Club Life is club promoter Fred Deakin's personal autobiography. To all intents and purposes, it’s a presentation with some music and some slides. But this description, diminishes it - to say the least!
A brilliant format and a warm nostalgia hangs over the evening
The journey begins with Deakin as a teenager, feeling rather out of place at someone’s house party. He resolves to give himself a purpose at the next party by taking some 7" singles along to play for his friends. And thus, a DJ is born!
Deakin takes us through his teenage years, and then up to Edinburgh, where he went to university. Edinburgh becomes the test bed for his early forays into club promotion. The story then continues to London where he expands his investigations into what he calls ‘the art form’ of clubbing.
This is not a general history of the UK club scene, it is rather a journey that is very personal and specific to Deakin - albeit set against the backdrop of broader trends. In fact, it’s so personal, that he includes pivotal life events - relationships and health issues - that have coloured and influenced his life's choices.
Over the years, the clubs move to different venues and change names and music genres - in order to illustrate each iteration, there is a musical interlude when, accompanied by a team of dancers, Deakin resumes his role as a DJ and the audience is invited to join in. We get up, we buy drinks at the bar, and we dance. In this time, the show transforms into a nightclub for about four or five songs before we move on to the next stage of the story.
Deakin reminds us that clubs in the 80s, such as The Wag in London, were rather exclusive. They used VIP guest lists and door policies that favoured ‘good-looking’ people. He remembers thinking it was an awful premise for a good night out, and he determined that his clubs would not be like that – they were going to be open and welcoming and inclusive. They would be the antithesis of ‘cool’ and people would be offered a safe, inclusive space, where they could be free.
Deakin insists that clubbing is not a frivolous luxury. And of course, gathering to dance has always been an important facet of the human experience. It is at these times we ask ourselves life's most basic existential questions: who am I? and why am I here? And it is vital that, particularly at the age when we transition into adulthood, we are given the opportunity and the space to find out. Dancing is a rite of passage.
As Euripides might have said: We ignore Dionysis at our peril!
This is a brilliant format and a warm nostalgia hangs over the evening. Deakin himself says that he wishes he could go back and do it all again. He thanks us all at the end and hopes that this evening might have inspired the minds of those charged with finding the future of this art form - whatever that may be.
