains are quite noisy too...

Yep - we had everything sorted for a night recently ... wicked line up (Slackk, e.m.m.a, Goon Club) wicked little venue, nice flyer etc... and then a week before the night the venue has a sound limiter installed by Hackney Council cos of some PRICK who thinks its ok to move above a club and then complain about loud music at the weekends. Absolute fuckry.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You can understand people being hacked off if a new club opened in a residential area (though I'm sure that would never actually happen in the first place), but for people to move into an area where a club is already operating and then complain about noise, I mean what the fuck did you expect? That said I bet it's the kind of thing unscrupulous estate agents would keep quiet about.
 
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crofton

Well-known member
Anyone remember that street advert campaign in shoreditch few years back, "warning: this area has a vibrant nighttime economy" or something like that ... financed by local promoters iirc?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That's how I feel about Fire. It's a shame you had bad ones at Cable as there were some good nights there.

I'm sure I've had good nights there going years back, it was just that one shitty night I could maybe write off but two in a row was just too much. I guess any club that's been going a while is almost bound to have off nights now and then.

I've only been to Fire once, the music was great (main act was Rebuild, i.e. 2/3 of 808 State) and the sound was brilliant, but it was spoiled by two things. One was outrageous prices, I mean we spent £15 each on tickets and I heard people being charged £25 on the door - time was when I considered a tenner quite a lot to spend on a door charge, now it's the amount you save by pre-buying a ticket. And inside the club cans of fucking Red Stripe we going for the better part of five notes, I mean seriously, WTF. The other thing that wasn't so good was a couple of pikey little shits mugging my girlfriend of her phone while I was in a different room, though in fairness the staff were pretty good about it when we reported it despite the fact that were clearly quite spangled.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/new-york-1percent-stifles-creative-talent

David Byrne writes...

New York was recently voted the world's favorite city – but when you break down the survey's results, the city comes in at No 1 for business and only No 5 for living. Fifth place isn't completely embarrassing, but what are the criteria? What is it that attracts people to this or any city? Forget the business part. I've been in Hong Kong, and unless one already has the means to live luxuriously, business hubs aren't necessarily good places for living. Cities may have mercantile exchange as one of their reasons for being, but once people are lured to a place for work, they need more than offices, gyms and strip clubs to really live.

...

The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information. Knowledge and creativity are resources. If the physical (and financial) parts are functional, then the flow of ideas, creativity and information are facilitated. The city is a fountain that never stops: it generates its energy from the human interactions that take place in it. Unfortunately, we're getting to a point where many of New York's citizens have been excluded from this equation for too long. The physical part of our city – the body – has been improved immeasurably. I'm a huge supporter of the bike lanes and the bikeshare program, the new public plazas, the waterfront parks and the functional public transportation system. But the cultural part of the city – the mind – has been usurped by the top 1%.

What, then, is the future of New York, or really of any number of big urban centers, in this new Gilded Age? Does culture have a role to play? If we look at the city as it is now, then we would have to say that it looks a lot like the divided city that presumptive mayor Bill de Blasio has been harping about: most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.

This city doesn't make things anymore. Creativity, of all kinds, is the resource we have to draw on as a city and a country in order to survive. In the recent past, before the 2008 crash, the best and the brightest were lured into the world of finance. Many a bright kid graduating from university knew that they could become fairly wealthy almost instantly if they found employment at a hedge fund or some similar institution. But before the financial sector came to dominate the world, they might have made things: in publishing, manufacturing, television, fashion, you name it. As in many other countries, the lure of easy bucks hoovered this talent and intelligence up – and made it difficult for those other kinds of businesses to attract any of the top talent.

A culture of arrogance, hubris and winner-take-all was established. It wasn't cool to be poor or struggling. The bully was celebrated and cheered. The talent pool became a limited resource for any industry, except Wall Street. I'm not talking about artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians – they weren't exactly on a trajectory toward Wall Street anyway – but any businesses that might have employed creative individuals were having difficulties surviving, and naturally, the arty types had a hard time finding employment, too.

