The Heavenly Sunday Social
There’s that famous maxim about the ‘60s, that if you can remember them then you weren’t there. In many ways, the same can be applied to The Heavenly Sunday Social. The club only ran for a couple of months, kicking off in August 1994, but speaking as someone who was there every single week from start to finish, every night has since blurred until all that’s left now is a smog of hedonistic memories. There were records played that cut through everything, glimpses of some bloke in the corner getting set on fire. There’s fuzzy memories of being in the crowd, the whole mob pleading for one more tune way past bedtime and I seem to recall something about being stood at the bar next to the Mod Father. Other than that, the major details have pretty much all but escaped me.
What I am sure of is this. The Heavenly Sunday Social took place in The Albany, the most unassuming of London venues, a basement room in a pre-furbished pub somewhere between the West End and the rest of the world. Although the resident DJs, Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands are now world famous as The Chemical Brothers, at the time they were The Dust Brothers, just 3 singles into a fledgling career, living on borrowed time name wise (the original owners asked for it back soon afterwards), recording their first album in the week days that preceded the club. Their supporting cast of record spinners included many of their peers, people like Andrew Weatherall, Justin Robertson, Tim Burgess - people who had long been inspirational to Ed & Tom. We at Heavenly came upon the idea for the club after hearing the Dust Brothers DJing in back rooms of clubs and at house parties – they played like their lives depended on it, week in week out. We weren’t club runners – we were a record company and a press office (I was doing press for the Dust Brothers third single, “My Mercury Mouth”, just around the time of the club). None of us could have predicted in our wildest dreams what would happen to Ed and Tom over the years that followed (and, really, why should we, we were way too caught up in the moment), but, at that exact point in time, we just knew that they were the greatest DJs we’d ever heard. It just so happens that that’s still the case.
As far as rock music was concerned, the summer of 1994 was already pretty much at fever pitch. Oasis were pure, untapped potential. “Definitely Maybe” was just round the corner – back then it really felt like they might turn out to be the greatest band ever (isn’t hindsight a terrible thing?) Blur’s “Girls and Boys” was still ubiquitous. Manic Street Preachers were somewhere between rock ‘n’ roll and a hard place – “The Holy Bible” was just out to universal praise but band member Richey Edwards was on a self destructive path out of the band. The long awaited second Stone Roses album was due in the Autumn; Primal Scream were headlining Reading Festival on the back of an unashamed rock album and a handful of very savvy dance floor remixes (the best of which was by – naturally - the Dust Brothers). Club wise, it was a different story. If you went out, you either had minimal techno, progressive house or glitzy super clubs playing pedestrian, uninteresting house music. Wherever you went, you were required to be part of a tribe, you dressed accordingly, you acted accordingly to get past the person on the door. Randomness was out. On the plus side, you were just starting to witness the first sightings of what would become known as ‘trip hop’ – Tricky and Portishead were putting out white labels, Mo’ Wax was just finding it’s feet.
Rather than try to recount the story as I remember it (that’s basically a load of blank pages with the occasional scribble in child’s crayon), I’ve tried to put together an eyewitness account of what happened in the 13 weeks that The Heavenly Sunday Social happened at The Albany. I asked a few of the battle-scarred veterans who lived through those times for their memories of the club – people who played down there and people who just hung out and propped up the bar. A few people I asked couldn’t answer on the grounds that memory failed them. Apologies for any vagaries or factual errors – if this was Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone, we’d have had to have regression therapy to retrieve the information for fact checking purposes. But that would have ended up tedious/libellous.
Socialites:
Martin Kelly – co-founder of Heavenly Recordings/The Heavenly Sunday Social/The Social bars
Wendy Barrett – co-conspirator at The Sunday Social, mother of Sonny & Danny (Heavenly - the next generation)
Ed Simons – one half of The Chemical Brothers (nee Dust Brothers), resident DJ at The Heavenly Sunday Social
James Dean Bradfield – singer/guitarist, Manic Street Preachers
Chloe Walsh –formerly of Heavenly Press Office, founder of Press Here Publicity
Justin Robertson – legendary DJ/musician, guest DJ at The Heavenly Sunday Social
Nick Dewey – former chef, co-founder of The Social bars, now a music manager
Sean Rowley – creator of Guilty Pleasures, guest DJ at Sunday Social
Robin Turner – co-creator The Heavenly Sunday Social/co-founder The Social/co-editor Socialism magazine
Pete Wiggs – one half of Saint Etienne, Social neighbour
Stuart Bailie – freelance writer and broadcaster living in Belfast, assistant editor of NME in ‘94
Mark Jones – founder Wall Of Sound Records
Alexis Petridis – music writer The Guardian/GQ
Martin – Heavenly seemed like it had been going for ages by 1994. I think we’d achieved a lot in a very short time. That year was a bit of a fallow period. Our Sony deal had ended and it was prior to our deal with Deconstruction. As a label Heavenly was in a kind of limbo, although there was still a real optimism about it. Although we weren’t a label, we were determined that we were going to be one, I think that’s what got us through.
Wendy - Jeff and I had got married the previous November and we were just running about having a lot of fun. We were living in a tiny flat in Shepherds Bush Road. We spent a lot of time playing pinball in the pub, then we’d head home and play records really loud and jump up and down a lot.
Ed – Me and Tom had just met everyone at Heavenly at the start of the year - Jeff and Wendy, Martin, Robin, Saint Etienne. We were really excited to have people to hang out with in London. Up to that point we didn’t really have a gang, we were still kind of halfway between London and Manchester, as we’d not long finished college. We were still going up there to play Jockey Slut parties on the weekends. That was the first summer that we got to play our kind of music to people in London. We’d played The Job Club a lot, where we’d met people like Richard Fearless. One of the things that really inspired us all to do a club was a party back at Jeff and Wendy’s flat after a Saint Etienne gig at the Shepherds Bush Empire. We all bonded over a load of brilliant records he was playing and the relationship kind of grew from there.
