Fabric.....and other clubs.

Going by what ive read from you on the forum i think youre making a good choice in checking out fabric.. coming from Dublin like you, i was pretty taken aback by the club when i saw Howlett dj there last summer.... the venue is fantastic... three totally separate rooms.... great sound.... well managed , unisex bathrooms , G&Ts with brill measures etc etc....

Fabric Live on Fridays is ace... Stanton's/Lemon Jelly etc play regularly.... Lavelle is a bit cheesy (midnight in a perfect world @ midnight etc etc) but you cannae fault him for trying... dunno about Thursdays ... Saturday's is a bit "poncy" for my (and i suspect) your tastes.... all that prog rubbish sounds the same to me. But Fabric get you cabs within about 5 minutes when you leave .... and the dress code is fine too.

John Peel is playing the 3rd room all on his tobler in the next couple of weeks... i'd get down there to see that one if i was in London.

Ive been to The End and the Ministry of Sound too... both ace.... but Fabric was my fave.... you get more "music fans" in Fabric than poseurs or ponces (!).

Kinda ironic a Dub telling another Dub about london clubs..... blind leading the blind...?

Whatever club you get along to youll be stunned at how much better they are than the dublin "clubs" ....

Dave.

Does that help? I can't come up with any specifics yet, but drop me an e-mail if you want any more details.

TARKUS!

things to do in the day: london eye photographers gallery (wicked cafe) - free to get in go to LUINIS on theobalds rd for delicious lunch - panzerotti!!!

Though - im more interested in the music than the décor anyway. As i feel Ronan is too.

d.

Er.....last question I promise. What would be fun to do in daytime besides spend way too much money on Berwick street like I did last time. Sorry for the constant bugging, anything any of you can think of, I suppose we'll probably just end up in the pub. thanks.

Then went to some pub and watched Liverpool and Ireland winning easily on Sunday. All good really.

Mad rumours going round right now that Fabric has gone into administration. Sounds like bullshit but you never know.

apparently they had to bail out matter and there'll be "staff changes" but fabric won't be closing

Yeah that drug money's got to be laundered somewhere.

not really surprising abt matter - the issues w/ the jubilee line must have caused them so much trouble

so matter is closing or fabric bailed it out?

I'm seeing reports that Islington Council is debating revoking Fabric's license tonight, I haven't been in years and probably never will again but its closure would be terrible for London's music scene and dance music in general.

Pretty sure that every other club I used to go to regularly has either been closed or threatened with closure by now, apart from Plastic People it's the last one standing.

so many gig venues are shutting down too - not just in London. Near me there is literally nowhere to go dancing and all but one live music venue no longer has a license. You're right - it would be tragic for London's music landscape if Fabric closed down and there's no decent reason I can think of why it should.

I'd like to know why this is happening so much and what can be done to stop it before London and other areas become devoid of music venues? I'm assuming it's a combination of noise restrictions and rising property prices, but is there more to it than this?

Yeah, gentrification. I think it can be difficult to argue in favor of cultural values that aren't strictly monetary in this current environment. Everything comes down to economic decision-making.

I'm disappointed that Trouw will be closing here in Amsterdam. It was always on the cards, and no doubt other new places will eventually replace it, but the fact that it's going to be replaced by temporary student housing is just baffling.

the big club i used to promote at (800 capacity) in Hitchin which had always been a club, and before that a ballroom, got turned into a soulless, echoey bar-restaurant a couple of years ago all thanks to new-builds shooting up around it. This is a direct result of the redevelopment of areas like Kings Cross; Hitchin being prime real estate for ageing hipsters who want to move to the suburbs and commute into work. With so many people being priced out of London now, I can see market and dormitory towns on mainlines becoming bonafide city suburbs very soon.

seems it's not a gentrification issue...

http://www.factmag.com/2014/12/19/fabric-saved-from-closure-but-forced-to-bring-in-sniffer-dogs-and-id-scanners/

Fabric has been saved from closure after club bosses agreed to take drastic measures to check clubbers for drugs. The venue will hire seven sniffer dogs as well as introducing mandatory ID checks and increasing CCTV.

but why now? haven't drugs always been a part of fabric / clubbing? i figured the whole thing was unofficially tolerated / blind-eyed in general.