Unlike Iceland, where the government let misbehaving banks fail and talented kids became less interested in leaping into the cesspool of finance, in New York there has been no public rejection of the culture that led to the financial crisis. Instead, there has been tacit encouragement of the banking industry's actions from figures like Mayor Bloomberg. The nation's largest financial institutions are almost all still around, still "too big to fail" and as powerful as ever. One might hope that enlightened bankers might emulate the Medicis and fund culture-makers – both emerging artists and those still in school – as a way of ensuring a continued talent pool that would invent stuff and fill the world with ideas and inspiration, but other than buying blue-chip art for their walls and donating to some institutions what is, for them, small change, they don't seem to be very much interested in replenishing the talent pool.

One would expect that the 1% would have a vested interest in keeping the civic body healthy at least – that they'd want green parks, museums and symphony halls for themselves and their friends, if not everyone. Those, indeed, are institutions to which they habitually contribute. But it's like funding your own clubhouse. It doesn't exactly do much for the rest of us or for the general health of the city. At least, we might sigh, they do that, as they don't pay taxes – that we know.

Many of the wealthy don't even live here. In the neighborhood where I live (near the art galleries in Chelsea), I can see three large condos from my window that are pretty much empty all the time. What the fuck!? Apparently, rich folks buy the apartments, but might only stay in them a few weeks out of a year. So why should they have an incentive to maintain or improve the general health of the city? They're never here.

This real estate situation – a topic New Yorkers love to complain about over dinner – doesn't help the future health of the city. If young, emerging talent of all types can't find a foothold in this city, then it will be a city closer to Hong Kong or Abu Dhabi than to the rich fertile place it has historically been. Those places might have museums, but they don't have culture. Ugh. If New York goes there – more than it already has – I'm leaving.

But where will I go? Join the expat hipsters upstate in Hudson?

Can New York change its trajectory a little bit, become more inclusive and financially egalitarian? Is that possible? I think it is. It's still the most stimulating and exciting place in the world to live and work, but it's in danger of walking away from its greatest strengths. The physical improvements are happening – though much of the crumbling infrastructure still needs fixing. If the social and economic situation can be addressed, we're halfway there. It really could be a model of how to make a large, economically sustainable and creatively energetic city. I want to live in that city.
 

Alfons

Way of the future
http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=27655

London's Plastic People nightclub is closing.

The club's manager, Charlotte Kepel, told Resident Advisor: "We will not open again in 2015. Plastic People had great runs both on Oxford Street and Curtain Road." She added: "A fabulous time was had and it felt right to move on."

A shame. I only ever went in the last year or so, so I can't compare it too how it was before they changed it (a lot of people on here hated these changes I seem to recall), but still I really liked the place and had a few really good nights there.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I used to go to Plastic People for various events way back but I haven't been for years. It's a nice enough space I guess and sound was good etc but I'm kinda mystified by all the recent press that makes it sound like it was the Paradise Garage mixed with Boccaccio. I understand that the nights that have made it "legendary" are maybe not the kinda things I especially like and as a result of that I've missed out on them but in general it seems like some kind of indictment of how things are going that just getting those very basic bare minimum things right is all you need now to be counted as one of the best clubs in the country.
Saw this top 25 clubs in Europe (mainland Europe, not including the UK) in the Guardian recently

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/dec/29/best-clubs-europe-club-nights-picked-by-djs

And I will look for the UK follow up soon but I was surprised by the number of people in the comments who mentioned Fabric as the best thing in the UK - to me it represents everything that I hate about clubbing. Surely there are better things than that - surely?
What are the best clubs and clubnights in London/UK at the moment? I think that part of the problem here might be the fact that maybe clubs aren't where the best nights happen. What I mean is, I went to World Unknown on NYE - I'm not a regular at that by any means but I've been a few times over the years and off the top of my head I can't think of any better nights in London at the moment - and it's in a different place every time so it doesn't show up on the radar of lists of best clubs.

Actually, I think we need a best UK clubs thread and I'm gonna start one.
 
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