Is clubland dying?

Anyway I don't know if clubland's dying, I don't really get the impression it is to be honest. I think what's happened is that it's plateau-ed a bit - the proportion of kids who like going clubbing now is about the same as the proportion of kids who liked going clubbing 5 years ago. As the growth of a phenomenon slows it stops being a phenomenon. There might be a shift away from big clubs to smaller or medium-sized clubs, too, I don't know.

Anyway, as long as James Palumbo goes bankrupt and ends up living in a cardboard box somewhere with a crack habit, I don't mind what happens to clubland.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4468068,00.html

apart from my residual kick against peretti's club-tart snobisme and the tiresome fact of a columnist employed by Guardian MegaCom unreflectively berating another (smaller) leisure industry for being "corporate" (i buy at pret nearly every day and DON'T buy the guardian nearly every day: this is not an accident), that seems to summarise reasonably fairly the entrepreneurial vs communalist tensions in rave culture => at least to this total outsider

The rest-Producing more good stuff than I have money to buy, or time to write about.

Well in that case I don't know, it's difficult, for me at least, to separate myself from my own social activities and make an impartial judgement, I'd imagine what I said isn't so irrelevent though. Surely the lack of a hyperpopular new bloke like Fatboy or something is going to affect numbers to some extent. I mean, people have to start somewhere.

Siegbran's comment seems to be the consensus among the promoters such as Cream etc, the odd thing is that Dublin is building new Superclub after new Superclub, so perhaps it's a British thing for the moment.

nyeh. because what sells clubland is going to a club, getting completely binned, dancing your nuts off, and then going home. The next day you say to your friends "does anyone know what any of the music we heard last night was called?". The likes of Fatboy do not get people going to clubs.

Superclubs are shuting down, changing their line ups, messing about with anything and generally giving the impression of hanging on by their teeth.

And this is because of:

Music: has polarised, either hard house or progressive house, neither of which are very accessable to the casual listener. Some blame a lack of 'doll's house' or 'music to get birds on the dancefloor', not that women don't like dance music (I mean I couldn't say that could I?) but those terms are generally used to denote a more casual interest, going clubbing rather than obbsessing over dance music.

Boring music: Records go from being obscure white labels to being played by Sara Cox within the space of a week. The result is that the big tunes no longer seem new and DJs go to stupid lengths to make their set sound 'up front'. True meaning of up front? Records made by their mates, just cut on to accetate for them and them only. Records that have not been tested on any kind of audience, let alone this audience who don't want to spend the whole evening being eductaed and might want to dance to something they know.

Money: Book a superstar DJ for thousands of pounds, plus champange, accomodation, free drugs etc. He doesn't fill your 4000 capacity club. YOu've paid for the name, it hasn't worked. Probably because said DJ is too old and playing dull music without passion. Club promoter out of pocket.

Door prices: If you can't fill the club, hike the price up. But then your non-obsessive clubber won't pay upwards of £15 for a night out. Club empty again.

But then in smaller clubs, the type with low overheads, where the club promoter is last off the dancefloor, where the crowd are getting something new and interesting and not having to stump up their life savings for the experience.

Ouch Tom, ouch.

but the other problem is the continuity, theres not a great deal of difference between a 2001 track and a 1997 track and even back as far as 94 (witness the perennial reissues of cafe del mar, first rebirth, ornage theme, vernons wonderland etc etc).

Anna's and Tom's posts seem on the money I guess. I find it irritating as I said on my thread last week or whenever it was, it's starting to become irritating in reviews in a "use other facts please" way, I mean whatever you think about it, true or untrue, starting a review with "Dance music, they say" or "the crisis in dance music" or "the 'crisis' in dance music" is just totally fucking dull at this point.

And yet I feel I write something and the above trend is so prominent that people will read it and think "all well and good, but WHAT ABOUT THE CRISIS". I didn't really think I made this point clear enough when I did another thread, but if I did then I don't mean to beat it over the head another time.

(I still think Dublin is slightly odd like this, two new superclubs built launched in the last 6 months and another one on the way, we're talking 1000 capacity, big djs every week)

and what about in germany and holland. what is the situation there?

This reminds me of the Jamaican sound-system clashes I've read about, which seem to me to be the origin of 'clubland' (in the broadest sense of people going to somewhere to dance to records played and mixed by a DJ.) - sound system owners would record one-off only copies of new tunes to have the freshest sounds. I guess it works if you have an audience that's already 'educated' as you put it and you mix the new up with the familiar.

as one of those mid-30s stay-at-home married types (complete with dusty decks in the attic) i'm not the best person to ask on the current state of dutch clubbing. i know a large amsterdam club IT closed its doors recently, but mega-promoters ID&T still seem to draw in thousands for huge events like Inner City + Sensation, (which only seem to play dull Trance or Hard House). dutch clubbing site xpander's events list suggests no waning interest ( http://www.xpander.nl/ ) but like i said i really wouldn't know.

Northern Coal is the other side of Wigan.

I don't know either. Like Stevo says, iT, one of the big Amsterdam clubs, is about to close. On the other hand, large dance events sell out way in advance. Either way, the music they play is skull-splittingly awful trance tripe. Like Ronan, I know that enough good music is being made all the time. I have a radio show. I buy & play a lot of great records. I don't know where they get played out, though. I've all but given up on going out dancing. I don't care anymore.

About the demise of the iT, this has a lot to do with the fact that Manfred Langer is dead. After that, the club lost a lot of appeal/hipness/etc, and I don't think their closure came as a big surprise. But the same time, clubs like Now&Wow and <> are still very popular. Perhaps the complaints of some clubs aren't justified by a total falling of club attendance. After all, it's quite convenient to blame empty dancefloors on a general decline than to admit that people like your competitor more :)

I think Gareth is OTM with the "punched above its weight" comment. Tom is also OTM with the comment about people who write now and how they are nostalgic. To reiterate from another thread, the pretense of going to a club to experience the personally transcendant/socially transgressive is on the wane. Nobody (at least in the major club magazines that I have read) even references these aspects of the club/rave experience anymore, even if some were using these aspects as a rationalization for getting fucked up without any true desire to become more than themselves for a few hours. So the nostalgia is partially for the empty rhetoric and partially for actual experience which may have lived up to the myths.

big clubs are a leisure industry like any other, and I think some are reacting to the impersonal experience by going to smaller clubs. so clubs and music aren't dying as much as the idea of the superclub. Those looking for grandiose experience go to large festivals, and those looking for intimacy go to the small clubs.

It should also be noted that the smaller clubs don't get as much media attention regarding drug use. When Twilo was shut down, everyone went somewhere else. In other words, the next weekend, there were still just as many people going out and using drugs, but still, shutting down Twilo was seen as an "accomplishment".

In terms of going out to 'the dancin' (as even the most suave and sophisticated of Glasgow clubs are still known), I'm not sure there has been much change in the last 20 years. Not in terms of total bums on seats (or shaking-asses on the dancefloor heh!).

Im sure some large clubs have closed because they have gone out of fashion - wasn't that always a feature of clubbing?