For DJs, timing is everything. Their craft involves lining up beats with mechanical precision. Their careers depend upon tracking the shifting winds of dance music’s fickle tastes.
For Scuba—aka Paul Rose, the Hotflush Recordings label head and a veteran of Europe’s bass and techno scenes—the timing of his upcoming mix for fabric looked, until recently, particularly auspicious. A few months ago, he returned to London after nearly a decade spent living in Berlin. A set for the club’s esteemed mix series seemed overdue, and not just because he hasn’t recorded a commercial mix CD since 2011’s DJ-Kicks. Rose has been playing at fabric since 2007—first on Friday nights, where dubstep and drum ‘n’ bass were the order of the day, and then, as his style shifted, as part of the Saturday-night techno lineups. And the new album would allow him to showcase a slew of upcoming Hotflush material—including several “completely unknown” artists who’ve never before released anything (Isaac Reuben, Blusome)—while tackling a mixing technique he’d never tried in any of his previous sets.
In any case, Rose “wanted to come back and play at the club more. I’d only been playing about once a year since 2012, and this made sense as a good way to frame it. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite worked out like that.” He trails off into rueful laughter.
Indeed: On September 7, after hearings dragged well past midnight, the Islington borough council permanently revoked the iconic London venue’s license, putting an abrupt end to what had long been one of the world’s most celebrated nightclubs, and the crown jewel of London dance music culture.
Fabric had clashed with the borough council before. In late 2014, following a series of drug-related deaths tied to the venue, the council and the Metropolitan Police imposed stringent security measures, including the use of drug-sniffing dogs, as a requirement for the club to keep its license. Some of those measures were later overturned on appeal.
The beginning of the end arrived this past August, when the drug-related deaths of two 18-year-old men, in two separate instances over the summer, triggered a temporary closure of the club. After a month-long investigation, the Islington Council Licensing Sub-Committee delivered its final verdict: immediate and permanent revocation of the club’s license, owing to “grossly inadequate” security and a “culture of drug use… which the existing management and Security appears incapable of controlling” (sic).
It’s hard to know whether the authorities are obtuse or simply hell-bent on putting the club out of business. Prior to the decision, one council member had ventured lowering the music’s tempo as a disincentive to drug-taking, and portions of the verdict read like script treatments for a Reefer Madness reboot. (“[I]t was abundantly obvious that patrons in the club were on drugs and manifesting symptoms showing that they were. This included sweating, glazed red eyes and staring into space and people asking for help.”) Yet even London Mayor Sadiq Khan supported fabric's bid to remain open, as part of his ongoing pledge to keep London’s nightlife economy intact. Previously, District Judge Allison had commended fabric for its search-and-seizure policies—all drugs confiscated on the premises were logged and turned over to the police—as a “beacon of best practice.”
As Resident Advisor’s Joe Muggs has noted, if even prisons can’t stanch the flow of drugs, it seems unfair to expect nightclubs to do the same, given the tens of thousands of pockets—and nearly as many orifices, to put it bluntly—that enter the club every night, each one a potential hiding place for a pill. In its 17-year-run, fabric had more than six million people come through its doors. The six deaths are tragic—but six out of six million hardly seems like evidence of gross negligence.
Fabric isn’t going down without a fight. To help fund their appeal, the club has announced a crowdfunding campaign, #saveourculture. As part of the effort to cover the club’s mounting legal fees, Scuba will donate all proceeds from his just-announced fabric 90 mix to the fundraising campaign.
If the appeal fails, and fabric remains closed for good, does that mean that Scuba’s will be the final fabric mix? Not according to Rob Butterworth, head of fabric’s in-house imprints, who stresses, “It’s business as usual for the label.” Following Scuba’s fabric 90, mixes from Kahn & Neek and Nina Kraviz will close out the year, and the label is deep in talks for 2017 releases. (Houndstooth, fabric’s sub-label devoted to original productions, also has a full slate for 2016 and early 2017.) “One of the purposes of the fabric series is that it allows those that can’t physically get to the club to enjoy a taste of what we do,” Butterworth says. With any luck, that spirit will be enough to carry the label until fabric’s management can figure out a second act.
Back to that question of timing. In a twist of fate, Scuba also happened to be the very last DJ to play fabric, having closed out the club’s main room on Saturday, August 6, the night before the Metropolitan Police put the kibosh on the operation. Rose hopes to release the set online at some point, but for now, he shares his thoughts on London's clubbing crisis.
Pitchfork: What was the last-ever song played at fabric?
My remix—the SCB remix—of “Hard Boiled.”
When you were playing that night, was there any indication that closure was imminent?
No, not at all. I didn’t even know there had been any problems at the venue. It’s difficult to know how significant the different things that went into this are. The deaths that were cited in the original closure, I’m not sure how much those actually factored into the licensing decision. All of it’s very opaque.
