 | This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information.(October 2019) |
Popscene was a UK "indie dance" club of the 1990 Brit Pop movement. [ citation needed ].
| This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information.(October 2019) |
Popscene was a UK "indie dance" club of the 1990 Brit Pop movement. [ citation needed ].
The founders of Popscene were Dave McCarthy and Mac Be, who were the promoters and DJs for its entire run. "It was myself and Dave at first, then Dave's girlfriend Jenny started doing a bit in the later years before we parted company in May 2000," Be explained on a dedicated fan forum. [1]
Prior to Popscene, McCarthy and Be had organised "Happy," a successful, pre-Britpop night at The Clapham Grand for the Mean Fiddler organisation. "Happy" featured early live London appearances by bands such as The Verve, and was contained within a club night structure akin to the acid house 'PA' appearance model.
In 1994 the owners of the Astoria in London's Charing Cross Road asked the duo to produce Friday nights at the LA2 club within the Astoria complex. The club's opening night featured free entry, leading to a capacity crowd. Under a strict policy of "no live bands," the club went on to run with weekly capacity crowds for the next five years. The club attracted more than 300,000 customers over its lifespan; hours-long entry queues of hundreds of people were common. [2] Popscene's DJ sets laid the foundations for the rock/dance crossover of the next decade; the tagline on many of the distinctive (and now highly collectable) flyers was "the dance club for people who like bands". [3]
Popscene's name originates from the single by Blur. It became synonymous with the Britpop movement along with retro-themed rival Blow Up. Members of bands popular within the scene, such as Oasis, Blur, and Manic Street Preachers, were regular customers at both clubs. Popscene deliberately avoided a separate VIP area and made a selling point of the fact that everyone was equal once inside the doors. “Sophie Ellis-Bextor came up to me and went, ‘I’m going to be a singer, I just sung Noel Gallagher ‘Wonderwall’ and he thought it was fantastic' McCarthy recalled in an interview with DJ Mag. [2]
The night was also notable for the DJs taking centre stage in the venue. The DJ's accessibility led to patrons taking to the stage and dancing onstage alongside the DJ decks. In response, the club developed a special "flying decks" set-up suspended from the in-house lighting rig.
The Evening Standard magazine described the crowd as 'fun' noting their enthusiastic energy. [4] The mid-Nineties UK MTV Magazine summed up the atmosphere when they wrote "cigarettes, alcohol and lots of snogging are the order of the night". [5] Time Out called Popscene "the indie superclub with an altogether hipper vibe" [6] and "UK Club Guide" described it as "a thriving, begging for it happy crowd." They continued, stating: "It's the busiest indie club in the country." [7] As Popscene developed over its five-year lifespan, it was cited as one of the major breakthrough clubs in London (together with the Heavenly Social) for the Big beat music genre in the latter part of the decade. The Guardian Weekend Magazine hailed it as "now deemed cooler than the heavenly jukebox." [8]
Amongst many other notable achievements, the DJ duo of McCarthy and Be were the first successful UK club DJs to move from vinyl to CD, gave Erol Alkan his first opportunity to play to large crowds, [2] and McCarthy was the first London club DJ to play what became known as bootleg/mash-up tracks with cut-ups he made using the first available editions of Acid sound production software in 1999. The club was also host to the first ever public playback of the third Oasis album Be Here Now in the world.
In 2004, BBC Radio London's mid-morning DJ Robert Elms asked his audience which clubs had been culturally most important to his listeners. All cited Popscene as the defining London club of the era. [9]
In the Summer of 2007, a sold out revival of Popscene was held in the original venue without the involvement of founder McCarthy, who had gone on to forge a subsequent career as acclaimed DJ producer IDC.
Britpop was a mid-1990s British-based music culture movement that emphasised Britishness. Musically, Britpop produced bright, catchy alternative rock, in reaction to the the darker lyrical themes and soundscapes of the US-led grunge music and the UK's own shoegaze music scene. The movement brought British alternative rock into the mainstream and formed the larger British popular cultural movement, Cool Britannia, which evoked the Swinging Sixties and the British guitar pop of that decade.
Blur are an English rock band formed in London in 1988. The band consists of singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bass guitarist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree. Their debut album, Leisure (1991), incorporated the sounds of Madchester and shoegaze. Following a stylistic change influenced by English guitar pop groups such as the Kinks, the Beatles and XTC, Blur released the albums Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995). As a result, the band helped to popularise the Britpop genre and achieved mass popularity in the UK, aided by a widely publicised chart battle with rival band Oasis in 1995 dubbed "The Battle of Britpop".