JDB – We’d just finished recording “The Holy Bible” and I’d just moved up to London, out from my parents’ house for the first time. I was feeling burnt, lonely and very Welsh.
Chloe – I’d just turned from 19 to 20 and had just moved out of a wonky little shared flat on Camden Parkway, a glorified cupboard really, to a flat in Chalk Farm with glorious cupboards. I was working at Creation Records in the kind of low anxiety job you can still do with 4 hours sleep, a raging hangover and a come down.
Justin - That summer I was up to my neck in rave. I think I was rolling with the Lionrock project, thinking about going live in an indie-dance style, I was DJing all over the place, and I was living in Manchester noticing a certain swagger on the street as Oasis began their march to world domination.
Nick – I’d been working a cook at a restaurant on Covent Garden Piazza by day and going out at night, weekender style. Coming into work on a Monday morning feeling awful was ok then because I was 24 and my main job was serving up burritos and nachos from a microwave to unsuspecting tourists.
Sean – I was working for Planet 24 as a producer on The Big Breakfast. My main responsibility was a slot called ‘Down Your Doorstep’ where I used to go up and knock on unsuspecting people’s doors at 7am, Keith Chegwin in tow, asking if we could do things like shear a herd of sheep in their bathroom, and other such TV pranks.
Martin –Robin came to myself and Jeff with the original idea to start a club with The Dust Brothers as headline residents at the start of summer. The ideas that he had back then ended up being very close to how the actual club was. None of us could have predicted how it was going to pan out, but in terms of the way it was envisaged, as a place where like-minded people could hang out and drink and hear great music, that’s pretty much how it was. We were kind of on the periphery of the dance music scene - we came from an indie background and loved dance music. I remember going to clubs like Merry England and places like that and just thinking that these clubs were full of wankers. That was the main reason for stopping going out clubbing, not enjoying being at them. It wasn’t like we didn’t like caning it, we just didn’t like the people we were forced to do it with. When the Social idea was hatched, it kind of hit the nail on the head for us. Sunday nights were perfect, it was such a tangent, something no one else was really doing. It did help that none of us had ‘proper jobs’. We were all in a place, at an age where we could take that chance on a Sunday night. For a while we were stuck for a venue, we had the idea and the DJs but no venue. We ended up choosing The Albany as I’d remembered going with Jeff there to see these Canadian comedians who were fucking awful. They were so shit we were pissing ourselves laughing all night. This was probably in 1989. I remember there was a vibe in the place, it looked like things could happen there in that basement room. When we went back to check it out, they’d kind of done it up and done it down – they’d roughed it up somehow. We went there to book the venue and the landlord, this no bullshit Aussie guy called Brian, asked us how many people we thought we’d get in. We said about 80 – 100 and he looked at us and said “In your fuckin’ dreams!”
Wendy - The idea of a weekly get together where you could hear great music was perfect. We all thought that it would be pretty low-key. We had no idea it would go so mental.
Robin – One of the first ideas we had was to produce a weekly newsletter (The Broadsheet) that would get handed out to everyone when they walked in. It had lists of people’s favourite records, charts from DJs, gossip from the previous weeks. It even had a weekly soap opera written by an old college friend of Ed & Tom’s (C.J. Magnet). This was before the internet, before people had mobile phones, when you had to actually talk to people to find things out. It was something we did to try to create a community, it told people what they’d missed and what they had to look forward to. I’d put it together on a shitty old word processor on the Friday, cut and paste pictures on and photocopy a load of them, hoping we’d make enough money on the night to pay me the twenty quid copy charge back.
JDB - I was drinking in a pub on Westbourne Grove on my own when I bumped into a pissed up Pete Wiggs and Robin Turner. They were crapping on about some guys called the Dust Brothers playing down this club they were involved in. Meeting them was kind of like reconnecting to my past with Heavenly. I though “Fuck it, I used to be a bar man at the Newbridge Memo, I used to get pissed there every Sunday. What could possibly go wrong?”
Pete - The Social started at a time that coincided with us being absent from the music industry for a while. I seem to remember just having fun and not doing much work for the whole time it was on. I was living in Cleveland Street in a studio flat, just one street away from the Albany. Myself and my then girlfriend had just moved into that flat when the Social started, I’d been to the pub before in the daytime but I didn’t know there was a room downstairs – some kind of mental sweatbox.
Sean - I remember first hearing about the Social at a party on Kensal Road. I bumped into Jeff. Our paths had crossed previously when I was head of TV promotions at London Records and we were working Flowered Up. Jeff handed me a badly photocopied flier for the first four weeks of his new club. I went on the second week. I bumped into Paolo Hewitt who had played the warm up at the first one and he said it had been a bit of a hoot and I should get down there.
Wendy – I did the door with our mates, Lou, Tash and Claire. It was three quid to get in and we had a rubber stamp with the Heavenly bird on. We had a little table at the bottom of the stairs, right behind where the DJs were. There was a big neon star there and another stairway that was fire exit out to the street.
Nick - One of the things that stood out at The Albany was the clock on the wall downstairs. It was permanently stuck at five to twelve. It was positioned on the wall behind where the decks were and there wasn't anything else to look at in terms of 'visuals' so that was the focal point. It became mysterious and seemed to be symbolic of something important even though no one knew what that might be.
Ed - The first one was pretty quiet, there were maybe 50 people, mostly people that we knew. The second week, Bob & Pete played it was roadblocked. The third week I remember I’d had a big night and I had to pull myself together to get down there. I ended up arriving pretty late. I got there and there was a queue right round the pub, people desperate to get in. It was a pretty easy club to pack, it wasn’t that big, but seeing that still felt pretty amazing. For the first few weeks, we were playing this mad party that happened every Sunday afternoon at a hairdresser’s in Kentish Town. We used to play on a roof terrace before slogging down the Albany. We put together a set of records that we stuck quite closely to every week, a kind of hodge podge of instrumental hip-hop and rare groove bits we’d picked up in Eastern Bloc in Manchester off (Richard) Moonboots, a lot of our own stuff. We were playing pretty mad records, stuff like “Dead Homiez” by Supersuckers, mad acid stuff like “Lobotomie” by Emmanuel Top. “Boops” by Sly & Robbie, “Tomorrow Never Knows”. We were pretty proud of the music we were playing, it was completely different to everything else out there. We’d just started going to the States to do Dust Brothers’ gigs, so we were picking up records each time. Jeff had made us a couple of tapes, it was that long ago that we were listening to C90s. Every time we went away we’d try to find a lot of the stuff off them. We started pretty much every week with “Strange Games And Funky Things”, a Love Unlimited Orchestra record, this strange, slow burn instrumental disco track that never quite peaked. It ended up being like a call to arms.
