It’s enough to give you vertigo. We’ve just passed the 25th birthday of the London club Fabric, and the mind reels at the fact that millions of dancers have passed through the doors since it opened. And that’s one club: if that was a lot to squeeze into a single narrative, how do we even begin to think about the evolution of British clubbing more broadly in the first quarter of the 21st century? Can we even talk about a “clubbing scene” as 2025 approaches and dance music seems to exist on TikTok and at mega-festivals more than sweaty high street dives? Is there a common thread through an era that’s given us grime, dubstep, EDM, amapiano, deconstructed club, hyperpop and a hundred other flavours besides? Perhaps first we need to look at where all that came from.
The millennium certainly started with a bang for clubbers – but in the UK, it was more the bang of a cultural balloon bursting. Through the 90s the – literally – wide-eyed optimism and sense of unity of acid house had turned into a decade of constant growth, subgenre diversification and commercialisation peaking in the “superclub era” of the end of the decade. But it couldn’t last.
“Millennium eve was quite disappointing, really,” says Johnno Burgess, co-founder of dance promoters Bugged Out, which has just celebrated its 30th birthday. “Loads of people tasted losing shitloads of money for the first time that night. The year 1999 had been a boom year – all Ibiza and Fatboy Slim and Mitsubishis [a notoriously strong brand of ecstasy pills], so there was no end of hype for New Year. But then Fabric went a bit mad and paid way too much for Basement Jaxx, had to overcharge on the door and didn’t do great. Cream went a bit off-piste and booked the Stereophonics for this huge thing on Liverpool Docks which we were part of and I think lost a load [of money] – it all felt a bit end of an era.”
“The UK scene, post millennium, just died on its feet,” says DJ Sasha, who epitomised the superstar DJ culture of that over-revved late-90s era, playing both the Cream event and Gatecrasher’s bash at Sheffield Don Valley stadium on millennium eve. “In the late 90s I’d gone from driving up and down motorways to these little provincial nights in the rave era to huge clubs and getting booked in America, Asia, Australia … and it was lucky I had those international bookings because within the first couple of years of the 2000s, almost everything had dried up at home.” After going from the 800-capacity Sankey’s Soap in Manchester to getting “4,500 people from all over the north into Cream every month”, the more techno-oriented Bugged Out also took a dive in the early years of the new millennium. “There was a real sense of the death of the superclub by 2002,” Burgess recalls.
A huge fragmentation in nightlife took place at this exact point. UK garage clung on in the mainstream, and drum’n’bass kept on rolling along in its own lane. Dubstep was just bubbling up as a micro-scene in Croydon as boys with hoods up and spliffs glued to their lips bathed in sub-bass in dark rooms. But electroclash and what we now apparently call “indie sleaze” pushed the spotlight away from DJs and on to performers, as did the nascent grime scene. “We thought we were raving,” says Scratcha DVA, the acclaimed bass music DJ, who cut his teeth as a producer in the early grime days. “It felt like clubbing, but looking back, crowds might have been going mad, but were we actually dancing? It was more like going to a show.” Whichever way you sliced it, dance music, the ascendant genre of the late 90s, was very suddenly no longer the only game in town.
Of course, dance music didn’t die altogether in the 00s. Existing genres from deep house to happy hardcore kept their nights going across the country, albeit on a less grand scale. There was also the phenomenon of small but energetic parties that made a virtue of old school club-culture values while remaining musically exploratory. Spaces such as Plastic People in London and nights such as Electric Chair in Manchester and Optimo in Glasgow wore their passion for the subcultural roots on their sleeves, while attracting diverse and intergenerational crowds. Arriving in London from NYC in 2003, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy started a series of members-only dances with her friend and colleague David Mancuso – who had been throwing NYC’s legendary Loft parties on and off since 1969 – with an emphasis strongly on community and continuity with disco and house music history. “When the focus isn’t on something trending in the moment only,” she says, “and stays true to more egalitarian principles, it will attract a far more diverse audience looking for a place to party and let loose.”
As the 2000s became the 2010s, younger-generation scenes and styles started to make their presence felt – notably dubstep, which exploded exponentially across the world. In the left field, 00s sounds were melting into vague categories such as “post-dubstep” and “bass music”, with collectives such as Hyperdub, Hessle Audio and Night Slugs building solid infrastructure and sense of scene, albeit leaning towards a more middle-class crowd. “Let’s face it,” says Scratcha, who remains a big part of this as part of the Hyperdub crew, “we were playing to white people. And again, were we really dancing in 2014? We were vibing, it was a good time – but I dunno you can call it raving.” He’s partly tongue in cheek here: there was plenty of all-night raving going on, in particular the Scottish contingent of this scene around the LuckyMe and Numbers labels – and this scene made international stars of the likes of Ben UFO, Four Tet and co.
