Category Archives: Clubbing

Berlin’s Watergate nightclub will close with New Year’s Eve last dance

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Upmarket Kreuzberg club blames economic pressures, a pandemic hangover and Berlin’s dated image as factors leading to end of 22-year party

Berlin’s Watergate nightclub, one of the institutions of the German capital’s nightlife, is to close down after 22 years, with its owners saying the night-time economy still hasn’t recovered after the pandemic.

In a statement, the club’s management said it had made the “difficult decision” not to extend its lease and close its premises after a New Year’s Eve party at the end of the year.

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DJs join Ravers for Palestine boycott of top Berlin techno club Berghain

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Faultlines in Germany’s response to Gaza war exposed by artists pulling out of gigs at renowned venue

People write guides on how to get into Berghain and even make films about its doorman. But the legendary nightclub is now facing a boycott by some DJs over its stance on the war in Gaza.

A group calling itself Ravers for Palestine first announced a boycott of the Berlin venue, along with several other clubs, in January, saying that remaining silent on Israel’s attacks in Gaza made it complicit.

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French artists, DJs and musicians unite to fight threat of far-right government

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Front Électronique acts as ‘world of the night’ to combat rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally

More than 1,200 artists, DJs and promoters from the French music industry have come together in a bid to galvanise “the world of the night” into political action and to protest at the possibility of the first far-right French government since the second world war.

Members of the Front Électronique (FE) have organised live debates on video streaming service Twitch and free concerts, and released a fund-raising album Siamo Tutti Antifascisti Vol.1 (We are all Anti-Fascists) featuring 38 artists. The compilation is described as a “call to arms”.

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Bangers and ballet: London’s Ministry of Sound embraces contemporary dance

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Big-name ballet dancers and rising choreographers have found a new home in the superclub where the after-party goes on until 5am

“It’s the easiest rider we’ve ever done,” says the Ministry of Sound’s Mahit Anam. “Normally it’s five bottles of Patrón, four bottles of vodka … ” And this time? Water, bananas and protein bars. It’s not your usual green room at the south London superclub, because this is not your usual show: the dancefloor is about to be taken over by professionals. Ballet Nights – a monthly production usually held in a Canary Wharf theatre and featuring the country’s top ballet stars and rising choreographers – is moving into clubland. So now amid the speaker stacks and DJ decks you’ll see Royal Ballet dancer Joshua Junker and work from Olivier award-winning choreographer James Cousins. It’s a whole different kind of podium dancing.

“Everything’s got too formulaic, too samey, and that’s why we want to do this stuff,” says Anam. “Pushing boundaries is something we should always be doing.” Ballet Nights was hatched by former Scottish Ballet soloist and choreographer Jamiel Devernay-Laurence in 2023. The idea was to give audiences an up-close view of big-name ballet dancers like Steven McRae and Matthew Ball as well as nurturing a stable of young artists. But he was itching to expand, and eager to attract younger audiences, people who are the same age as the dancers who perform. Devernay-Laurence had met with all sorts of venues – theatres, concert halls – and it was always a “let’s talk again in the future” situation. But when he walked into Ministry of Sound: “They had open arms, they were so excited. We walked out the same day with an agreement and a date.”

Ballet Nights is at Ministry of Sound, London, on 31 May

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‘We can live again’: Belgian nursing home residents hit the nightclubs

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Papy Booom runs outings for older people, and late-night dancing is proving a successful way of socialising and staying active

A Belgian initiative with the motto “happiness overcomes old age” has found a novel way to counter feelings of loneliness among nursing home residents: unleashing them on to the dancefloor of Brussels’ largest nightclub.

As part of a series of unconventional activities designed to keep retired people active, a nonprofit association, Papy Booom, recently arranged for 11 pensioners to visit Lift Brussels, a 1,360 sq metre (14,500 sq ft) venue specialising in R&B, reggaeton and Latin dance.

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Printworks London may reopen by 2026 after developers submit plans

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British Land and AustraliaSuper want to create cultural venue that will include offices and shops

Printworks London, the 6,000-capacity post-industrial superclub, could reopen by 2026 after property developers that own the site filed their plans to Southwark council.

British Land and its partner AustralianSuper, one of the country’s largest pension funds, submitted a detailed proposal to the council on Monday to redevelop the site in Rotherhithe into a permanent cultural venue just over a year after the cavernous club shut its doors.

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‘Profane’ or ‘innocent’? Row over Canterbury Cathedral silent disco

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Critics say dance event sends message that ‘Christians do not take their faith or their holy places seriously’

From south London’s Ministry of Sound to Ibiza’s legendary superclub Pacha, everyone has a favourite venue for dancing the night away. And now a rave in the nave may be about to join that illustrious list.