Martin - Once Tom & Ed started, you’d look around the room and the look on people’s faces was pure elation, I guess it’s like what people say the early days of acid house were like – a communal spirit. You definitely had that feeling that you were doing something that other people didn’t know about yet, something special, something illicit. I remember having that feeling at Shoom, you knew the outside world was unawares that you had a secret that you wanted everyone else to know, but at the same time you weren’t going to be the one to tell anybody ‘cos then it would be out.
Pete – I’d been with Robin to see The Dust Brothers at a house party near Finsbury Park a few months before the club started I think it was one of those nights I wanted to stay in but got press ganged into going out. As soon as they came on I thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard. Every single night at The Social was like that. The music was so refreshing for the time, no one else was playing records like that, things like the Manics, their own records, soul records, hip hop. It wasn’t at a blistering pace, which at the time was quite a different thing to do. Also they didn’t have a scary DJ mentality, which seemed to be all the rage at the time, they were such nice blokes to be around.
Stuart - The NME student kids were all wittering on about Megatripolis and Club Dog, like it was the start of a new era. I didn’t get it. But The Social was exciting in a very different way. It was happening on a night when people didn’t normally go out. A lot of the emphasis was on people becoming mates. There was an interesting mix of cool faces, music fanatics and minor hooligans – bits of that Loaded culture slipping in. A lot of good haircuts, white jeans and Harrington jackets, as I remember. I imagine the ’60s clubs like the Bag O’ Nails and the Speakeasy were a bit like this.
Nick - It was funny because it was in the days before all day drinking on a Sunday was legal so you'd go for lunch at the pub, then end up going back to someone’s house before finally making it to the club. It was all over the place and made for a crazed atmosphere.
Justin – First impressions of The Social? It was the last days of the Roman Empire! Like the Queen Vic meets Studio 54 with Bobby Gillespie as licensee. I wasn’t really surprised it exploded so quickly for Tom & Ed, they had such a unique sound from the start, it was so intoxicating, you knew something truly great was happening – they were an irresistible force!
Pete - The first week, someone dragged one of the chairs from the upstairs into the middle of the floor, like a kind of makeshift podium. It became a thing that had to be done every week, there was a weird determination to place the chair in the middle of the floor, then people would get on it and dance. We’d head down there early every week, we’d all meet upstairs before the doors opened. I remember we were used to drink Flaming Drambuies before it started, which is really naff but it seemed to start that night off pretty well. It took a while to get to the right level of drunkenness needed to be getting on a chair in the middle of a packed dancefloor in a grotty pub. The Drambuies probably helped.
Wendy - When it got really busy the queue went up the stairs and into the pub. If we had any mates we wanted to get in we’d sneak them in the fire exit. People seemed to come from everywhere. Tash eventually got sacked from the door for letting everyone in for free. We cashed up in a little room behind the bar and someone worked out how much we could pay the DJs. The warm up DJs usually got fifty quid. We had a great spot on the door because it overlooked the dance floor. We had a never-ending supply of beer and by the end of the night we’d be up on the little table dancing. Both staircases would be packed with people.
Sean - The thing that sticks in my mind most is the amyl run (RT - at the point where there was £30 profit in the till, someone was sent in a wait and return cab to buy three bottles of amyl from Old Compton Street – this happened every week). That was genius. I remember walking in one night to a heavy stench of rotten socks, only to discover that it was amyl nitrate. I quickly learnt just how important amyl was to the night – you’d time your amyl blast to coincide with records that sounded like they’d been beamed in from outer space. Tom & Ed’s remix of “Bug Powder Dust” by Bomb The Bass really represents that part of it, you’d really try to time your blast to coincide with that one.
Nick – One night down there, I’d been chewing this African twig called Kat all night, thinking this was the best thing since sliced bread. No one else seemed to be too taken with it though, which I thought was picky coming from people sniffing amyl nitrate like it was going out of fashion.
JDB - I remember being there and thinking that “Chemical Beats” was the best thing I’d heard since “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” or “Fear Of A Black Planet”. Also, “Under The Influence Of Love” by Love Unlimited. I’d never heard a record like that played at that volume. It made me think that they were trying to rock ‘n’ roll-isize everything, which I thought was brilliant.
Martin – I really remember records like “Live Forever” and “Weekender” standing out, Tom & Ed playing them alongside their own records, those were the points where you’d really stop and go “Fuck!” I remember someone coming up to me and going “What the fuck is this???” It was “Tomorrow Never Knows”, they were convinced it was some kind of remix, it was the original, played off the original vinyl, just out of its normal context. The fact that it was being played alongside mad acid records, well - it is the original mad acid record. Tom & Ed had the ability to make all those records meld together, that was their secret.
Nick - I was going to clubs all the time then which was great but I was ready for something different. There were some amazing clubs around like Sabresonic and David Holmes' Sugarsweet night in Belfast, but they were proper banging techno all-nighters. The Social was like a response to all of that. In a way it was what I imagined Sabresonic would be like before I went down there, the place to go and discover the source of it all, the inspiration for all that incredible music that people like Weatherall and Primal Scream were making and talking about at the time. And it was important because it's had a lasting influence, the unsung sister to Britpop in a way, the Velvet Underground to Britpop's Beatles; everyone went on to start labels or clubs or start making records of their own.
