Shindig has left the building ..

Craig_M · Mar 29, 2008

Originally posted by TheSpence
The scabs play house music & will be playing it tonight. They are not going to be whacking out scouse house ffs.
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Im fully aware of that

fiddla · Mar 29, 2008

Originally posted by adam.
and what the hells on tonight ?

are they going to move that facemelter thing to digital then ?
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apparantly if the facemelter gets busy enuff they are going to open the upstairs room as well !!

Play · Mar 29, 2008

Re: Happier Times

Originally posted by TheSpence

Later the tables were turned when the promoter, having conquered Newcastle’s dance scene, took up residency at Lazi Leisure’s Annabel’s in Sunderland. Thereafter, the two men had sporadically remained in contact.

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Sunderland premier night spot

MistaK · Mar 29, 2008

Originally posted by Craig_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VWRyGugfFY
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"Dani Fiesta - The Return" Had it on ADM original years ago :spangled:

emoticons cannot truly show my emotion aptly. radgie fucks.

and i hope to god it isnt mega monkey chrissy G, otherwise you'll not be able to move for donks, and this whole mirroring of the nights that were there is what the obvious choice is - but i can imagine it to be the most thrown together, care-lessesly ran night.

i personally love it how digital's going down the pan. someone gan halfs on foundation. please.

TheSpence · Mar 29, 2008

The lads who lost there jobs seem to get into some scrapes, the business venture with Mark Doyle (Tokyo Project) ended up in a legal mess as well.

Þ€tè®* · Mar 29, 2008

wow i didn't see this coming, tbh i've had some good nights at shindig in digital but the ones that stick out are from the times i was in the upstairs room, i personally couldn't get used to the size of the main room, i hope the night find a new home that allows them to book the quality line-ups they have been.

BRID · Mar 29, 2008

Re: Happier Times

Originally posted by TheSpence

A new partnership between niche music innovators Toyko Industries and high street specialists Utopian Leisure heralds an exciting time for the nation’s clubbers. Jerry Gilbert gets the scoop.

You might reasonably expect that any new vehicle badged ‘Utopian 3’ would be the product of NASA rather than Newcastle.

But the merger of the dancebrand-rich Tokyo Industries with the Utopian Group up on the Tyne has generated a niche music-led operation that looks nothing short of inspirational – particularly given the high street fall-out that has followed licensing deregulation.

Aaron Mellor and Rob Cameron, the men behind Toyko Industries, have cleverly blindsided the mainstream over the past ten years, building credible dance brands during their time as promoters before sensing they needed their own real estate in which to propagate them.

And so the tenants became owners, developing an enviable portfolio of premium operations in Oldham, Huddersfield and Newcastle. But when last year they over-extended, relentlessly pursuing two near simultaneous openings 100 miles apart which would triple their turnover, their back-office all but disintegrated.

Segue to Bob Senior. He had furrowed an altogether different path, firstly with Newcastle-based Lazi Leisure and then as head of AIM-listed Ultimate Leisure plc until he fell out of favour after issuing the type of profits warning the city dreads.

He is not the first leisure capo to suffer this fate. When Paul Kinsey had earlier advised First Leisure Corporation that the leisure sector was about ‘to drop a shelf’, he faced the same consequence. But both men remained eminently bankable and after the entire board of Ultimate Leisure had resigned last year, Senior and his property director Tim Wynn set up Utopian Leisure in October 2005 (named partly, one suspects, because Bob wanted to transfer his personalised ULG 2 number plate).

They raised £1 million of their own money before Barclays Bank granted them a £100m facility. So with £100m at their disposal and a couple of high volume businesses - Sam Jacks at the Gate complex and Bar 55 (both acquired from Central Pub Co) - they rolled out a development blueprint to build the Love Shack brand on the new Walkergate site in Durham, with a second to follow in Belfast.

Yet for all their corporate nous, what Senior and Wynn lacked was a strong musical sensibility. They knew that if they were going to compete at a rung above the promiscuous Friday night, heavily-discounted drinking circuit they needed a more sophisticated foil to counterpoint their pre-match Saturday afternoon sports bar fiestas featuring ‘exotic dancers’ (for which Newcastle-upon-Tyne is famed).

And so with a scintilla of inspiration Bob Senior picked up the phone and reacquainted himself with his old associate Aaron Mellor. : “Increasingly the marketplace had fragmented and we needed their specialist knowledge; so I approached Aaron...”

It was a masterpiece of timing that Bob Senior could scarcely have foreseen.

