Nestled between Millwall FC stadium and an intersection of southLondonrailway lines, the 350-capacity Venue MOT – once an actual MOT garage – is a cornerstone of the city’s underground music scene. But every Tuesday, owner Jan Mohammed gathers his staff at the bar and tells them how much money it has lost since the weekend.
Mohammed, a sculptor, started renting a nearby space to use as a studio more than a decade ago. With no residential neighbours and relatively low costs, he opened Venue MOT in 2018 based on simple intuition: “I thought music could thrive here,” he says. Despite the losses and Mohammed calling his operation a “comedy of errors”, it does. Time Outrecently labelledVenue MOT the best nightclub in London and Jamie xxcalled it“one of the last places in London that feels genuinely free and DIY” after his 10-night residency last year with guests including Charli xcx and Daphni. Mohammed describes the club’s atmosphere as “DDS” – deep, dark and sweaty. Indomitable characters like him are the lifeblood of a financially unstable scene that must constantly adapt to licensing rules and urban redevelopment.
But there is another side to London’s underground clubland: numerous promoters, including some who organise events in nightclubs such as Venue MOT, are from very wealthy backgrounds.
Some of London’s most successful and longstanding dance brands were set up by highly privileged individuals: Krankbrother, known for its parties in Finsbury Park with headliners including Four Tet and Solomun, is run by Danny and Kieran Clancy, the sons of the late construction magnate Dermot Clancy. Blaise Bellville, founder of dance music livestreamers Boiler Room is English gentry: the Marlborough College-educated son of Lady Lucinda Wallop (though he has said he “didn’t have any money” growing up). Today, newer ventures include Figura, an ambitious new project founded last year and funded by Tetra Pak heir Magnus Rausing, and one of the latest people to hire out Venue MOT is Ollie Ashley, the son of billionaire Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley.
Ollie Ashley’s last venture, the loss-making London-based online radio station Radar Radio, stopped operating in 2018 amida storm of allegationsincluding sexual harassment by station staff – Ashley himself wasn’t accused, but he did preside over a dysfunctional working environment and a station accused of cultural appropriation. (In a company statement at the time, Radar said “we don’t agree with all the opinions” made in the allegations, but said it was “capable of making mistakes” and apologised “to anybody who has felt unsafe or discriminated against”.)
Ashley didn’t comment further, and has kept a fairly low profile since. But last year he launched a new club night, Virus, and his Venue MOT-hosted lineup in February included big names such as Hudson Mohawke, the night after he supported Justice at Alexandra Palace.
Some in the scene fear that monied promoters will pay over the odds for star DJs like these, leading to over-inflated markets that end up making the overall scene less sustainable. “If there’s more money, things get frothy, things become unreal, and it takes a long time for them to settle down afterwards,” says DJ, producer and promoter Rob Venning, who started putting on events in his home of Watford in 2013, and only made his first significant profit last year. “On a number of occasions, I didn’t break even,” he says, and had to make up the difference with his own savings.
It’s made harder by the fact that clubbing, though an important part of British cultural life, is rarely supported by the kind of philanthropy that often props up visual art, theatre, opera or dance, nor does it tend to receive public funding. The cost of living crisis also hits clubs from both sides: their costs increaseandtheir audience’s propensity to go out goes down. “You expect young people to go out, but how many have the money and how often can they do it?” asks Mohammed.
All of this contributes to an environment where those investing personal wealth can go a long way. It’s opened up a debate in the scene: are people like Ashley and Rausing buying their way into a grassroots culture? Or are they a new generation of arts patrons that could bring exciting opportunities?
When I meet Ashley outside of the Virus headquarters in east London, I expect him to be terse and tight-lipped, but he’s friendly and candid. Tattooed on one of his arms is a black circle, covering up what was once the Radar Radio logo. On the other is a black square. It was a tattoo of underground dance label Night Slugs’ logo, he tells me, until he and label founder Bok Bok fell out. The latter wrote under a recent post on Virus’s Instagram: “That billionaire money at work again”.
Virus is in the same building that once housed Radar, which now contains a number of recording studios that Ashley offers artists without payment, with recent guests including Skepta and Fred Again. Most artists who perform at Virus do so in exchange for studio time – so Ashley may not be driving up DJ fees, but this is a resource that very few others can offer. Despite his advantage over other promoters, Ashley says he wants to avoid going up against them: “We’re not trying to compete or discourage other promoters. That’s why we normally do pop-ups on odd days in the week like Tuesdays or Wednesdays and tend to announce events at the last minute.”