Chloe – I’d grown up in Glasgow where I’d gone to a lot of clubs, but I hadn’t really been to many since I’d lived in London. The few that I’d been to in London didn’t really have the same energy as places like the Sub Club and the Arches in Glasgow. Or the Hacienda in Manchester. There wasn’t the same sense of shared euphoria, maybe because there wasn’t such a loyally regular crowd so that lightening bolt of excitement when a longstanding club favorite was played was missing. The London clubs I went to seemed soulless by comparison. The atmosphere in The Albany was the closest thing to the Slam DJs’ in their peak at the Sub Club I’d found, which was my favorite club up to that point. Did it affect the way I thought about clubs? Well, I’d never seen poppers on the dancefloor before. So it changed the way I thought about poppers.
Martin - Really quickly it became like a religion, as soon as anyone went once, they were going to be going every week from then on. That’s why the numbers grew so quickly, people would come back, and they’d bring a few friends, before long it was road blocked.
Robin – The idea initially was that the club would only run for four weeks, every Sunday in August. After three weeks, we knew we had to keep it going, we were having too much fun. We hit the phones hard the next week to try to corral anyone we could into playing – I don’t think anyone we rang turned us down, no matter how far they had to come. Word must have spread pretty fast.
Stuart - The early ’90s had Kurt Cobain, Richey Manic and PJ Harvey, all grim as anything. The required reading was Prozac Nation. Britpop was a bit of a holiday from that and The Social reflected some of that escape. It was also the place where people like The Dust Brothers could work out a new aesthetic. I remember suggesting to the paper that someone should write about this, and they looked at me like I was mad.
Ed - Playing down there was always very intense, there was no booth, and the decks were on a table. You knew that if it had been a sunny day it would get a bit rowdy – the decks would jump all over the place which was a total pain in the arse.
Nick – There was an anticipation for the next record that was unlike any other club I’d been to. The records that Tom and Ed were playing and making at that time seemed to have been beamed in from another planet. Every week they'd come straight down from the studio clutching some new classic to try out alongside all those great remixes they were making at the time for the Scream, Bomb The Bass, The Prodigy. They’d play those with all these mad hip-hop instrumentals, psychedelic rock tracks and stuff like the Leftfield remix of Renegade Soundwave. It got heavier and more intense as the set went on. It was more like a rock 'n' roll show in the way it exploded from one track into the next, but at the same time totally unlike like any band you'd ever seen. I just remember thinking that this was the music I had been waiting to hear all my life.
JDB – It is weird if I think about, it was just a really strange mixture of people down there, people like Tim Burgess, Oasis, Bob & Pete, Mani, Tricky, Paul Weller. You’d look round and Beth Orton would be dancing on the bar. It seemed like a new gateway out of the whole Manchester thing, the last real ‘scene’ that had happened. Also, it was on a Sunday. Sunday is always a good piss up day.
Robin – I remember one week finding myself at the bar, stood next to Paul Weller. I’d never been a Jam fan so didn’t have that slightly deranged obsession that a lot of blokes my age seem to have. A polo shirted, modish guy stood next to him and blurted out “Mate, ‘All Mod Cons’ made me the man I am today.” Without missing a beat, Weller looked him up and down and said with notable distain, “What, that’s supposed to make me proud?” I immediately asked him what he was drinking. The answer, obviously, was Lowenbrau.
Ed- Tom’s family were a massive part of it from the first week, his wife Vanessa and his brother Huw, they were mad party heads and they found some like minded people in Heavenly and the people who made it down there every week.
Nick - One night a light bulb went off on my head down there. Not metaphorically, the bulb literally exploded onto my head as I was walking to the toilet. I’m not sure how that happened but I do remember everyone finding it hilarious, falling about laughing, with me feeling like a bit of a buffoon. Ultimately I was very proud the following week when I saw it mentioned in The Broadsheet.
Pete - There were a lot of weeks when half the club piled back to our flat, it was pretty hard to avoid carrying on the party back there. The off-licenses on the corner got to know us so we could usually get booze after hours. I was pretty embarrassed to bring people back to the flat mainly as it was so small but also because we had a really young kitten that was shitting everywhere and stinking the place out. No one seemed to care though. Most people’s sense of smell seemed to have given up on them by that point.
Ed - A lot of people felt very isolated from clubs around that time, this was at a time when clubs like Ministry Of Sound were massive. It wasn’t like I didn’t like going to the Ministry, half the time I’d have been in there on the Friday before the Social anyway, it was just that people wanted something smaller and more intimate, something with an incredible atmosphere. That’s what it became very quickly.
Chloe - You had to really want to squeeze in there. It wasn’t for the lighthearted. I remember thinking that they couldn’t possibly squeeze any more people in each week but they always did until it got to the point where people were just jumping up and down on the stairs, and at the top of the stairs, in the upstairs bar, and outside on the street. If it had kept going it would have taken over Great Portland Street tube station.
Nick - I threw myself in with both feet. You had to really, it was all or nothing. It wasn't the sort of place where you could stand at the bar trying to look cool. Once you were in you were in and there was no escape. You went to the bog at the start of the night because there was no way you'd get all the way over the other side of the room when it was in full swing. I’ve been back to the Albany since and it's only about two feet from one side of the basement to the other so they must have really packed them in. There wasn't really a dancefloor, more of a pile-on. It was a bit like when you play football at primary school and you all form a big swarm that moves around the pitch with no proper passing or tackling just everyone hacking away at the ball. It wasn't really dancing. By the end it would be like the sleeve of the Pogues' "Rum, Sodomy and The Lash", you’d be clinging on for dear life. And the heat was unbelievable, you'd come out soaked to the skin, it was like something from ‘Tenko’. I can't imagine anything worse now but at the time I loved every second of it.
Sean - Having spent the majority of my life going to clubs, from slightly naff suburban soul boy beginnings all the way through to acid house, I’d always felt like a person on the outside looking in. I took what I wanted from those clubs. These were all nights that I went to and had my moments. Nothing came close to going into the cellar of The Albany, hearing that music and forging relationships with people who have since shaped the way my life has gone since. Sounds dramatic but it’s all true. It’s probably worth mentioning that I ended up going out with one of the girls who did the door (Tash) for the next three years.