The latter accepted, famously stating, “It gives us great pleasure to be working with Bob Senior again, especially helping spend some of his £100m. I knew a lot about Bob’s background and we honestly couldn’t have done this with anyone else. I had already been very respectful of what he had done in the mass market.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Tokyo Industries Ltd fold an estate of eight bars and clubs, including Tokyo itself, Stereo and Digital, into Utopian 3. But the engine that drives them is Digital’s club nights, the mash-up of long-running underground house night Shindig, Madchester-inspired rock n roll session Stonelove, hip-hop show Lovedough, cutting-edge breaks, electro, house and techno stompathon Wax:On, and Hed Kandi. Which needs no introduction.

Bob Senior is pledging to operate a hands-off approach to Utopian 3. “Aaron and Rob will be allowed to exercise their individuality,” he promises. “I don’t want to involve myself in Utopian 3 - it’s not my discipline. It was always assumed the merger would take a couple of tie-ropes off them where they were dragging the office behind them.”

The career paths of Mellor and Senior can hardly be described as inexorably linked - but they had promoted student nights together, and developed a strong mutual respect since the latter first arrived on Manchester’s Oldham Road in 1991; Mellor - who ironically was about to study for a degree in architecture up in Newcastle - helped him promote his new venue. Later the tables were turned when the promoter, having conquered Newcastle’s dance scene, took up residency at Lazi Leisure’s Annabel’s in Sunderland. Thereafter, the two men had sporadically remained in contact.

While this union of unreconstructed and renaissance values might seem a trifle odd it’s no more radical than Big Chill’s Pete Lawrence and Katrina Larkin merging with Richard Bigg’s Cantaloupe Group four years ago when they arrived at the same brick wall in their development; at that time the cash injection and back room support enabled the eclectic festival promoters to cartouche their entertainment in a series of fixed abodes, based on bricks and mortar rather than canvas.

Aaron Mellor recalled the circumstances leading up to this unlikely merger. “Last year we over-extended. We had the £2m Tokyo project in Huddersfield which suffered a three month listed building delay.

“Then the opportunity for Digital in Newcastle popped up quickly - it just wasn’t on our radar. We had grown organically until then but this was too attractive to turn down.

“The result was we went to a fast-track refurb in Newcastle after an 1820 Grade II listed former courthouse in Huddersfield, and when that happens you forget about all the disciplines and just steamroller through. We had been operating Shindig, Stonelove & Hed Kandi in the Po Na Na-owned Foundation for ten years. We were desperate for them to improve their venue but cash problems prevented them doing so. Digital had to happen to keep our brands in a venue we could fully control.

“Our back office had crumbled because what Rob and I are best at is driving the business forward. I wanted a financial director to control that side of the business and I was dealing with that when Bob Senior asked the question. It was exactly the right time.”

As a teenager, Aaron Mellor had also discovered Manchester club culture at exactly the right time. Probably the most influential indie face to come out of Oldham after the Inspirals, he must have been beguiled by the juxtaposition of First Leisure’s achingly-beautiful local venue Butterflies (his first club experience) and the trip uptown to Ben Kelly’s edgy, industrial landscape at the Hacienda, where he became transfixed by the Factory sounds of New Order and Happy Mondays.

“Butterflies was a very themed experience and at the age of 16 or 17 I was amazed by the whole experience. So I flipped between the cheesy corporate world and the Hacienda.”

Mellor had left Manchester at a time when it was the clubbing and music capital of the world, arriving in Newcastle to find a very stagnant clubland offering. “I started DJing student and indie nights for a local promoters Mick Rayner and Steve Forster (now AMG’s Operations Director) at Rank Leisure’s Studio/Ritzy venue (now Ikon) before establishing my Bulletproof night at Granada Leisure’s Madison venue.” At the same time ex-club manager and building surveyor student Rob Cameron was running Shindig, Newcastle’s big dance night. Together Mellor and Cameron founded Stereo Corporation. Stereo was Newcastle’s first real style bar, following on from venues like Dry bar in Manchester that Aaron had known in the early 90s. It was all about the theatre of bar - a culture they have now extended into the über chic Tokyo.

The two men’s coming of age in Newcastle, however, had been at another venue altogether - the popular Riverside. Taken over by David Phelps and renamed Foundation it soon became part of the Po Na Na Group estate. They enjoyed a close relationship with Christian Arden’s company which became increasingly chequered as the company went into decline (and eventually receivership). Their ten year reign at Foundation was about to come to an end and the search for a permanent venue (which culminated in the Powerhouse purchase from Trafalgar Leisure) was about to begin.

The metamorphosis of Powerhouse into Digital set pulses racing, and extended Tokyo Industries’ reach way beyond the city. Powerhouse had been pure New York warehouse with a DNA straight from the most seminal gay palace of 25 years ago, the Paradise Garage. Matt Rawlinson, who carried out the original design at the club, remembers, “It was all polished granite steel and concrete, with stuctural bar details and a small first floor bar area. There was a quite cool feeder bar we did next door which had some fab orange chairs and mad wallpaper, which linked to the VIP room in the club. It was a bit hardcore, especially the red illuminated cruising corridor, and would probably need softening for today’s market.”