Before Radar, Ashley worked at London radio stations Rinse FM and NTS and flyered for the legendary, now-defunctdubstep night FWD>>. He presents himself as an enthusiast who is proud to be funding this scene. “The whole nepo baby set should be doing stuff like this,” he says. “We should be putting our money and resources into things we’re passionate about and that make people happy.” He’s under no illusion about his privilege, but says he wants to use it to build something that “inspires young people to learn how to DJ, make music, throw a party, the same way parties like FWD>> did for me when I was 18”. He’s also hosted promoters including Manchester-based Genesys and Evian Christ’s Trance Party in his studios. “We’re actively trying to build community between promoters,” he says.
DJ and producer I Jordan cancelled their Radar show in 2018. “We all benefited so much from it,” they say, “but at the same time there was this general lack of accountability and responsibility that often happens when people that come from wealth don’t think about the consequences of their actions.” (For his part, Ashley says he had “never run a company before, which isn’t an excuse. I was really trying my best, but I let people down. I’ve learned so much from it and if I could do it again I’d do nearly all of it differently.”)
For Jordan, the unequal clubbing economy is part of a wider problem: “We all exist under exploitative, unethical capitalism.” They and their agent have to make a case-by-case decision on who to work with and what fee to take. Recently, they took a well-paid gig and spent the money on gender-affirming surgery; it wouldn’t be fair to ask DJs like Jordan to routinely resist the draw of wealthy bookers. But it’s worth asking, as Jordan does, “how can we redistribute that wealth or use that wealth in good ways?”
Cyndi Anafo, who organises events with her husband Chris Ellis as the Handson Family, is happy to be a channel for wealth redistribution. For seven years, she’s been running free-to-attend events at Brixton Market, funded by its owner, property developer Taylor McWilliams. She’s glad to spend his money on organising nights that platform Black artists and pay them well, and believes that they give McWilliams something in return. “Wealthy people are currently on the back foot when it comes to their brand identity,” she says. “They want to make money – but their brands want to align with the good side.” So dance music can allow the rich to buy their way into a certain community, giving them cultural cachet.
That’s not a deal that Rausing, the Tetra Pak heir who funds Figura, seems interested in making: “I don’t like loud music and I like being in bed early,” he says. But he knows enough about London’s nightlife to believe that there’s room for improvement. “I just want there to be a better experience out there. And for it to be just that, an experience. A place for people to get lost in the music, the production, and the people around.” He wants his financial support to allow Figura “to be a celebration of art, and nothing else”.
This simple goal can be difficult for poorly funded promoters to achieve. Venning started his Watford events because he wanted to platform artists who might not be heard otherwise, but as his nights have grown to demand more of his time and money, he’s tempted to be more conservative in who he books, “and it’s an impulse I have to work against”.
No such problem for Figura’s founder and chief executive, John Becker, who started his career at Berlin club Tresor before consulting for nightlife brands such as Boneca and Unleash. Back then, he repeatedly booked the same artists who he knew would do well. With Figura, Rausing’s support reduces the immediate financial pressure on the project, and gives Becker the freedom to programme more experimental events: next month’sSeeing in Dreamswill have boundary-pushing musicians including Andy Stott, Crystallmess and the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Becker denies overpaying artists or competing unfairly with other promoters. He wants to position Figura not as a competitor but “a collaborator that tries to enable creative freedom, risk-taking and artist-first programming, rather than an arms race for booking fees”. Rausing’s funding, he says, instead allows him to encourage artists to work with them on less commercial projects and gigs. “We can take a bit more of a risk than others,” he says, “and maybe if we don’t exactly break even, that’s something we can cover”.
Figura is also hosting a takeover from Accidental Meetings, a club night by Lucien Calkin, who also works at Venue MOT and runs free-thinking Bristol music festivalSaccade. Accidental Meetings started in Brighton, where Calkin spent his student bank account overdraft on organising events. It still uses the same bank account, and when we speak, it’s £1,000 in the red. “You’re constantly having to top it up yourself, and that’s made me quite skint in the last few years,” Calkin says. “It has to be a passion project.”
It’s unfair that grassroots promoters have to dip into modest savings and hope to break even, running events on hard-mode, while their better funded counterparts play a lower-stakes game. In the case of Ashley, his wealth might be seen to have helped him weather controversy.
At the same time, the Rausing money that Calkin receives via Figura is useful – many of the best nights struggle to make a profit and it’s unrealistic to expect a scene to run solely on the passion that drives him, Mohammed and Venning. When I ask Mohammed and Calkin what the plan is for the next five years, they both laugh. “I don’t know what’s going on next week,” Mohammed tells me. “Because it’s so fragile, we’ve got no fucking clue,” says Calkin.