Chloe – I’m pretty sure I went to almost all of them but I can only remember about 10 minutes of any of them. 10 minutes total, not 10 consecutive minutes. My memory is murky. As was the club. It was rowdy and sweaty and frenzied. I first laid eyes on a lot of people who would soon become some of the very best friends I’ve ever had... all red-faced, covered in sweat, splashing beer all over themselves as they pogo’d on top of tables.
Pete – One of many reasons why The Social was great because there wasn’t any of the usual crap you got at clubs – there was no guest list, there wasn’t any door policy, it was egalitarian. It did mean it was horribly packed... no one really cared as long as they were inside. I remember when I played records down there with Bob. I’d only just started DJing just around that time. It was a fairly wayward set, but people were asking what things were, there was no heckling. We were made to feel very welcome, it was great to be playing stuff that wasn’t house music and not get some idiot having a go at you.
Sean - Of all the DJs who played before Ed and Tom, Tricky was the one no one who saw it will ever forget, one of the most insane sets of records I’ve ever heard…
Martin - When we booked Tricky, I don’t think any of us realised just how mental it would be. He’d been coming down for weeks as a punter and we were all pretty in awe of his records. We offered him a slot on the final night. David Holmes was on the same night, he refused to play after Tricky, thinking he’d play some kind of messianic set that couldn’t possibly be followed. Tricky played for one very bizarre, very brilliant hour. I remember leaning over to tell him that the heavy metal record he had on was playing at the wrong speed. He just looked at me and said, “I know.”
Sean - The club always got tagged as eclectic, which missed the point. I’m obviously not a snob but I did get protective to the club, very much like “If you don’t get it, just fuck off”. The anything goes philosophy got very misinterpreted, not within that night, more with what came after and got lumped in with. There were great life affirming moments in the warm ups, they really did have that magical ‘all back to mine’ feel. This was a totally new twist, it did mean you could play a Northern record next to an acid record next to god knows what. What was really special was that constant changing of someone’s take on it, which, even if it didn’t quite work, you didn’t mind getting there early and being a bit disappointed cos you knew you were about to get delivered the goods by Tom & Ed. The guests had the feel of a support band – some are fantastic, some weren’t quite right, no one cared, you got there early and hung in there.
Nick - Some people from the dance world were quite snobby about it at the time, I remember someone describing it as like a student disco but that was so off the mark, it was serious about music and you were in the hands of people who knew their onions. I discovered some of my all time favourite records down there and the club shaped everything musical and beyond for lots of us in a way. We went from boys to men.
Mark – To say period when The Sunday Social ran is a bit of blur is an understatement. What I do remember is that dance culture had evolved into a fluffy bra fuck fest and indie rock was so drab it needed a massive injection of life. Being in there, seeing people’s faces as they walked down those stairs into the room for the first time was a picture. To hear two records played back to back that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else or maybe have no common obvious link with each other. The club had no boundaries, no barriers - rules are for fools. Without a shadow of a doubt as influential a club on my life and thinking as Shoom, it captured everything Wall Of Sound was and would become for me. The sights, the happy queuing, the people, the smiling, the sounds, the beats, the bleeps, the soul, the smells, the amyl… I’m sure with some help I could recapture some moments in more details… problem is I can only just about remember where I live and what my name is now.
Chloe - I always loved Jeff and Martin’s warm-up sets. They’re still my favorite DJs.
Nick - I loved getting in early and hearing Jeff, Martin and Robin from Heavenly kick it off. All those great soul records like “Love Don't Come No Stronger” by Jeff Perry, “I Never Dreamed” by The Cookies with records by Stephen Stills, Sister Sledge, the Congos. Just one great record after another. It wasn't jokey or throwaway, well mostly not, there’s always a few exceptions. It was quite modish I suppose, it had that quest for the great pop moment. It was inspired getting these great DJs to bring along 'the other box' and play the sort of records that they'd play at home to mates. And a breath of fresh air for them not to worry about keeping the floor busy like in big clubs with seamless mixing, they could just play whatever they liked.
Alexis - I remember the first time I went. I’d moved to London about two weeks before, I was at journalism school, spent ages trying to get in, got in, Jeff was DJing and he was playing ‘Friday Night August 14th’ by Funkadelic which I’d never heard played in a club before. I’d only been to either indie nights or hardcore raves or techno clubs before that. It was a Sunday evening, everyone was off their faces and there were pop stars everywhere. I was like, ‘Fuck me, this is what living in London’s like’. I was on acid as well. What a fucking night.
Sean - I got asked if I’d play a warm up on my birthday. I was so thrilled to be asked. Looking back, I always end up thinking that, even though I played it, where else could you hear The Beach Boys “Sail On Sailor” in a club in 1994?
Justin – It’s hard to pick one highlight really, or in fact piece together most evenings. It was such a mixture of styles, truly carrying the Balearic torch, perhaps the first club to really truly combine rock ‘n’ roll with the spirit of acid house. I always loved the sing-along aspects of The Social, where records like “La Tristesse Durera” by the Manics always got a huge reaction. Which is odd when you think it’s a song about a quadriplegic war veteran.
Nick - I had just finished reading Jon Savage's book about punk, 'England’s Dreaming', and The Social seemed to tie in with that too, rockers and ravers getting down together to reggae and northern soul. It felt like our generation’s “London Calling” moment, a big melting pot of everything you loved.
Ed - At that point, it was amazing for us to be playing with the likes of Andrew Weatherall, Ashley Beedle, Justin Robertson, people who’d names we’d read in magazines, suddenly they were warming up for us. Weatherall played an incredible version of “Radio Clash”. I remember he put his set together so brilliantly, he played completely differently to how he would at Sabresonic, which had happened earlier that year - that was the last time I would have heard him play. Justin was great, he played a lot of reggae and, I think, “Tour De France”. Jeff’s set was inspirational, he’d play some fantastic records, mad Italian house records you’d forgotten about, then things like Sister Sledge “Thinking Of You”.