Not really... remember the raid at 93 Feet East etc?

sure, of course they have drug busts, but sometimes i wonder whether the timing of them come down to agenda

Wow, those conditions are exceptionally harsh. ID scanners, wtf? Clubbing in teh panopticon...

Haven't read this properly, but in the 8 cases of overdoses discussed in the first few pages, they admit that most of them involved people taking drugs before coming in:

http://democracy.islington.gov.uk/documents/s2936/Fabric.pdf

Think it is basically a gentrification issue tbh (and I say that both as someone who goes to Fabric regularly, and someone who lives just around the corner from it).

fair dos

The door policy regarding id scanning etc I thought came in a while ago, Im sure it was in place at one of the Arpiar nights last year

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/05/fabric-nightclub-closure-uk-nightlife-drugs-death?CMP=share_btn_tw

well that's the end of that then

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/07/london-nightclub-fabric-close-permanently-licence-revoked-drugs

https://twitter.com/posthumanmusic/status/773316831788556288

https://twitter.com/Mr_Dave_Haslam/status/773421968024535040

fuck this shit imo

Haven't been for years and the last time I did I had quite a stressful time, but this is still fucking awful and sends further signals to the world that Britain is going down the shitter.

http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/stations/farringdon/

nice

In addition to the station improvements, Crossrail has been working with Islington Council and the City of London on proposals for improvements to the area around the station.

The only reason anyone goes to Farringdon is because of Fabric tbh.

Well it's good to know that young people will stop taking dangerous drugs now that this is all over.

I've not been in four or five years and would probably never have gone again anyway but it felt good to know that it was there, providing exposure for a lot of artists and DJs and, well, just a lot of fucking great music. And I'm presuming that the latest mixes (Gerd Janson and Hannah Wants) will be the last.

Everybody moaned about it at the time and it was often awful but I had some great nights there - Ivan Smagghe at peak electrohouse in 2004, Ellen Allen & Apparat in 2006, Michael Mayer, Ame and Gabriel Ananda in 2007, Petre Inspirescu dropping a segment of Debussy's La Mer to a room full of minimal zombies in 2012.

It was often overcrowded and gropey and awful and everybody moaned about it but London is also all of those things and the best bits still make up for it.

Ben Klock was there that night in 2006 as well, that was an outrageous night.

http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/stations/farringdon/

― groovypanda, Wednesday, 7 September 2016 10:16 Bookmark

http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2016/09/01/museum-of-london-assembles-200m-smithfield-project-team/

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/fabric-closed-shut-down-appeal-reopen-campaign-operation-lenor-and-the-real-reason-fabric-was-shut-a7229541.html

Mensch-bot delivers https://twitter.com/NilamAtodaria/status/773422348858957827

Only went once - a mid-week Nicolas Jaar show, but the knock-on impact Fabric had on my life was insurmountable.

I went four times during the year I lived in London, and it was responsible for some of the best live music events/nights out of my life, notwithstanding losing my winter coat there, and a lacklustre vibe at a Wet your self night (redeemed by Roman Flugel's set). My fondest memory of living in London is of walking to Farringdon station at 7AM after a Hessle Audio takeover. I'll also always remember the first time I heard Joy Orbison's Ellipsis there, rushing to try to find out what it was, and being obsessed with it for the next year; spending like 14 hours there for its 12th birthday event, and taking breaks in the smoking section to discreetly do my school readings; lumbering around the room as Dixon ended a 3.5 hour set with a paul simon edit, thereafter walking out to an unusually beautiful day at 8:30AM; hearing frank ocean's novocaine for the first time, as the end track of a Kode9 set, and also being obsessed with it for the next several months; seeing so many DJs I'd never gotten the chance to see elsewhere. I also remember walking into room 2 at the end of a set by Redinho, and hearing him just thank the crowd, saying something to the effect of "I love you, fabric" with a sincerity that I remember today, 4.5 years later, as if his voice carried his appreciation for its support for so much important music, and the standard by which it showcased it. I think this is reflected in its CDs: it's crazy that they've put out so many so frequently, with a consistently high quality of contributors, while also raising the bar for its presentation, i.e. each having its own specially commissioned design and its own tin case rather than a standard digipak or jewel case. It has its shortcomings like any other club, and I hadn't gone back in several the times I've returned to London (getting a student discount, combined with a favourable exchange rate, made going more feasible then), but there is definitely a comfort in knowing it was there, doing its thing.

