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This is a story about the beginning of a revolution of sorts. In the 2000s Auckland is a city dominated by electronic music; by the cult of the dj; by dance music. It wasn't always so. This page has no real agenda except to name a few of the places that changed that. From the mid 80's onwards most of these clubs were pulling crowds in excess of 800 people a night every Friday and Saturday-far bigger than most clubs in Auckland now (although the number of clubs in Auckland is vastly larger). The onward movement staggered a bit with the onslaught of grunge in the late eighties and early nineties but it was always inevitable...
+A Certain Bar (1st floor, cnr Wellesley & Albert, 1981-82)Where it all began for Auckland clublife as we know it now. Peter Urlich, teenage rock'n'roll heart-throb, fresh from a trip to London, hanging out with The Cure and the like; and Rip It Up journalist and lad-around-town Mark Phillips opened this in a dingy upstairs bar in a rundown old pub on the corner of Wellesley and Albert Streets in mid 1981. With Tina, or Karen on the door (or myself at times) it was quickly the cutting edge of Auckland, which had seen nothing like it before. The giant ACB letters behind the rough and ready DJ booth were pinched and re-arranged from an ABC album display. The music was new, fresh, and funky (quite a thing for a city emerging from the disco-punk street wars) and spun with humour by Mark, Peter, or, when the lads needed a refreshment break, me. There was no dj gear as such so a guy called Moby was asked to make a rudimentary mixer and belt driven turntables were the devices used to play the 7" and 12" vinyl. The crowd ranged from fashion victims, to pop stars, to skinheads, to wannabes to has-beens, but it worked. Forget anything else you might read (no it didn't start at Squid or Calibre, or even The Box), ACB was where club culture started in Auckland...everything else can draw a direct line from here and, many of the people who came to dominate and define Auckland over the next 25 years first appeared here. Besides where else could could you wear a kilt and get away with it (and Steinlagers...back in the day when they were thought to be drinkable...were only 90c each) +ACB Floor Fillers:
+The Six Month Club (situated where the Aotea Centre is now, 1985-6)Peter Urlich and Mark Phillips opened this place early in 1985. So named because it was situated in the "Ace of Clubs", owned by Phil Warren, in Cook Street, in a building due for demolition six months later. Originally Mark and Peter tried to show, a still provincial, Auckland, a little bit of sophistication, by spinning cool jazz tracks, but as we later found out at Celebre, the kids just wanna dance, and they soon reverted to dancefloor aimed funk and soul. I arrived back from two years in the UK with 300 records, to find that they were still DJing off the tapes I’d been sending back for the past two years. I was hired that night and spent the next six months (the club lasted eight) spinning discs, to what was, probably Auckland’s first exposure to contemporary club culture. Harry Ratbag (Club H's Harry The Bastard) was barman extraordinaire, when he could stand; the kids wondered who the grumpy old guy on the door was (Don, a millionaire and Phil’s partner); the labyrinth of rooms out the back hosted the unrepeatable; Dirty Dave leered at the female fashion victims out of the lighting booth and for a short, intense time, it was the epicentre of Auckland cool. The closing down party was lierally a demolition party and the crowds, after listeing to a variety of bands, including an extended version of the Car Crash Set, wrecked the building as they flowed out into Cook Street in the AM. +Crucial Six Month Club Tunes:
+The Brat (51 Nelson St, currently the rooms below Toto, 1986)We were at a bit of a loose end after the demise of the Six Month Club, so we ran our new record label (Stimulant) and eventually the boys announced they’d found a new venue for a club, the sixties rock’n’roll refuge, "The Foundry", in Nelson St. I was dragged in to handle the music again, and we spent the Christmas / New Year period renovating the place (Mark almost lost an eye and spent New Years Eve in hospital), opening with a splash in February, 1986. Perched high above the dancefloor in a DJ booth stuck precariously on a concrete beam (it shook as the volume increased), The Brat was the first time we had proper turntables and made an attempt to mix. Simon Le Bon virtually lived there for a while and hassled me continuously to play Duran Duran records, which, of course, I didn't. It all came to pieces in June when, deciding, I wanted to be more than a simple DJ, I jumped ship with Tom Sampson & Roger Perry, and opened up in competition (see below). If you want to hear the soundtrack of The Brat, track down our Eight Arms to Hold You collection....7000 copies sold in 3 months!
+The Asylum (currently the soon to be demolished PowerStation, 1986-87)Tom Sampson and myself took over the nights at The Galaxy in Mount Eden Road that were free when it wasn't being used as a live venue and put a dance club in there, with DJ Roger Perry jumping on board (he'd just left Russell Crowe's club, The Venue-yes that Russell Crowe) to spin with me. We painted the stage bright blue and built stairs and an attachable fence (it allowed those on the stage to be on show...something most clubs need still). We announced which nights we were to open each week with a simple ad in the paper, saying something like "Asylum Friday" or "Asylum All Weekend", plus a couple of radio ads on bFm and that was all it took. It was soon packed with the beautiful and the cool, at least 1000 going through each night. It worked partially because it was playing music that no-one else in the country would go near, and partially because it wasn't always on...it was irregular depending on which bands had booked the caverous space. And like The Brat, it was one of the first clubs that had no colour or race barriers, so the crowd came from south, west, north, east and central Auckland...and happily mixed. Our door policy was simple-if you understood, you were in, and they queued to do so whenever we opened the doors.
New Years Eve 1986/7 was absolute mayhem with god knows how many 1000s being turned away by an overworked Tom who always had his work cut out overseeing the door. Roger and I also managed to persuade bFM to give us a radio show, Asylum FM, on Saturday afternoons - New Zealand's first dance radio show, much to the dismay of the bFM mafia who stood outside the studio and sneered at the "disco" we were playing. Simple, functional, very loud with a mix of hip hop, soul, Def Jam, pop and this new sound that Roger and I became hooked on. It was called house music, and the Asylum can claim to be the place where house started in New Zealand. That is, when the turntables didn't jump.... +Jackin' Asylum choons:
+The Playground (51 Nelson St, 1987-88)The guys that owned The Galaxy (Phil Warren & Don Lillian who we still maintained the greatest respect for) had started hassling Tom & myself for a bigger cut of the door money (they already had the bar return), which we were unhappy about, so when Mark Phillips offered us the old Brat space for a club (they had moved upstairs to open the now legendary Le Bom) it seemed smart to grab Roger and move. We spent about a month renovating the place and ended up back downstairs in Nelson St, with the coolest DJ booth Auckland has ever seen (private rooms, couches, fridge and a private party every night) and the crowd, en-mass, from the Asylum. We painted the place black with massive white upside down letters spelling "playground" that made it look rather cool in a minmal way.
Crazy times, an even bigger P.A. and an ever swelling crowd. We were more uncompromising with the music (although Roger did a regular turn dropping Rick Astley), mostly house and hip hop, some quite raw and VERY loud. We had, for a while, the first club lasers in NZ and the hole above the dance floor allowed the casual observer on the first floor to be a voyeur of the dancefloor masses. It came to an end about a year later. Peter and Mark had had a fight with their partner and moved on (hosting Auckland's first dance parties), then the partner decided that he didn't need us either and tried to move us on. Our last two weekends were host to over seven thousand people, and we quit, ripped off to the tune of many thousands. Turned out they did need us, the ten or so confused looking people the next weekend never returning. A great club and bar complex killed by greed and stupidity.... +Playground Essentials:
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