Nick - Andrew Weatherall was amazing. The next day we all went out and tried to find the records he played that night. It took ages to track them down, it was much harder to find music then. There weren’t any blogs crapping on about it the next day.
Andrew Weatherall – it’s really nice that everyone remembers that set so well. I honestly can’t remember a fucking thing about it.
Justin – The Social was totally different from everywhere else I was playing around that time because it was truly eclectic and open-minded, it had such a fresh approach. It was also exciting seeing Tom & Ed developing and really coming into their own, they were making all these alien new sounds and combining them with the cream of musical universe. Also, there was more amyl down there. Lots more. It was just something wonderfully wrong to do on a Sunday.
Robin – Every week you kept hearing these mad stories of things that people had seen down there. Some guy who was letching girls had been set on fire with a bottle of amyl and a cigarette. Someone chucked a pint over him to put him out. Then there was the guy getting a blowjob on a pile of coats behind the decks. Not sure if it was the smell of the place or the fact that it was so packed to the bloody rafters, but the one thing that place wasn’t was sexy. Call me old fashioned but I’m not really sure how that one happened.
Pete - There were times when I’d pray for a night off but I was petrified that someone would come and knock on the door and drag me down so I would usually head down there before that happened. It was pretty addictive once you’d started going.
Wendy - Sunday night back then was early closing but no one was ready to go home at half ten. Sometimes we carried on at home, pissing our neighbours off. Once, an antique vase was bounced across a table on the floor above us by a Studio One record - it smashed on the floor. Monday mornings usually ended up hurting.
Sean – Things did take a turn for the worse for a while. Sunday nights were getting more and more sprawling and pretty soon I was missing from work on Mondays. I went through a succession of lies such as “I went out this weekend and I got spiked and I’ll never take acid again”. After a few weeks, Tuesdays started to disappear, then Wednesdays. After a while of not turning up, I got confronted by the head of Planet 24 on a Thursday morning and said “I was out of Sunday, jogging, when I got run over and I’ve been in a coma for 48 hours. I’ve had a scan and I’m alright now.”
Ed - Although looking back at it, the whole thing must seem very hedonistic, but for me it was never druggy, it was just an endless bottle of Budweiser.
Martin – The Social couldn’t really have gone on much longer at the Albany, I think we were all very aware of when it needed to stop, Heavenly and Tom & Ed. It was getting out of hand, numbers wise. On the last night, Brian (the landlord) estimated there were 1600 people either inside the building or outside trying to get in. The capacity of the place was about 160 comfortably. We usually got 300 in somehow. That last night, Brian was stood on the bar taking a panoramic photo of all the people locked out, probably to tell the brewery it was just another average night down The Albany.
Sean - By the end of the run, I’d questioned so much of what was going on in my life, I walked out of the job, thinking there was way more fun to be had, there was much more to give that just taking Keith Chegwin round people’s houses at 7am. Pretty soon after I was pursuing the All Back To Mine idea that I’d begun to formulate while at the club. It eventually became a TV series and an album. Guilty Pleasures has evolved out of that, really.
JDB – If there was one thing I learnt from going to The Albany it was never to take my mate Mitch Ikeda to a club, ever. He fell asleep in the sub-bass speakers clutching a bag of pills. I had to carry him all the way home. Never again. Also, it made me realise that Heavenly, after a few heavy knocks, were coming back, that there was something culturally important about the label. Personally I was gutted when it finished. I remember when it moved from Great Portland Street, it never really got that same spirit going, which was I was always sad about.
Chloe - These days I can’t make it through a bottle of wine on a Sunday night never mind a bottle of amyl. Nowadays something like that would kill me. But I’m glad I was there. Even if it’s the reason my memory’s shot to bits.
Ed - It was an amazing time for us. It was the first time we’d had our own club, we were making “Exit Planet Dust”, it was a really hot summer, which seems even more incredible to me now, sat here in the worst July weather ever. 1994 really was one of the greatest summers for me. The best thing about it all at the end of the day was the people I met, people I’ve been friends with now for 14 years.
JDB - If it were to happen now, definitely it would kill me. And I wasn’t even taking drugs.
Sean - One of the great gifts that life can bestow on you is to actually really have, for a brief moment, a place where you can go and literally lose yourself. It’s probably not recommended, but I was lucky to have that in that period of time. I’d never in a million years dream of going back, but I wouldn’t swap the experience for anything.
Stuart – The Social was far more important than I realised at the time. Most of those periods probably are. And when it started to celebrate itself, the creative part was probably ending. There’s that line in “Complete Control” by The Clash, “We’re controlled by the price of the first drugs we can find”. The Social became full of people shouting too much. It was the first place where I heard someone say “Got any beak?” Britpop was fuelled on cocaine and The Social also reflected that. But it definitely made a difference and it was a privilege to have been there.
Ed – Right now, I think I could probably cope with it every other week. Although, I’m quite a big fan of ‘Coronation Street’ on a Sunday… I’m sure I’d manage to catch up with that somehow.
Pete - I was driving past The Albany the other day in a cab and I was trying to explain to the driver about The Social and what had happened down there, how absolutely incredible the club had been, how many amazing nights had happened in such an unassuming place. I don’t think he was listening. The screen went up, metaphorically, Spinal Tap style….
Martin - Stopping it when we did was like a great band reaching it’s peak and splitting before everything goes downhill. It was a collective decision and we knew we’d done all we could. Stopping then was what made it legendary. If you go to The Albany now, spookily it’s the same. I remember going down there a year or two after the Sunday Social finished and it was exactly the same downstairs except for some reason they’d put a Northern Uproar poster up on the wall.
