From the smallest gestures, grow empires. “It’s easy,” an ex-girlfriend of mine said as she flicked a fader from one CD-R deck to the other, giving me an idiot’s guide to the DJ mixing console during one of her regular sets in a Shoreditch gay bar. It was 2003 and everybody was a DJ. As The Strokes’ alt-rock explosion shook the British guitar music scene awake from its post-Britpop coma, every club, bar and chicken shop guerrilla gig needed someone to play ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ between bands and I was as hooked as anyone on the prospect of £50 for a six-hour set and all the warm Beck’s I could stomach.
My very rudimentary DJ skills – Hot Hot Heat CD in, cue up track four ‘Bandages’, wait until previous song starts fading out, press play, spend next three minutes trying to look busy – were never going to get me a prime spot after indie-mix maestro Erol Alkan at Trash. But they were sufficient to bag me a few warm-up slots for legendary dance-on-the-decks indie DJ duo Queens Of Noize. Word swiftly got around of my ability to successfully play Hot Hot Heat’s ‘Bandages’ through a simplistic PA system and an email dropped in from a friend of mine called Adrian who ran a club called Kill All Hippies at the ramshackle club-cum-studio complex Fortress Studio, curated by Zane Lowe and Eddy Temple Morris. Would NME like to host the second room?
And so, shouting around the office for any other writers with even a vague idea of how a headphone jack works, myself and my colleagues Julian Marshall and Malik Meer played the first ever Club NME in February 2004. I can only remember the heart-stopping silences when ‘Bandages’ inexplicably failed us due to technical faults/being phenomenally pissed and clueless, but somehow we were a hit.
When Kill All Hippies moved to Bagley’s warehouse in King’s Cross, my revolving crew of NME office deck destroyers (often literally) went with it. The NME floor at Bagley’s became a regular monthly staff haunt, until one night editor Conor McNicholas came down, witnessed the rammed room of indie sleaze miscreants lost in wild frenzies to The Libertines, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Bloc Party’s ‘Banquet’ (the bar staff of most London clubs by now were threatening violent repercussions on anyone playing ‘Bandages’) and thought big.
Passed into more capable hands, Club NME officially launched at Camden’s 1,400 capacity Koko venue in 2005, drawing guest DJs from bands such as The Libertines, hit London indie club Frog and NME, who took up occupancy in the “riot room” on the second floor. Jeff Automatic – indie club legend and now resident DJ at Reading Festival and Alexandra Palace – headed up a revolving cast of the capital’s best alternative DJs, and recalls the club as the crucible of the ‘00s indie rock explosion.
As Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons and a hundred more chart-destined bands rocketed out of all corners of the country – and The Killers, Kings Of Leon, The Rapture and The White Stripes were discovering the potential of launching your career from the UK first – Club NME was where this dizzying barrage of a scene gelled into the sweat-drenched 4am party to end them all.
“It was a really exciting time for music,” Jeff recalls, “Rather than it being each DJ for themselves, we took guidance from what was being published in NME. We wanted to always play the newest things that we thought we could get people to dance to. We wanted it to be the newest and the latest and push things forward, make it contemporary and interesting.”
Dovetailing perfectly with the emergent UK scene, Club NME similarly exploded. The weekly Friday nights at Koko became, according to Jeff, “probably the biggest indie, rock and electronic night in London, if not the UK” and the brand expanded across the country, to Newcastle, Brighton, Huddersfield, Leeds, Birmingham and beyond. One-off nights raged at The Great Escape and In The City festivals and in 2010 Babyshambles headlined a sold-out Club NME Weekender at Camber Sands. With virtually every rising band of the age turning up to play, Club NME was soon the biggest indie club promoter in the UK.
Next stop, the world. Clubs opened in LA, New York, Amsterdam, Rome, Berlin, Milan, Sydney, Dublin, Toronto and Ibiza. “It was a very anglophile time and it all came together in a beautiful moment,” says Jeff. “People looked to the NME and London for what was happening and Club NME was a tastemaker.”
While such subsidiary nights came and went, Koko remained the club’s true home, nailed to the cutting edge of music and nurturing alternative culture’s next gen DJ gods. Harry Harrison, an international DJ who plays under the name Amazonica, was spotted prompting crowd surfing in the upstairs bar to The Prodigy (“it was bedlam”) and became one of the club’s key resident DJs as the scene turned more electronic in the 2010s.
“It was so special because it was the only place in London where you could play to a big audience and play rock and a lot of crazy fucking remixes of stuff that was hitting at the time,” she says. “I also mixed it in with a lot of really cool hip hop and MIA. It really made me as a DJ. It was mad that everyone was off their fucking faces and going ham till 4am. I don’t know where else I could have ended with Jimi Hendrix and there were a lot of really good, like, Lana Del Rey remixes that went down fucking fire. Just playing those songs to a big crowd was sick. No one told you what to play, you just did your own thing. You’re not confined to one genre. You can go anywhere else and hear house music in every single club in the country. I liked to play all the stuff that you don’t hear when you go out because that’s really what people want to hear. it’s nice to hear good music that you fucking love that’s got heart and soul.”
Harry remembers the legions of French students who’d Eurostar from Paris for the club, then catch the first train back in the morning. And the night Club NME hosted one of Lizzo’s first ever London shows. “It was just her and a microphone, a DJ and two dancers. It was in the beginning where it was very Beastie Boys and she was so punk rock and just absolutely on fire. Other nights there’d be a rumour, like, ‘Sam Smith is here really drunk in the bar’. It was cool as fuck.”
The Club NME New Years Eve parties I DJed in the latter years at Koko were some of the wildest dancefloors I’ve seen, yet Club NME’s tenure wound up shortly before the venue closed for its major refurbishment. But the club resurfaced in 2019 for an equally memorable night. As myself (DJ Wineman to you) and ex-NME cohort Lisa Wright (DJ Cheeky Legend) span the hits from the Moth Club’s caged booth, Dave Grohl snuck from the wings unannounced and played a feverish solo set, invaded midway through by Rick Astley. Peak Club NME? You aint seen nothing yet.
It’s back! Club NME returns together with Ladbrokes Live with gigs across the UK. Sign up and play for free at Ladbrokeslive.co.uk for your chance to win tickets.