In the popular imagination, nightclubs are sweaty basements providing a soundtrack to drunken fumbles in the dark; an alien world with no connection or relevance to the more wholesome things that happen during the day. But the reality is that anyone with an Instagram account, a fashion magazine subscription or an interest in social activism is ultimately engaging with club culture. Nightlife is like an angel investor in pop culture, silently incubating grassroots movements and social moments, and since the first iterations of the disco, clubs have been a breeding ground for cultural experimentation.
You can see it most obviously and prosaically in fashion, from the era-defining slinkiness of Halston dresses worn at Studio 54, to the still influential queer punk attitude of the New Romantics in 80s London clubs, to contemporary rave culture’s complicated aesthetic in Christopher Shannon’s sportswear designs at London fashion week in 2017. Music trends, too, are often forged first in nightclubs: Madonna did it back in 1990 when she released Vogue, a track inspired by New York’s ballroom scene, and both Beyoncé and Drake have sampled the bounce artist Big Freedia on tracks inspired by the New Orleans rap subgenre. “It’s not always self-evident, but there are really direct links between small, independent artists and labels and the absolute highest echelon of pop stardom,” Will Lynch, editor of the electronic music site Resident Advisor, says.
Less predictably, the very architecture of clubs themselves has proved influential. “The 1960s and 70s were most interesting because that’s when the nightclub was being defined as a typology of its own,” says Jochen Eisenbrand, chief curator of last year’s Night Fever exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. “Clubs,” he says, “are forerunners of spaces that create an experience temporarily.” Clubbing has always been about creating a parallel world for the night, right down to how a typical club is laid out: a stairway descending into an underground playground of disorienting lights and sounds.
In those early clubs – New York’s Electric Circus, Space Electronic in Florence and the Piper Discotheque in Turin – architects experimented with flexible spaces that could be changed depending on what was happening in them. With its reconfigurable stage and moving light structure, Piper became known as the “pluriclub” for its varied cultural programming that included fashion shows and poetry readings in the same space it held discos. In a similar vein, during the day Space Electronic’s dancefloor was home to an experimental architecture school. Eisenbrand says this relates to architecture today, “which is about creating more democratic cultural institutions that allow participation”.
This is happening now in places such as Amsterdam, which, in 2016, saw the trial introduction of 24-hour, multi-use venues. One of those spaces was De School, a former technical college that was redeveloped into a cafe, restaurant, concert space, art gallery and nightclub. “The goal of the project was to create a venue where different groups of people feel welcome,” says Luc Mastenbroek, programmer of De School’s nightclub. “We can organise this with the use of flexible spaces.”
The venue, which is three years into its five-year lease, experiments with how it uses its expansive brutalist venue; its eclectic programme includes a late-night dinner-cum-light show in the restaurant, as well as exhibitions, concerts and club nights. “It feels a bit boring to have separate, specific spaces for different cultural and art practices,” Mastenbroek said. “It gets interesting when they get mixed up.”
Issued with a 24-hour licence and freedom to set its own opening hours, the initiative was the brainchild of Mirik Milan, who at the time was Amsterdam’s night mayor. “Late-night culture is a massive motor for cities’ economic wellbeing,” Milan told the Guardian at the time. Since then a number of other cities, including London and New York, have appointed dedicated officials to look after their cities’ night-time economies – with an inherent tension when national or local government gets involved in a city’s club culture.
Capitalising on nightlife as a driver of economic growth runs counter to the ethos of the club as a place to escape everyday norms. And this is where clubland, for all its influence on culture, finds itself being influenced by culture.
It’s not just councils that want to capitalise on nightlife. Given that marketing is all about selling an experience, it’s not surprising that brands are keen to associate themselves, too. Last year, Smirnoff worked with a number of electronic artists, notably the socially active house DJ the Black Madonna, on a campaign to get more women into dance music. While applauded for tackling the problem of representation, some corners of the community raised an eyebrow at the partnership. “What does it mean to team up with a vodka brand?” Lynch from Resident Advisor says. “It’s not the most socially wholesome idea.”
On the one hand, this kind of deal looks like a company making a land grab for anything vaguely cool. On the other, brand deals are becoming a necessary part of the underground’s ecosystem – increasingly, it is sponsorship that fills the gap left by falling record sales for artists trying to make money from music. In 2017, the electronic musician Madame Gandhi featured in an Adidas campaign; to promote its line of trainers the following year, Reebok worked with the underground techno collective Discwoman; and Versace has worked with the rapper Tommy Genesis, singer Cosmo Pyke and outsider pop artist Rina Sawayama on its diffusion line, Versus.
And from the chevrons in the Peter Savile-designed Haçienda to the bold iconography of 90s clubbing brands such as Ministry of Sound, Cream and Gatecrasher, to the selfie-friendly environments in Ibiza clubs such as Ushuaia, clubland has also learned to market itself. As Eisenbrand says: “It’s hard to say which way it goes; it’s a network where things influence each other.” These grey areas have left the underground clubbing community feeling uneasy. “It’s a struggle to articulate what’s wrong with it,” Lynch says, “but people have a strong suspicion of it.”
If nightlife becomes merely a branding opportunity, chunks of future cultural history will be erased. So club culture is reasserting itself as a socially influential force by rejecting bland consumerist hedonism and engaging directly with political action and social upheavals.
It was behind the scenes of a club night in Manchester that a movement to provide a drug-checking service got its start. The Loop, a harm reduction charity, would test confiscated drugs at Warehouse Project to find out what was being brought into the venue. For the last two years, the charity has offered a free checking service at UK festivals.
“We’re catching people who are part of a hidden population,” says Fiona Measham, director of The Loop, “a hard-to-reach group who don’t see themselves as having a drug problem. But these people do have questions about their health, so it’s a great opportunity to start that dialogue with a healthcare professional.” Nightlife was the lab for The Loop’s work, which has since received support from political groups and local authorities. Measham now has her sights set on opening regional hubs, so that people can test their drugs in city centres.
That nightlife can be the birthplace of radical social change comes as no surprise to Nadine Artois, a co-founder of Pxssy Palace, a London-based inclusive club night that champions the rights of trans and queer people and people of colour. “There’s no reason why the dancefloor can’t be an educational space,” she says.
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The Pxssy Palace nights are about creating a space where marginalised communities can feel safer than in other places. “It’s not just a club night; it’s a form of resistance,” says Artois. “We try to protect our community, but also spread our ideals into the wider society.” Artois says more club nights championing inclusivity are cropping up and points to XOYO – one of the bigger London clubs popular with tourists – recently introducing a safe space policy. “The underground club scene shapes culture a lot more than anyone really imagines,” says Artois.
The last few years have seen an influx of similar nights that act as a conduit for social change. Pxssy Palace’s longtime collaborators BBZ throw nights for queer and non-binary people of colour that have been a welcome addition to London’s club scene. Other inclusive parties in the capital include Femmi-Errect, which aims to represent the whole femme spectrum, and the cabaret night Cocoa Butter Club, which champions performers of colour. Meanwhile, in Manchester, the city’s DIY scene is thriving, where collectives such as Partisan are rejecting the commercialisation of nightlife in favour of more democratic, owner-operated venues.
Ultimately, as Lynch says, “the experience of transcendence that people are looking to get from music is delivered most purely in a club”. That potency is something that brands can only dream of – and will ensure club culture will always remain, at some level, a wellspring of cultural influence.
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