As Aaron opens the door to this monolith it is easy to get swept back to the days of Paradise Garage. Although the new owners have reconfigured the space through trained architect and surveyors eyes, if anything it oozes even more ferrous energy - aided by the installation of a new glass VIP cube designed by Arca. “We flipped the orientation of the club, made it more iconoclastic - though it hadn’t really dated,” Aaron admits. “Digital is just so brand dependent.”

Just as Paradise Garage had introduced the legendary Richard Long sound system, so Aaron was determined to introduce arguably its latter day equivalent - the original prototype Funktion One dance stack. Prohibitively expensive, Mellor managed to find a system on ebay (originally from Maze in Miami) and flew to the States to collect it. “It looks more like a sonic assault weapon, something you could invade countries with - the best bit is it really does sound just as awesome as it looks! Hi-fi stereo on a big big scale.”

Flanked between these two totemic F1 speaker stacks, Tokyo Industries have designed the best DJ set up in the world with four Technics SL1200 MKIII decks and four Pioneer CDJ-1000s. The coruscating booth resembles an altar - a turntablist’s sanctuary - haloed by the light irradiating from the 32 Pixelline LED battens behind.

Next door is a shabby chic feeder bar, upstairs a sonic concrete box annexed to a live room, with no lighting whatsoever and four isolated F1 F218’s groundstacked in a recess for which it could have been purpose made.

Aaron smiles with satisfaction as he admits, “Digital had been the end game of everything I wanted to do. But of course once you’ve achieved it, there’s always a next level. Utopian 3 is that next level.”

The willingness of Tokyo Industries to throw in their hand with Utopium is probably the ultimate vindication of Bob Senior’s new-found independence, operating outside the corporate box. “We are no longer driven by having to deal with projections. World domination is not my bag and I can’t imagine any circumstances that would drive me back into a public company situation,” he proclaims.

What had so badly misfired at Ultimate Leisure? With the relaxation in licensing laws in the lead up to deregulation that resulted in 52 new licenses being granted in Newcastle alone, the company had suddenly started seeing their profit line being eroded. “By the mid-term (31 December 2004) we had brought in £5m profit and were about to open three new units; every year prior to that 50% of our profit had come in at the halfway stage so we assumed going forward we would show £10m. But Easter came early - in March 2005 - and April didn’t happen either. There was a dynamic that I wasn’t recognising and so we sounded a profit warning.”

By the end of the financial year Ultimate Leisure declared profits of £8.5m followed by a further profit warning in July. The city didn’t like what they were hearing and by the following month the Ultimate Leisure board, including operations chief Bob Senior, were history.

“I had nothing lined up. I had resigned with nothing to go to. It was a devastating feeling.” On 16 December he and Tim Wynn started Utopian - and Christmas came early when he bought Sam Jacks and 850-capacity Bar 55. Close behind came Utopian 2, the Food Division run by Eddie Fung, with a single unit known as Zen in Belfast.

Now, with Utopian 3 up and running, Bob Senior is confident that the core company will increase to eight pubs and clubs, giving them a projected turnover of £15m by the end of the year. The merger with Tokyo Industries is clear evidence of joined-up thinking, and shorn of the responsibility of setting up back office systems, Aaron Mellor and Rob Cameron can maybe take a leaf out of NASA’s book, and blast Utopian 3 into orbit.
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Doesnt sound very hedonistic eh ..... a bunch of men in suits becoming the driving force behind the 'scene'

Shortee · Mar 29, 2008

Has Dan posted anything about Wax : On yet? Where is dave clark playing next week?

james909 · Mar 29, 2008

Just to add more rumours i heard half the soundsystem had been taken out as well.

The other rooms recently just had no midkick just sub and mid high end function 1.

Chris_Spence · Mar 29, 2008

Whats the closing time?

mr.K · Mar 29, 2008

Originally posted by Chris_Spence
Whats the closing time?
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doubt you'll stand a chance if your not there in the queue early bird

im not even goin to try

Chris_Spence · Mar 29, 2008

Originally posted by kenzil
doubt you'll stand a chance if your not there in the queue early bird

im not even goin to try
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i know! just rang up. bloke on the phone said they close at 1.30.

Major Boooooo. wont get out of work till 1 so theres not much point

Stephen · Mar 31, 2008

uni?

Katie · Apr 1, 2008

Originally posted by Rossy
Just to let everyone know that I personally will be offering to shindig my services as a DJ. If they need any tech support however, contact Aems.
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Rossy Im crying with laughter at that!

Jess C · Apr 1, 2008

Wheres eric prydz djing by the way? Doesnt say on the email I got?

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