Subject / SWIRL Access All Areas
Bank Holiday Sunday 26th October 2008 - 4 Dame Lane, Dublin 2
Room 1 - Desert Island Disco [Disco. Classic House. Balearic]
NICKY HOLLOWAY
[Desert Island Disco, Special Branch, London]
Stephen Manning
[Space Camp / Night Flight]
Room 2 - SWIRL [DeepFunkinBumpinHOUSEMusic]
Joe Morrissey
Mr Rossworth
Ro Flynn
Austin Molloy
Doors 9pm - 2:30am | Adm: e10 / e5 | http://www.myspace.com/subjectevents
NICKY HOLLOWAY [Desert Island Disco] a [self-penned] introduction...
Trying to write your own biography is incredibly hard and I have been
putting it off for years. Lots has been written about me in the music
press over the years, but it's pretty fragmented and usually only covered
a brief snapshot of my career or the antics at the time, so, with the
publication of my new website [www.desertislanddiscos.com] I thought it
was the ideal opportunity to pull them all together and commit my personal
story for the record. Anyway here goes...
I was born in London in...let's just say the Swinging Sixties, and spent
most of my school years playing truant and getting into trouble. I left
school at fifteen without any qualifications, and started working in a
menswear shop in North London. This would not last long and I soon got the
sack for spending too much time in the record shop two doors away, but the
seeds were sown for a career in music. Fast forward to 1979 and a
sixteen-year old Nicky Holloway had just discovered clubs, lager and of
course girls, and I found myself standing on the balcony at the Royalty
Club in Southgate watching Froggy mixing two copies of Instant Funk's "I
Got My Mind Made Up" and thinking, "I wanna to be a DJ" - which back in
those days was hardly considered a good career move. I never had enough
money to buy a set of decks (Technics 1200 had just come out) but I do
remember waiting for Mum to go to work, so I could borrow her hi-fi and
install it in my bedroom next to mine where I would practice for hours on
end dreaming of the day when I actually played to a crowd, in fact come to
think of it I was the original bedroom DJ.
After numerous unsuccessful auditions, I finally found an agency that
booked DJ's for the thriving Disco Pub scene that had sprung up around the
Old Kent Road and in 1980 got my first ever paid gig. I started to work
4-5 nights a week at various South London dives longing for the day when I
would play in stylish venues and to bigger and better crowds. I finally
realised that one way I could make this happen quicker was to put on my
own parties. When I first started to organize nights out back in 1984 the
whole club thing was very different from what we have come to expect in
this day and age. Even if you were clued up, back in London in 1984 you
had a very limited choice as to where you could spend your Saturday night.
If you knew the score you managed to get hold of a ticket for one of my
Special Branch parties or "Doo's", where, along with a relatively unknown
at the time Pete Tong, we combined Hip Hop, Rare Groove, R&B and early
House in one room while Gilles Peterson spun a more Jazzy eclectic mix in
the other room. You could find me playing a similar selection on Friday
nights at the legendary Royal Oak in Tooley Street but this was just a
taster of things to come.
By now I had really got the promotion bit between my teeth and between
1984 and 1988 I put together sixteen "Doo at the Zoo's" at London Zoo,
four Weekenders at Rockley Sands, and many other assorted one-offs at
unique venues such as the Natural History Museum , Chislehurst Caves,
Thorpe Park and even took three hundred people for their first taste of
Ibiza – The Special Branch's reputation grew and grew until the end of 1987
when the whole of the club scene was about to be turned upside down, enter
stage left, House music.
1988 turned out to be one of those landmark years that will be embedded on
peoples' brains for the rest of their lives, you only have to read one of
the many books published that cover the period such as Adventures in
Clubland, Once in a Lifetime, Class of '88 or Altered States to realize
something happened that year that completely changed the face of clubbing.