What I am sure of is this. The Heavenly Sunday Social took place in The Albany, the most unassuming of London venues, a basement room in a pre-furbished pub somewhere between the West End and the rest of the world. Although the resident DJs, Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands are now world famous as The Chemical Brothers, at the time they were The Dust Brothers, just 3 singles into a fledgling career, living on borrowed time name wise (the original owners asked for it back soon afterwards), recording their first album in the week days that preceded the club. Their supporting cast of record spinners included many of their peers, people like Andrew Weatherall, Justin Robertson, Tim Burgess - people who had long been inspirational to Ed & Tom. We at Heavenly came upon the idea for the club after hearing the Dust Brothers DJing in back rooms of clubs and at house parties – they played like their lives depended on it, week in week out. We weren’t club runners – we were a record company and a press office (I was doing press for the Dust Brothers third single, “My Mercury Mouth”, just around the time of the club). None of us could have predicted in our wildest dreams what would happen to Ed and Tom over the years that followed (and, really, why should we, we were way too caught up in the moment), but, at that exact point in time, we just knew that they were the greatest DJs we’d ever heard. It just so happens that that’s still the case.
As far as rock music was concerned, the summer of 1994 was already pretty much at fever pitch. Oasis were pure, untapped potential. “Definitely Maybe” was just round the corner – back then it really felt like they might turn out to be the greatest band ever (isn’t hindsight a terrible thing?) Blur’s “Girls and Boys” was still ubiquitous. Manic Street Preachers were somewhere between rock ‘n’ roll and a hard place – “The Holy Bible” was just out to universal praise but band member Richey Edwards was on a self destructive path out of the band. The long awaited second Stone Roses album was due in the Autumn; Primal Scream were headlining Reading Festival on the back of an unashamed rock album and a handful of very savvy dance floor remixes (the best of which was by – naturally - the Dust Brothers). Club wise, it was a different story. If you went out, you either had minimal techno, progressive house or glitzy super clubs playing pedestrian, uninteresting house music. Wherever you went, you were required to be part of a tribe, you dressed accordingly, you acted accordingly to get past the person on the door. Randomness was out. On the plus side, you were just starting to witness the first sightings of what would become known as ‘trip hop’ – Tricky and Portishead were putting out white labels, Mo’ Wax was just finding it’s feet.
Rather than try to recount the story as I remember it (that’s basically a load of blank pages with the occasional scribble in child’s crayon), I’ve tried to put together an eyewitness account of what happened in the 13 weeks that The Heavenly Sunday Social happened at The Albany. I asked a few of the battle-scarred veterans who lived through those times for their memories of the club – people who played down there and people who just hung out and propped up the bar. A few people I asked couldn’t answer on the grounds that memory failed them. Apologies for any vagaries or factual errors – if this was Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone, we’d have had to have regression therapy to retrieve the information for fact checking purposes. But that would have ended up tedious/libellous.
Socialites:
Martin Kelly – co-founder of Heavenly Recordings/The Heavenly Sunday Social/The Social bars
Wendy Barrett – co-conspirator at The Sunday Social, mother of Sonny & Danny (Heavenly - the next generation)
Ed Simons – one half of The Chemical Brothers (nee Dust Brothers), resident DJ at The Heavenly Sunday Social
James Dean Bradfield – singer/guitarist, Manic Street Preachers
Chloe Walsh –formerly of Heavenly Press Office, founder of Press Here Publicity
Justin Robertson – legendary DJ/musician, guest DJ at The Heavenly Sunday Social
Nick Dewey – former chef, co-founder of The Social bars, now a music manager
Sean Rowley – creator of Guilty Pleasures, guest DJ at Sunday Social
Robin Turner – co-creator The Heavenly Sunday Social/co-founder The Social/co-editor Socialism magazine
Pete Wiggs – one half of Saint Etienne, Social neighbour
Stuart Bailie – freelance writer and broadcaster living in Belfast, assistant editor of NME in ‘94
Mark Jones – founder Wall Of Sound Records
Alexis Petridis – music writer The Guardian/GQ
Martin – Heavenly seemed like it had been going for ages by 1994. I think we’d achieved a lot in a very short time. That year was a bit of a fallow period. Our Sony deal had ended and it was prior to our deal with Deconstruction. As a label Heavenly was in a kind of limbo, although there was still a real optimism about it. Although we weren’t a label, we were determined that we were going to be one, I think that’s what got us through.
Wendy - Jeff and I had got married the previous November and we were just running about having a lot of fun. We were living in a tiny flat in Shepherds Bush Road. We spent a lot of time playing pinball in the pub, then we’d head home and play records really loud and jump up and down a lot.
Ed – Me and Tom had just met everyone at Heavenly at the start of the year - Jeff and Wendy, Martin, Robin, Saint Etienne. We were really excited to have people to hang out with in London. Up to that point we didn’t really have a gang, we were still kind of halfway between London and Manchester, as we’d not long finished college. We were still going up there to play Jockey Slut parties on the weekends. That was the first summer that we got to play our kind of music to people in London. We’d played The Job Club a lot, where we’d met people like Richard Fearless. One of the things that really inspired us all to do a club was a party back at Jeff and Wendy’s flat after a Saint Etienne gig at the Shepherds Bush Empire. We all bonded over a load of brilliant records he was playing and the relationship kind of grew from there.
JDB – We’d just finished recording “The Holy Bible” and I’d just moved up to London, out from my parents’ house for the first time. I was feeling burnt, lonely and very Welsh.
Chloe – I’d just turned from 19 to 20 and had just moved out of a wonky little shared flat on Camden Parkway, a glorified cupboard really, to a flat in Chalk Farm with glorious cupboards. I was working at Creation Records in the kind of low anxiety job you can still do with 4 hours sleep, a raging hangover and a come down.
Justin - That summer I was up to my neck in rave. I think I was rolling with the Lionrock project, thinking about going live in an indie-dance style, I was DJing all over the place, and I was living in Manchester noticing a certain swagger on the street as Oasis began their march to world domination.
Nick – I’d been working a cook at a restaurant on Covent Garden Piazza by day and going out at night, weekender style. Coming into work on a Monday morning feeling awful was ok then because I was 24 and my main job was serving up burritos and nachos from a microwave to unsuspecting tourists.
