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A recent article in Spectator Life
Why do bankers love techno?
by Josiah Gogarty
"Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc in the first series starts when the protagonist, exhausted after a long night on the powder, executes a trade in the wrong currency.
Some in the field have protested that the on-screen excess is unrealistic. But much of it is apparently inspired by real-world experience. Mickey Down, one of Industry’s creators, spent just over a year working at Rothschild at the beginning of the 2010s. Among his peers, working hard and playing hard was taken to extremes: ‘It’s not natural to do a 100-hour work week, but somehow your body acclimatises to it,’ he says. Those long days in the office turned into long weekends (often starting on a Thursday) of partying at high-end clubs such as Cuckoo in Mayfair, where bankers would spend thousands on bottles of Dom Perignon with sparklers strapped to them.
Aside from among the straight-laced eastern Europeans, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine use was rife, Down says. Italians, Germans and the French were finally able ‘to let their hair down’ after the rigours of business school, while ‘Swedes’ – and Down concedes this is a slight generalisation – would ‘take lots of coke’. But it was the British who held the ‘gold medal’ in drug use, having gone through a three-year intensive training programme as undergraduates.
The same antics still occur a decade later. But what has changed is that more and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance.
Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights. Graduates leaving prestigious universities and considering how to cash in their degrees are confronted by a trade-off between social and financial capital. At one end of the spectrum sit arts jobs which pay a pittance but give you dinner-party cachet; at the other, corporate law and finance, which offer six-figure salaries in your early twenties but little in the way of glamour.
This kindles a degree of status anxiety in corporate types, which some try to quell by striving for a compensatory level of cool in their personal lives. In the 2015 film adaptation of The Big Short, Adam McKay’s biting account of the 2008 financial crisis, a Deutsche Bank salesman played by Ryan Gosling is found in a Manhattan bar filled with yuppies swilling champagne. He turns to the camera and plaintively protests: ‘I never hung out with these idiots after work, ever – I had fashion friends.’
Look at David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs and semi-professional DJ. Solomon started DJing in 2015 – he says it helps his ‘left brain, right brain’ balance – and has managed to acquire millions of monthly listeners on Spotify and high-profile performance slots, despite heading a bank so rapacious it’s nicknamed the ‘vampire squid’. Some of Goldman’s board members are reportedly sceptical about Solomon’s side hustle, especially since he used the firm’s private jet to fly to a gig at Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival this summer. Implicit in the wider backlash (and mockery) is a more fundamental contention: rich bankers simply shouldn’t be allowed to have that much fun.
So, how do you square a job that hands you near-unlimited resources to enjoy yourself with the attendant constraints of social stigma and punishing office hours? As finance folk can probably appreciate more than most, the market finds a way. The relentlessness of the era that Down remembers has been tempered by the rise of wellness culture, and the growing recognition that sleep isn’t an optional extra. This has led to the advent of day festivals such as Field Day and Waterworks. These big-budget parties, held in London’s parks, lay on fancy food stalls and a who’s who of DJs, with ticket prices pushing three figures. Crucially, they also tend to wrap up by 11 p.m., giving attendees the chance to be tucked up in bed by midnight.
Day festivals have multiplied over the past few years, with promoters labouring under the (correct) assumption that many partygoers want their hedonism at least a little gentrified. If, Down says, enough bankers find social refuge in clubbing, it’s unsurprising that eventually clubbing starts to reflect their own, less subversive habits: ‘It’s a snake that eats its own tail.’"
Why do bankers love techno?
by Josiah Gogarty
"Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc in the first series starts when the protagonist, exhausted after a long night on the powder, executes a trade in the wrong currency.
Some in the field have protested that the on-screen excess is unrealistic. But much of it is apparently inspired by real-world experience. Mickey Down, one of Industry’s creators, spent just over a year working at Rothschild at the beginning of the 2010s. Among his peers, working hard and playing hard was taken to extremes: ‘It’s not natural to do a 100-hour work week, but somehow your body acclimatises to it,’ he says. Those long days in the office turned into long weekends (often starting on a Thursday) of partying at high-end clubs such as Cuckoo in Mayfair, where bankers would spend thousands on bottles of Dom Perignon with sparklers strapped to them.
Aside from among the straight-laced eastern Europeans, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine use was rife, Down says. Italians, Germans and the French were finally able ‘to let their hair down’ after the rigours of business school, while ‘Swedes’ – and Down concedes this is a slight generalisation – would ‘take lots of coke’. But it was the British who held the ‘gold medal’ in drug use, having gone through a three-year intensive training programme as undergraduates.
The same antics still occur a decade later. But what has changed is that more and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance.
Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights. Graduates leaving prestigious universities and considering how to cash in their degrees are confronted by a trade-off between social and financial capital. At one end of the spectrum sit arts jobs which pay a pittance but give you dinner-party cachet; at the other, corporate law and finance, which offer six-figure salaries in your early twenties but little in the way of glamour.
This kindles a degree of status anxiety in corporate types, which some try to quell by striving for a compensatory level of cool in their personal lives. In the 2015 film adaptation of The Big Short, Adam McKay’s biting account of the 2008 financial crisis, a Deutsche Bank salesman played by Ryan Gosling is found in a Manhattan bar filled with yuppies swilling champagne. He turns to the camera and plaintively protests: ‘I never hung out with these idiots after work, ever – I had fashion friends.’
Look at David Solomon, chief executive of Goldman Sachs and semi-professional DJ. Solomon started DJing in 2015 – he says it helps his ‘left brain, right brain’ balance – and has managed to acquire millions of monthly listeners on Spotify and high-profile performance slots, despite heading a bank so rapacious it’s nicknamed the ‘vampire squid’. Some of Goldman’s board members are reportedly sceptical about Solomon’s side hustle, especially since he used the firm’s private jet to fly to a gig at Chicago’s Lollapalooza music festival this summer. Implicit in the wider backlash (and mockery) is a more fundamental contention: rich bankers simply shouldn’t be allowed to have that much fun.
So, how do you square a job that hands you near-unlimited resources to enjoy yourself with the attendant constraints of social stigma and punishing office hours? As finance folk can probably appreciate more than most, the market finds a way. The relentlessness of the era that Down remembers has been tempered by the rise of wellness culture, and the growing recognition that sleep isn’t an optional extra. This has led to the advent of day festivals such as Field Day and Waterworks. These big-budget parties, held in London’s parks, lay on fancy food stalls and a who’s who of DJs, with ticket prices pushing three figures. Crucially, they also tend to wrap up by 11 p.m., giving attendees the chance to be tucked up in bed by midnight.
Day festivals have multiplied over the past few years, with promoters labouring under the (correct) assumption that many partygoers want their hedonism at least a little gentrified. If, Down says, enough bankers find social refuge in clubbing, it’s unsurprising that eventually clubbing starts to reflect their own, less subversive habits: ‘It’s a snake that eats its own tail.’"