More than 3,000 people were expected to take to the floor across four sessions of Canterbury Cathedral’s 90s silent disco to dance to the likes of the Spice Girls, Vengaboys and Eminem, in an event that officials hope will serve to attract a new generation of worshippers to the building’s hallowed cloisters.

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Life inside the wild London club where lesbians were free to be themselves

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A new documentary takes viewers back down the rickety stairs to the trailblazing Gateways in Chelsea

The Gateways is back. The longest-running lesbian club of all-time – the one whose actual clientele appeared in the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George; the one where Mick Jagger tried to talk the owner into letting him crash in a frock; the one that was a sanctuary to every class and sort of woman, from well-known figures such as the writer Patricia Highsmith and the artist Maggi Hambling (then an art student) to swimming-pool attendants at the Tooting Bec lido – has been given a new lease of life in the first full-length documentary film to celebrate its history, and ensure that it is not erased.

Behind a dull green door on the corner of King’s Road and Bramerton Street in Chelsea, down some rickety steps to the basement lay the dive, a former strip club. The lease had been won in a bet at a televised boxing event at the Dorchester hotel by course bookie Ted Ware in 1943, and initially he offered it as a hang-out to a group of his lesbian pals who had been kicked out of their old Soho haunt the Bag O’ Nails pub after new owners took over and banned them.

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‘We can be in bed by 1am – amazing’: veteran DJ Annie Mac’s new clubbing venture hits the spot

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A club night that ends at midnight is welcomed by those who – like the DJ – want a good time without partying all night long

Before Annie Macmanus – aka veteran DJ Annie Mac – started her four-hour set for her new night, Before Midnight, she wandered around the early arrivals saying hello. They all said the same thing: thank you. “It’s like I’m doing some kind of a public service,” she says.

At Islington Assembly Hall in north London on Friday night, the gratitude was real – with the mixed crowd delighted to be raving hard by 9pm, before many clubs have even opened, and knowing they’d be on their merry way home just after midnight, when “normal” clubbers are just getting started. Macmanus started the night, billed as “clubbing for people who need sleep”, because, at 43 and with children to care for, she no longer wanted to play sets all night. The DJ – who during her 17 years as one of the biggest DJs at BBC Radio 1 always declared that “raving is a state of mind” – also wanted to put on nights “for anyone who just wants to go out and loves nightclubbing but hasn’t really felt like nightclubbing is a place for them any more.”

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Neo rhythms: why techno music and The Matrix are in perfect harmony

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The films’ heroes look like they’ve just stepped off the Berghain dancefloor – and the connection isn’t merely aesthetic. The series shares the genre’s philosophy of liberation

“We can’t see it,” says a character in The Matrix Resurrections, “but we’re all trapped inside these strange repeating loops.” Small surprise techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann is resident and where, cut off from the everyday world, people have surreal, liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the franchise’s aesthetics.

When club techno arose in 1980s Detroit, African American producers were reimagining the deindustrialised city as a site of futurist fantasies. Cybotron’s dystopian 1984 track Techno City was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s track Technopolis. “I extrapolated the necessity of interfacing the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Cybotron’s Rik Davis (using the word “matrix” before the film existed), “between the brain, the soul and the mechanisms of cyberspace.”

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‘Music dug up from under the earth’: how trip-hop never stopped

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Fused from jungle, rave and soul, trip-hop filled the coffee tables of the 90s, and is now inspiring Billie Eilish’s generation. So why is the term so despised by many?

Nobody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax’s 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: “THIS IS NOT TRIP HOP”. James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label flirted with the term after it was coined by Mixmag in 1994, but quickly switched to displaying it ostentatiously crossed out on their sleeves. Ninja Tune did print the phrase “triphoptimism” on a king size rolling paper packet in 1996, but only as a joke about escaping categories.

“I always disliked the term,” says Lou Rhodes of Lamb, “and I would always make a point in interviews of challenging its use in regard to Lamb.” Mark Rae of Rae & Christian similarly says: “I would give a score of 9/10 on the lazy journalist scale to anyone who placed us in the trip-hop camp.” And Geoff Barrow’s ferocious hatred of the term – let alone its application to Portishead – has become the stuff of social media legend.

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No Covid pass, no entry: Cardiff clubbers divided on new Welsh rules

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As mandatory checks began, not everyone in the queue for the Pryzm club was prepared

There was an extra thing for the hundreds of young people waiting in the queue outside Pryzm nightclub in Cardiff to worry about.

As usual, they needed to show ID, undergo a search and make sure they still had their phone, keys and friends with them – but for the first time they also had to produce a Covid pass, showing they were fully vaccinated or had tested negative.