Oasis were an English rock band formed in Manchester in 1991. Originally known as the Rain, the group initially consisted of Liam Gallagher, Paul Arthurs (guitar), Paul McGuigan and Tony McCarroll (drums), with Liam's older brother Noel Gallagher joining as a fifth member a few months after their formation. Noel became the de facto leader of the group and took over the songwriting duties for the band's first four albums. They are characterised as one of the defining groups of the Britpop genre.
Madchester was a musical and cultural scene that developed in the English city of Manchester in the late 1980s, closely associated with the indie dance scene. Indie-dance saw artists merging indie music with elements of acid house, psychedelia and 1960s pop. The term Madchester was coined by Factory Records' Tony Wilson, with the label popularised by the British music press in the early 1990s, and its most famous groups include the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, the Charlatans, James and 808 State. It is widely seen as being heavily influenced by drugs, especially MDMA. At that time, the Haçienda nightclub, co-owned by members of New Order, was a major catalyst for the distinctive musical ethos in the city that was called the Second Summer of Love.
The Haçienda was a nightclub and music venue in Manchester, England, which became famous during the Madchester years of the 1980s and early 1990s. It was run by the record label Factory Records.
Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged in Northern England and the Midlands in the early 1970s. It developed from the British mod scene, based on a particular style of Black American soul music with a heavy beat and fast tempo.
"Popscene" is a song by English alternative rock band Blur, released as a non-album single on 30 March 1992. Despite its relatively low chart placing, it has since become critically praised and regarded as one of the pioneering songs of the Britpop genre.
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IDC is David McCarthy, an English recording artist and DJ from London, England.
DJ Magazine is a British monthly magazine dedicated to electronic dance music and DJs. Founded in 1991, the magazine is adapted for distribution in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Latin America, China, South Korea, Brunei, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Oman, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Canada, Russia, Belarus, and the Netherlands.
Popular music of the United Kingdom in the 1990s continued to develop and diversify. While the singles charts were dominated by boy bands and girl groups, British soul and Indian-based music also enjoyed their greatest level of mainstream success to date, and the rise of World music helped revitalise the popularity of folk music. Electronic rock bands like The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers began to achieve a high profile. Alternative rock reached the mainstream, emerging from the Madchester scene to produce dream pop, shoegazing, post rock and indie pop, which led to the commercial success of Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis; followed by a stream of post-Britpop bands like Radiohead and The Verve.
Plump DJs are an English dance music duo consisting of Lee Rous and Andy Gardner, considered to be early pioneers of the breakbeat genre in the late 1990s. Throughout the 2000s, they have been very prolific creatively, releasing many celebrated underground singles, albums compilations. Also remixing the records of well-known dance music mega stars such as deadmau5, Mark Ronson, Fatboy Slim, Orbital and the Stanton Warriors. They cemented their international status through their 10-year residency at London's famous superclub Fabric, in a career that has taken the duo to the largest stages on all four corners of this earth to perform.
The Zap was a beach-front nightclub and performance arts venue, in Brighton, England that became known in the late 1980s and early 1990s particularly for its acid house nights. It has been described as an "influential ... club which pulled together many of the underground strands of visual art, fashion, music, design, comedy, cabaret and theatre which were circling at the time".
Change Giver is the debut album by British rock band Shed Seven, released via Polydor Records on 5 September 1994. It was produced by Jessica Corcoran and was issued during the formative year of the Britpop movement—a scene that dominated British alternative music in the mid-1990s.
Heaven is a gay superclub in Charing Cross, London, England. It has played a central role and had a major influence in the development of London's LGBT scene for over 40 years and is home to long-running gay night G-A-Y. The club is known for Paul Oakenfold's acid house events in the 1980s, the underground nightclub festival Megatripolis, and for being the birthplace of ambient house.
Shelley's Laserdome was a night club in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. It was at the heart of the house and rave scene in the early 1990s, helping to launch the career of DJ Sasha and featuring regular appearances from Carl Cox. It was eventually shut down by Staffordshire Police.
Blow Up is a club night that was founded in the early 1990s by promoter and DJ Paul Tunkin at a North London pub called "The Laurel Tree". The night quickly became the centre of the emerging Britpop scene in Camden attracting long queues of people eager to gain entry to the tiny venue. Early regulars included members of Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Suede, The Buzzcocks, Huggy Bear and The Jesus and Mary Chain, leading to the club being referred to as the place where "Britpop was born".
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