Meanwhile 90s sounds reasserted their presence in the mainstream, in particular drum’n’bass and house music. The rise of “Joey Essex house” – promoted on Ministry of Sound mix CDs by the reality star turned DJ – plus the irresistible rise of Disclosure, Rudimental, Chase & Status and co created a new UK dance mainstream establishment that remains a dominant force to this day, and made stars of the likes of Becky Hill and Sam Smith. Globally even this was eclipsed by the instant-gratification spectacle of EDM wherein dubstep, Daft Punk and trap beats were distilled to their purest form with laser and pyrotechnic shows for US Spring Break crowds. “We thought we were doing well in the late 90s,” says Sasha “but that’s nothing compared to Calvin Harris with 10 No 1 singles!” Meanwhile the rise of the Boiler Room and Instagram video made short, viral moments into currency – something turbocharged by the arrival of TikTok.
All the way through this a huge structural shift was happening: slickly run festivals were appearing like mushrooms, while fiscal shifts made running smaller urban spaces harder and left punters with less disposable income. Even at the start of the century, “mainstream festivals booking dance acts was part of what put pressure on clubs”, says Sasha. And that’s only grown as not only domestic festivals but those in Croatia, the Alps and further abroad suck up audiences and attention. “Now it means people want events rather than to go to a 500-capacity club every week,” says Burgess. These pressures have been brutal for old-fashioned “going out”. Even looking back just a decade, club and radio DJ Jamz Supernova remembers how “you could just go to [east London clubbing mecca] Dalston any night and know you’d find something to go to, whereas now people plan where they’re going, and probably only go out at the weekend. It’s very different.”
Covid, and then the cost of living crisis, rolled into this precarious situation like a bulldozer. Into a fragile clubbing environment came – or rather, didn’t – an entire generation who missed out on a year or more of pubs, clubs and other experiences, and whose relationship with music is fundamentally more online. It’s no wonder that, just as in the live music industry, you’ll often hear narratives of grassroots collapse, with some predicting no clubbing at all in the next 10 years. Some of the more alarmist claims are over-egged – although small clubs are indeed closing fast, the rise of late licences for bars and pubs has in many cases filled the vacuum – but the fact remains that the pressure on property prices means that while big promoters such as Manchester’s Warehouse Project and London’s Drumsheds prosper, it’s rarely been more precarious to put on a sustainable small club night, let alone build a scene.
Global bass music DJ and producer Mina cites issues including “cost for grassroots promoters of putting on events, restrictive licensing restrictions, the fact DJs can make thousands but the producers that make the music they play don’t get paid … and smartphones taking away some of the freedom of the dancefloor and replacing it with a constant feeling of surveillance.”
But there are positive trends. Mina points out that the flipside of social media is how it has “empowered artists from the global south to build successful careers” – and that’s fed into a vast musical diversification with UK clubs. Scratcha notes a thriving British scene of “proper raving” to South African amapiano hybrids, and Jamz says “it feels like there’s new sounds every month”. And all acknowledge a major and accelerating trend of diversification of lineups, with women and LGBTQ+ people taking significant places at the table.
A huge amount of this is down to hard and intentional work by creative collectives, such as the Reprezent radio station where Jamz learned her craft alongside the likes of her 6 Music colleague Sherelle; the Saffron mentoring programme for women and non-binary artists and DJs; and small venues that are run as community spaces – complete with daytime cafes, studios and more. Many of these programmes and spaces are founded with a conscious focus on what Murphy calls “creating a safe space where dancers can celebrate life together”; that is, taking the emphasis off branding, alcohol sales, performance for social media, or anything else other than the dancing people themselves.
Mina recounts recently doing a fact-finding tour of the UK with the founder of Nairobi club MIST, and finding a constellation of “hard-working, passionate and inspiring people” running grassroots venues such as the Jam Jar in Bristol, Peckham Audio and Sister Midnight in London, Cosmic Slop in Leeds and Cobalt Studios in Newcastle upon Tyne. Through small and alternative nights, such as Mina’s Club Soft alcohol-free day parties or Jamz’s No Edits midweek Peckham dances, high-end sound systems, skilled DJs and music that’s not beholden to creating TikTok moments are thriving. And it’s notable that many of the same people who back in the 00s were deliberately preserving even older old-school clubbing values are still celebrated not as throwbacks but as vital current parts of the scene. Fabric’s survival to 25 and Bugged Out’s to 30 are impressive, but do show that audiences serious about music and dancing are still there.
Times may be tough, the competition from festivals and mega-venues fierce, but as Jamz supernova says: “we’ve got to have optimism because that’s what we go on to the dancefloor for. We’ve been through tough times before, so we reset, rebuild and go again.”
Fabric, Joe Muggs’s 25th anniversary illustrated history of the nightclub, is out now via White Rabbit Books. Sasha’s Da Vinci Genius installation soundtrack album is out now via LateNightTales.