What’s your take on the whole situation? Why do you think the Islington council decided the way they did?
There’s an awful lot of conspiracy theories surrounding this whole thing. From my understanding, there had been problems with the police going back to last year, and further back as well, [despite] having previously had quite a good relationship with them. I’m not sure why that deteriorated. There are various sub-narratives concerning gentrification and the way London has changed because of its property market, but I just don't know. It seems like the police, following previous incidents, made an attempt to get the venue shut down, and I think they were pretty much humiliated in court at that time.
On the face of it, it looks like they’ve pursued a kind of vendetta since then, which is pretty shameful, really. The record of the Metropolitan Police in London over the past 20 years is pretty appalling—from the Stephen Lawrence case, where they were described as being institutionally racist, to various other incidents involving protests where they've been criticized for their tactics. I think this is an institution that has a poor reputation, and they seem to be living up to it in this instance.
Fabric, before the closure
Nightlife in the UK seems threatened right now. What will be the repercussions for London’s dance music culture if fabric closes for good?
I think it’s important to make a distinction between the closure of venues and the persecution of a culture, which I’m less convinced is happening. In fairness, the police and local councils do give out temporary licenses for venues to have proper raves, essentially, ’til 6 in the morning or later, in a way that many other cities don’t. In Osaka, Japan, they pretty much banned dancing. That hasn’t happened [here], and the scene in the UK is healthy. There are as many events going on, probably, as ever.
But fabric is a symbol. And [fabric's closure] is a symbol of gentrification as well. I think that’s why it’s resonated with people who otherwise wouldn’t be too interested in underground dance music. It’s been a key institution in London, and to see it go is pretty distressing.
How has the neighborhood around fabric changed since it opened in 1999?
Farringdon is in the City, in the Square Mile, so not a lot of people live there and not a lot goes on at the weekend. It’s very much offices. So it’s a little bit different to the gentrification in other parts of London, like Hackney, which have been affected by residential developments, with well-off people coming into the area and then complaining that it’s too noisy at nighttime. But that’s not to say that there isn't development happening, and one part of the conspiracy-theory aspect of this is what plans may or may not exist for that area over the coming decade or so.
You lived in Berlin for a long time. Could you imagine something like the fabric closure happening in Berlin?
It’s interesting, this story that came out recently about the redesignation of Berghain's tax status [as a venue for “high culture” and not merely “entertainment”]. It seems unlikely. I think in Berlin there seems to be just a little bit more recognition of the cultural significance of this kind of stuff. I don’t want to overstate that; I think there’s a tendency in the UK to look at Europe and see it as this kind of social utopia, in a way, and Britain is this neoliberal dystopia. I’m not sure that’s quite as accurate as some people make it out to be.
What’s your history with fabric—did you go first as a clubber or a DJ?
I certainly went as a clubber, absolutely. I was a regular there between ’99 and when I left for Berlin around 2007, which is about the same time I started playing there. I went to the drum ‘n’ bass nights more than anything else. As soon as it opened, it was just a key spot, you know?
What was it like to play there?
Friday nights at fabric were always drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep and that kind of stuff, and the Saturday night was always house and techno. So a key moment in my DJ career was moving from playing on the Friday night to playing on the Saturday nights. For the first few years I was playing there, I played on Fridays, mostly in Room 2. It was one of the first big clubs that I played in, certainly one of the first regular slots I ever had at big clubs.
It was just really obviously run in the right way. The focus was always very much on the music. Room 1 was probably the best DJ booth in the world. It has everything that should be there, and laid out as it should be laid out.
What were your ideas for your fabric 90 mix?
I wanted to do it in a completely different way to previous mixes. I’ve done quite a lot of studio mixes over the past three years, despite not having done a commercial CD, and I’ve generally approached them in the same way I would DJ a club, just playing with three decks and a mixer. And this I wanted to do differently. I don’t really want to make a big song-and-dance about exactly how I did it, but it’s not three decks and a mixer. [Laughs]
It’s one deck and a microphone.
It’ll be fairly obvious to anyone listening to it that it’s not something you can do just DJing traditionally. I wanted to challenge myself a little bit and do something in the studio.
Also, the DJ-Kicks mix gradually gets slower and slower, constantly, and it was a complete nightmare to do, because I had to do it manually, moving the pitch faders down every tune. One of the things I wanted to do with this mix was have a constant BPM all the way through but change the mood dramatically, like there’s the illusion of changing BPMs, but actually it doesn’t change at all.
Seeing how everything has gone down with the club, is there anything you wish you had done differently with your mix?
I didn’t really pay much attention to what had gone previously in the series when I was putting this together. If I’d known it was going to be the last one, maybe I would have gone back and thought about the series as a whole. But I think it's a reasonably representative snapshot of my understanding of fabric as a musical institution—certainly Saturday nights, anyway. If it does end up being the last one, I’ll still be happy with it.