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Shayne Oliver: ‘Being a Black weirdo is harder than being any other kind’

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He’s DJ’d naked, put a great dane on the catwalk – and now with an album, Shayne Oliver is on a mission to bring New York’s queer underground to the world. Is the former Hood by Air designer the 21st century Andy Warhol?

Interviewing Shayne Oliver is a conversational rollercoaster. We hurtle from cult 90s guitar bands to Arthur Jafa, from the problem with political correctness to the pressure on creatives, from Kanye West to Vin Diesel, with little warning of which thrill or spill is next. “I’m such a scatterbrain,” he says at the end of our call. “I’m sorry.”

But Oliver is far from a scatterbrain. He is best known as a fashion designer, the former vogue-dancer who founded the critically adored label Hood By Air, or HBA, in 2006. However, he is no longer limiting himself to clothes. Oliver is moving into music, having formed Anonymous Club – a “creative studio” focused on young talent that began as a series of parties. The studio’s debut release is Screensavers Vol 1, a compilation album based on Oliver’s demos, executive produced by Yves Tumor.

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Clubbers shun reopened venues in England amid confusion over Covid safety

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Owners blame ‘low consumer confidence’ and confused government messages for poor post-‘freedom day’ attendances

Nightclubs in England have seen low attendances and been forced to cancel events as the pandemic continues to disrupt the nightlife industry almost two weeks on from “freedom day”.

Many operators blamed “low consumer confidence” in the face of confusing government messages about whether it was safe to attend.

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Infectious nightclubs: Covid outbreaks serve as risk alert

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Nightclubs across the world have been linked to outbreaks, leading some countries to open up to vaccinated clubbers only

They only wanted to enjoy themselves on the sunny Sardinian coast last summer after a tough two-month lockdown. But instead, young Italians, who had frequented nightclubs, returned home either with Covid-19 or laden with feelings of guilt, regret or anger at the authorities.

Nightclubs, such as those in Spain, France, the UK, Austria and Thailand, have triggered coronavirus outbreaks since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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New York’s clubs are back, and with them a sense of community I’d forgotten existed | Larissa Pham

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As I dance, it doesn’t feel like a night out – it feels like a homecoming

In 2018, upon her return from a trip to China, my roommate gifted me a pack of black surgical masks. Affixed to the plastic packaging was an explanatory note: RAVE MASKS :)

I knew the look – the masks were purely aesthetic for certain ravers; dressed and masked in serious black, drifting past me at warehouse parties in New York, where I live. But it was a hard look to live up to, and my rave outfits leaned more toward sweaty efficiency, anyway.

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My summer of love: ‘Under the spell of ecstasy, strangers went straight to limitless intimacy’

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We danced in water features, stupefied with drugs. And while my big crush was unrequited, the whole season was irresistible fun

A summer of love is predicted when – if – we emerge from the Babylonian captivity of lockdown in a frenzy of courting. It will be the third summer of love in recent years. The first occurred, in a cloud of hashish and patchouli, around San Francisco in 1967. I was five and living on the outskirts of Kettering, untouched by those events, although I have heard it said the Skew Bridge Ski Club could get quite racy.

The second summer of love I can talk about because I was in it. It was 1990, I was 28, and recently retired from pop music. It arrived on the back of a new party drug, ecstasy. I had come across E – more properly MDMA – in the United States, in the clubs of the east and west coasts, where enterprising leisure professionals realised that its effect on the neurotransmitters responsible for the experience of pleasure could make every venue a Xanadu of irresistible fun.

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Here Are the Young Men review – Anya Taylor-Joy and the bad boys

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Three Dublin lads and their super-smart classmate face an uncertain future in a tale that only hints at dark possibilities

Here is an ensemble coming-of-ager in which someone actually says the line: “That summer may have changed everything …” It’s in a style I associate with the 90s: movies such as Trainspotting or Human Traffic, with people clubbing and yearning and discovering the value of friendship together as the sun comes up. There’s certainly an impressive cast lineup for this one, but there’s also something weirdly formless and frustrating about it as well; the film gestures at some dark and disturbing possibilities in human nature without quite knowing if or how to follow through.

Matthew (Dean-Charles Chapman), Kearney (Finn Cole) and Rez (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) are three Dublin lads who leave school without much idea of what they want to do – not like their super-smart classmate Jen (Anya Taylor-Joy) who has some ambitious life plans figured out and on whom sweet, sensitive Matthew has a massive crush. But then the boys witness something horrible that shakes them up and reveals a sinister side to Kearney, who has a creepy attitude to Jen and a droog-like enthusiasm for torturing homeless people.

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‘You can smell the sweat and hair gel’: the best nightclub scenes from culture

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Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown

There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.

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