NOVEMBER | THE COLUMNISTS
Access’ regular
columnists
talk clubbing,
creating impact,
and the West End
renaissance...
Lost Club Culture
Jonathan Emmins, founder,
Amplify
Everyone has a club that defines
their youth, tastes, friendships
and much more beyond. My club
was the ‘Heavenly Social’. After
bouncing around the backrooms of
boozers, it found its spiritual home
at Farringdon’s Turnmills (now
luxury flats).
Low key and helmed by the
Chemical Brothers (then Dust
Brothers), the Heavenly Social
threw together music genres with
abandon. Fast forward 20+ years
and Alexandra Palace attracted a
20,000-strong ‘older crowd’ who
congregated to see the Chemical
Brothers unleash their latest.
A far cry from the Turnmills
days, it was a carefully
choreographed two-hours that
played to the senses and blurred the
lines between music, art, film and
technology. Regardless of the music
or nostalgia, it was inspirational for
event professionals, reflecting how
sweaty little nights develop into
today’s vision, artistry, ability and
high expectations, as encapsulated
by boundary-pushing clubs
and promoters like the mighty
Printworks and festivals like
Awakenings or Dekmantel.
Amplify’s new ‘Lost Club Culture’
film celebrates the culture’s unsung
heroes. We interviewed a myriad of
DJs and producers, from Éclair Fifi
to Paul Oakenfold. Watch the film
on Amplify’s website.
Outsider art
Josephine Burns, chair, Without
Walls We are investing West
Simeon Aldred, group creative
director, Vibration Group
Outdoor arts brings the streets
to life. It invades the public space,
turns it on its head, reinvents and
then vanishes.
And what do audiences
remember? A soaring poignant
voice or a magical flute conquering
the urban din, a wisp or clatter of
words that make you laugh or weep,
a high-flying acrobat describing
an impossibly elegant movement.
These things transform, at least
for a moment, how we think about
where we live and who we are.
Outdoor arts and the world
of fashion have a lot in common.
Think about it: both must make an
immediate impression otherwise
fail to attract an audience. To
steal a millennial term, both are
“Instagrammable”, adept at making
people stop and stare – to take
notice. Both embody a diffusion
of ideas into and out of ‘the street’,
styled, made more fabulous, by
artistry and design - those cunning
in the ways of enchantment.
Both have an enduring imagery
(recurring photos and the rest)
that define a sensibility and a style
that puts the UK in prime place in
the ’soft-power’ battle. But we are
nothing without innovation - now
massively threatened by the decline
in arts in the curriculum. We have
to DO something about about this... Vibration Group own and operate a
number of cool event spaces in East
London, and the ‘I need Shoreditch’
mantra continues to be on the
lips of all the major brands and PR
companies looking for space.
But at Vibration Group we can see
a light wind blowing to the West.
There are a number of exciting
food halls, rooftops, and street food
operations ploughing money back
into the West End and far west
destinations. Are we about to see
the renaissance of the West End
venue? We think so. Shoreditch,
Dalston, Peckham, and Brixton are
still booming and will continue
to grow in the next few years,
but we predict a shift West and a
re-balancing of what it means to
be the ‘cool’ London destination.
With smart food operations like
Pergola and Mercato Metropolitano
committing to space in the west we
can see operators creating spaces
and leisure destinations for the
West and North London tribes as
well as overseas visitors.
Vibration Group are also
committing massively to the West
with next year’s opening of the old
bus depot behind Westfield London
that will offer a large capacity new
space called ‘Exhibition London’.
For now, the London event economy
continues to boom and we see a
re-balancing of the east/west ‘cool’
happening in the next 12 months.
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