Popscene (club)
Popscene was the pioneering UK "indie dance" club of the 1990 Brit Pop movement, setting a successful template that continues to be copied around the world in many clubs over subsequent years.
The founders were Dave McCarthy and Malcolm Braden, who were both the promoters and DJs of the night.
The pair had previously run a successful pre-britpop night called 'Happy' at The Clapham Grand for the Mean Fiddler organisation, which featured the first major live London appearances by bands such as The Verve and was contained within a club night structure along the lines of the acid house 'PA' appearance model.
In 1995 the duo were asked by the owners of the Astoria venue in London's Charing Cross Road to take over Friday nights at the LA2 club in the venue complex. With a 'free entry' opening night proving a 1000 capacity sell-out and a new strict policy of 'no live bands' the club went on to run for the next five years to weekly capacity crowds.
Taking its name from the single by Blur, and in so doing establishing the trend for most of the indie-dance clubs that followed in its wake around the world, Popscene became synoymous with the Britpop movement, alongside its more Sixties orientated retro-based rival Blow Up. Many of the scene's bands were themselves regular customers at both clubs, with members of Oasis, Blur, Manic Street Preachers and many others often in attendance. Popscene deliberately avoided a separate VIP area and made a selling point of the fact that everyone was equal once inside the doors.
The club attracted more than 300,000 customers over its lifespan, with people queueing in their hundreds for hours to gain admission every week. With a forward-thinking music policy which 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".
The night was also notable for the DJs taking centre stage in the venue, leading to riotous scenes with hundreds of people dancing onstage alongside the DJ decks and the development of a special "flying decks" set-up suspended from the in-house lighting rig. The Evening Standard magazine wrote "man, the crowd is fun. Deep into the night I watch the tasty-looking throng go mental" [1] and 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". [2]
London's nightlife bible Time Out called Popscene "the indie superclub with an altogether hipper vibe"[3] and the contemporaneous clubbers reference guide magazine 'UK Club Guide' described it as "a thriving, begging for it happy crowd. It's the busiest indie club in the country" [4].
As Popscene developed over it's five year lifespan it went on to be cited by many 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, indeed the Guardian Weekend Magazine declared it was "now deemed cooler than the heavenly jukebox" [5].
Ultimately Popscene came to be as important to a generation of UK clubbers in the 1990s as The Haçienda, Blitz and Wigan Casino were to previous waves of older clubbers. In 2004 BBC Radio London's mid-morning DJ Robert Elms asked his audience which clubs had been the culturally most important to his listeners each and every caller cited Popscene as the defining London club of the era [6]
Amongst many other notable achievements, the DJ duo of McCarthy and Braden were the first successful UK club DJs to move from vinyl to CD, gave Erol Alkan his first opportunity to play to large crowds 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.
After Popscene finished in 2000, McCarthy went on to continue to create mash-ups for MTV and then forge a successful international DJ and recording artist career in the latter half of the new decade as IDC, whilst Braden continued to run a string of indie club nights in London, including a short-lived revival of Popscene as a retro-Britpop night.
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