I feel sad and angry at the closure and what it signals for London and it's increasing blandness and submission to private space and foreign capital and homogenous bougie gentrification and everything else, but I also just feel really grateful for a lot of good memories and support for music I love.

those tin cases were shit and didn't work iirc

never went but recognise the scale of the loss

I think you might be thinking of Chain Reaction's tin cases, which are notorious for destroying the disc inside. I'm pretty sure the fabric ones "work" (they open, they close, they hold cds and booklets, and are durable).

Really gutted about this, I've still been going a few times a year - last went back in May for Voices From The Lake/Villalobos, which was incredible. So many great Villalobos sessions there on Sunday mornings over the last ten years. It would never be my favourite club, but the professionalism always blew me away - they did a fantastic job of cracking down on phone theft, more recently they made a big effort to stop people taking flash photographs on the dancefloor, basically I always felt like they were sincerely trying to improve anything they could about the experience. Given the crowd that they would inevitably attract due to their size, I think it's pretty amazing that it wasn't unbearable in there (although room 1 did always feel overcrowded for much of the night).

Thinking about this again this morning and how it feels like it's left a gigantic hole in dance music. Like, Fabric never felt like the crucible for anything that was happening but it was a big stage and a magnetic centre point for a LOT of different sounds and there isn't really anywhere else in London that can replicate that. Even for someone like me whose clubbing days are basically behind them the very fact that someone was playing Fabric made them at least worthy of a listen (except for the drum and bass stuff and some of the noiser blog-house and brostep, which I never really bothered with).

Also it was one of the few places in London where the police would allow grime nights during the lean years.

There was a Sunday afternoon Innervisions thing last year I was planning to go to and then flaked out at the last minute and I kinda regret that now.

Something i always said about Fabric was that it was a place where the serious music nerds and the 'avin' it dumbfucks regularly merged and mixed. So you'd have your baldy headnodders out to hear, I dunno, Matias Aguayo, and you'd also have some sweaty stripey shirt fellas with their dates in stretchy minidresses out at Fabric purely because it was a famous club and it was Saturday night and they were going to paint the town red, and they had no idea who the DJ was and didn't much care but they were getting blown away by the music anyway. There's something great about that. I don't know too many other places with such a rep in the mainstream as well as consistently innovative bookings.

that's what a big club always is, or even a medium-sized club or just a cub. that's kind of what dance music is. some people like a party, others are there logging every tune in their head to find out what it is. it's one of the best things about it, not exclusive to fabric imo.

You're probably right, it just seemed particularly acute there to me for some reason.

Every club is like that to some degree but Fabric always had a lot of serious heads there for the lineup AND a lot of random tourists or students or people just along for the ride (a lot of whom don't go to, say, a night at Corsica Studios), and because the music could be pretty weird at times it accentuated that.

When it opened in 1999, the height of the superclub boom (it opened almost exactly the same time as Home in Leicester Square, which was closed for drugs almost immediately) it definitely felt like a very different kind of big club, more serious, more confidently about the music.

yeah the lineups were pretty seriously underground, they booked people as soon as they'd had a few singles out, but also booked older more serious "legend" figures.

when i say all "clubs" are like that i guess i don't really consider corsica studios or whatever a club in that manner, more a venue. if your city has a big known "club" brand, it tends to be like fabric was. but fabric definitely went all-in with fairly underground lineups.

i hadn't been since like 09 - i never had a brilliant night there but i never thought it was as bad as people say either. it's more on a symbolic level that i think this is bad, there are a lot of reasons to feel grim about the uk at the moment, and it's harder to see my time here as permanent.