When I opened Trip at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road at the end of May
1988, I was expecting to get somewhere between six and eight hundred
people. Much to my delight and amazement two thousand clubbers turned up
every Saturday for the next two years at what was probably the first big
legal (for want of a better word) Acid House club with me and, for a year
or so, Pete Tong as residents. The likes of Dave Morales, Todd Terry,
Kevin Saunderson, Derek May and West Bam weren't anything like the
legendary names they are now however, always the pioneering sort, I stuck
my neck out a bit and gave them some of their first ever gigs in the UK
during this period. Of course the exploding Acid House phenomenon couldn't
stay out of the spotlight for long and I decided to change the name of
Trip to Sin, because of the misinformed media exposure and panic tabloid
journalism that Acid House was attracting at the time. It had also become
a regular experience for the Charing Cross Road to be blocked with
dancing, smiling faces when the club ended, the police at the time had
absolutely no idea as to what was going on, and just stood back in
amazement.
During this period, with a concept loosely based upon the Caister Soul
Weekenders that I grew up going to in the late Seventies and early
Eighties, the Incredible Organization as my promotions company was then
known, successfully managed to spirit away three thousand people for the
whole weekend twice a year to the aptly named "KAOS Weekenders" at places
such as Pontin's Holiday Camps at Camber Sands in Sussex and Hemsby in
Norfolk. A monster had been created and like all good things there comes a
time when it stops being fun and its time to move on. So that's what I
did. In April 1990 I finally got my first club and wanted to put a bit of
style back into clubbing, a baggy jumper, strobe and smoke machine were no
longer good enough, enter the Milk Bar - with it's whiter than white image
and strict door policy it stood out alone in clubland.
During the summer of '92 we also opened up a couple of bars in Ibiza under
the Milk Bar banner which ran successfully for a couple of seasons while I
managed to get Ibiza out of my system. I wanted to stay on the Island for
the whole summer, so I had to get my own bars going – didn't want to have
to buy any drinks now, did I! Journalists often ask me what's the best
night I've ever put on, which is a tough one to answer. There have been so
many good nights over my twenty six years of DJ'ing that to pick one is
hard work, however one event that I'm really proud of and which was a
spectacular achievement by anyone's standards was back in 1993 when we
took three thousand clubbers to Euro Disney in Paris for a one-off event
named Dance Europe .This was originally supposed to be on site at Disney
until three weeks before, when Disney Corp got cold feet and cancelled the
event, worried about their family image and anticipating the potential for
"Mickey Mouse on Acid" stories in the press. Determined not to be beaten I
jumped on the train went over to Paris, secured 13 hotels nearest to
Disney for the accommodation and bought three thousand passes for Disney
which are valid for any day so they could not stop us using them. The
event went off despite all odds and non-stop rain, and was very memorable.
After the lease on the Milk Bar ran out in 1994 it was time to find a new
home for my nocturnal activities. As with several things in my life,
purely by accident I managed to find a site just around the corner from
the Milk Bar in an old Salsa Restaurant and the Velvet Underground was
born. In the three years that I was at the helm of the club it fair to say
that everyone who was anyone in dance music graced the decks there. During
this period We also opened MARS back on the old Milk Bar site (on a short
lease) which while only ran for a couple of years was still successful and
organized dozens of other one -offs. But life doesn't always go the way
you want it. To finance a new club project I sold my stake in the clubs to
my former partner Leon and proceeded to waste a year and a half of my life
and all the money I had on getting a big new club in Soho off the ground,
which sadly due to planning permission never happened...
These days, as well as production for many music clients, and myself, I
still find time for three or four DJ gigs a month, a fair number of which
are abroad - which I enjoy the most. I'm lucky enough to have travelled
the world with a set of headphones and have made some great friends in
many countries.
More at:
http://www.myspace.com/subjectevents
http://www.desertislanddiscos.com
http://www.subjectevents.bebo.com
http://www.nickyholloway.com
http://www.subjectevents.com
http://www.spacecamp.ie
Subject / SWIRL Access All Areas
Bank Holiday Sun 26th October 2008 - 4 Dame Lane, Dublin 2 w/
NICKY HOLLOWAY, Stephen Manning & SWIRL Residents...
Adm: e10 [e5 b4 11pm] | Doors 9pm - 2:30am | More info:
http://www.myspace.com/subjectevents /// http://www.subjectevents.bebo.com
Facebook: 'Subject Dublin' /// Mailing List: info[at]subjectevents[dot]com