They closed the Arches now Fabric there will be no clubs or gig venues left soon but drug taking wont stop. It's so stupid. It feels like a generational war like in the 90s when my generation was young and the criminal justice act.

Only good thing about it is we got to laugh at louise mensch again.

Home felt a lot more mainstream than Fabric... shiny shirts, Tall Paul on the decks etc..

i liked the end a lot whenever i went. t bar in shoreditch is the club i liked most in london and the one i can imagine i'd still go to, if it still existed.

The End was the absolute best, it was perfectly laid out and always booked really good people, it never felt overcrowded or pushy like Fabric did. I have very fond memories of the cluster of big warehouse-type venues around King's Cross as well. I mean maybe people say the same thing about the Bussey Building or wherever now but there certainly seem to be fewer options.

Like it's so weird to me that house/disco/garage/grime are so much more prevalent everywhere in London (and in the charts) than they were a decade and a bit ago but it's almost like it's been taken out of the clubs altogether. You're as likely to hear Kerri Chandler in a food market these days.

Breaking: Fabric to appeal.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CspNHGqWAAAVe0n.jpg

Haven't been to Fabric for over a decade and, in all honesty, was never likely to go again but I do feel strangely saddened by this. I can't really articulate why except it prompts feelings of "Oh, for fuck's sake".

Might have already been mentioned up-thread but, if not, in contrast:

"In Berlin, techno can now officially be considered high culture after a court decided that the legendary nightclub Berghain produces work of cultural significance and should therefore be allowed to pay a lower tax rate."

You didn't have to go to Fabric to be affected by its existence. The fact it existed and showcased so many incredible acts in the way it did had a knock on effect on UK and dance culture all over the country / world

Absolutely.

https://twitter.com/LDLDN/status/774289341090766848

was at this, p sure i still have the flyer somewhere. wasted it acquainting myself with a bird...

God Lord that room one lineup. DJ Rolando in 99 (ie height of Jaguar-mania) would have been incredible.

There appears to be a new Fabric CD coming out next month so maybe they are keeping them rolling. Shame it's by Scuba though.

carl craig (live) in 99 (ie height of innerzone orchestra-mania) would probably have been my thought at the time there alas

http://www.islingtontribune.com/saved-fabric-nightclub

reopening confirmed

Fabric opening will involve a new ID scanning system, enhanced searching procedures, physical changes to the club, and lifetime bans for anyone found in possession of drugs or attempting to buy drugs in the club but not the use of sniffer dogs.

according to Resident Advisor.

sounds like a good night out

There was probably no way they were going to get to reopen without draconian levels of surveillance but that sounds like the absolute opposite of what anyone would want in a club. Bet they do fuck all about its persistent gropiness as well.

Sounds like the conditions could have been worst.

God Lord that room one lineup. DJ Rolando in 99 (ie height of Jaguar-mania) would have been incredible.

― Matt DC, Monday, 19 September 2016 21:41 Bookmark

dis fuckin internet... https://soundcloud.com/rolando000/reinforced-records-10th-birthday-19991217-fabric-london

Woah.

:D

i saw mills play jaguar out at the limelight in 2001, about midnight. basically as a warmup!! only reference i can find is this thread:
https://bbs.clubplanet.com/topic/59939-jeff-mills-limelight/

nice to see that "clubplanet nightlife community" is still on and poppin

Okay there's an hour before the football, I've been to the beer shop, let's do this.

If this is real it's mad shameless, Night Drive + Clear + Alleys Of Your Mind + Trans Europe Express in the first 15mins or so.

Could do without the "NEW WAVE RADIO!!!" Decepticon prick over the top though.