Sean – I was working for Planet 24 as a producer on The Big Breakfast. My main responsibility was a slot called ‘Down Your Doorstep’ where I used to go up and knock on unsuspecting people’s doors at 7am, Keith Chegwin in tow, asking if we could do things like shear a herd of sheep in their bathroom, and other such TV pranks.
Martin –Robin came to myself and Jeff with the original idea to start a club with The Dust Brothers as headline residents at the start of summer. The ideas that he had back then ended up being very close to how the actual club was. None of us could have predicted how it was going to pan out, but in terms of the way it was envisaged, as a place where like-minded people could hang out and drink and hear great music, that’s pretty much how it was. We were kind of on the periphery of the dance music scene - we came from an indie background and loved dance music. I remember going to clubs like Merry England and places like that and just thinking that these clubs were full of wankers. That was the main reason for stopping going out clubbing, not enjoying being at them. It wasn’t like we didn’t like caning it, we just didn’t like the people we were forced to do it with. When the Social idea was hatched, it kind of hit the nail on the head for us. Sunday nights were perfect, it was such a tangent, something no one else was really doing. It did help that none of us had ‘proper jobs’. We were all in a place, at an age where we could take that chance on a Sunday night. For a while we were stuck for a venue, we had the idea and the DJs but no venue. We ended up choosing The Albany as I’d remembered going with Jeff there to see these Canadian comedians who were fucking awful. They were so shit we were pissing ourselves laughing all night. This was probably in 1989. I remember there was a vibe in the place, it looked like things could happen there in that basement room. When we went back to check it out, they’d kind of done it up and done it down – they’d roughed it up somehow. We went there to book the venue and the landlord, this no bullshit Aussie guy called Brian, asked us how many people we thought we’d get in. We said about 80 – 100 and he looked at us and said “In your fuckin’ dreams!”
Wendy - The idea of a weekly get together where you could hear great music was perfect. We all thought that it would be pretty low-key. We had no idea it would go so mental.
Robin – One of the first ideas we had was to produce a weekly newsletter (The Broadsheet) that would get handed out to everyone when they walked in. It had lists of people’s favourite records, charts from DJs, gossip from the previous weeks. It even had a weekly soap opera written by an old college friend of Ed & Tom’s (C.J. Magnet). This was before the internet, before people had mobile phones, when you had to actually talk to people to find things out. It was something we did to try to create a community, it told people what they’d missed and what they had to look forward to. I’d put it together on a shitty old word processor on the Friday, cut and paste pictures on and photocopy a load of them, hoping we’d make enough money on the night to pay me the twenty quid copy charge back.
JDB - I was drinking in a pub on Westbourne Grove on my own when I bumped into a pissed up Pete Wiggs and Robin Turner. They were crapping on about some guys called the Dust Brothers playing down this club they were involved in. Meeting them was kind of like reconnecting to my past with Heavenly. I though “Fuck it, I used to be a bar man at the Newbridge Memo, I used to get pissed there every Sunday. What could possibly go wrong?”
Pete - The Social started at a time that coincided with us being absent from the music industry for a while. I seem to remember just having fun and not doing much work for the whole time it was on. I was living in Cleveland Street in a studio flat, just one street away from the Albany. Myself and my then girlfriend had just moved into that flat when the Social started, I’d been to the pub before in the daytime but I didn’t know there was a room downstairs – some kind of mental sweatbox.
Sean - I remember first hearing about the Social at a party on Kensal Road. I bumped into Jeff. Our paths had crossed previously when I was head of TV promotions at London Records and we were working Flowered Up. Jeff handed me a badly photocopied flier for the first four weeks of his new club. I went on the second week. I bumped into Paolo Hewitt who had played the warm up at the first one and he said it had been a bit of a hoot and I should get down there.
Wendy – I did the door with our mates, Lou, Tash and Claire. It was three quid to get in and we had a rubber stamp with the Heavenly bird on. We had a little table at the bottom of the stairs, right behind where the DJs were. There was a big neon star there and another stairway that was fire exit out to the street.
Nick - One of the things that stood out at The Albany was the clock on the wall downstairs. It was permanently stuck at five to twelve. It was positioned on the wall behind where the decks were and there wasn't anything else to look at in terms of 'visuals' so that was the focal point. It became mysterious and seemed to be symbolic of something important even though no one knew what that might be.
Ed - The first one was pretty quiet, there were maybe 50 people, mostly people that we knew. The second week, Bob & Pete played it was roadblocked. The third week I remember I’d had a big night and I had to pull myself together to get down there. I ended up arriving pretty late. I got there and there was a queue right round the pub, people desperate to get in. It was a pretty easy club to pack, it wasn’t that big, but seeing that still felt pretty amazing. For the first few weeks, we were playing this mad party that happened every Sunday afternoon at a hairdresser’s in Kentish Town. We used to play on a roof terrace before slogging down the Albany. We put together a set of records that we stuck quite closely to every week, a kind of hodge podge of instrumental hip-hop and rare groove bits we’d picked up in Eastern Bloc in Manchester off (Richard) Moonboots, a lot of our own stuff. We were playing pretty mad records, stuff like “Dead Homiez” by Supersuckers, mad acid stuff like “Lobotomie” by Emmanuel Top. “Boops” by Sly & Robbie, “Tomorrow Never Knows”. We were pretty proud of the music we were playing, it was completely different to everything else out there. We’d just started going to the States to do Dust Brothers’ gigs, so we were picking up records each time. Jeff had made us a couple of tapes, it was that long ago that we were listening to C90s. Every time we went away we’d try to find a lot of the stuff off them. We started pretty much every week with “Strange Games And Funky Things”, a Love Unlimited Orchestra record, this strange, slow burn instrumental disco track that never quite peaked. It ended up being like a call to arms.
Martin - Once Tom & Ed started, you’d look around the room and the look on people’s faces was pure elation, I guess it’s like what people say the early days of acid house were like – a communal spirit. You definitely had that feeling that you were doing something that other people didn’t know about yet, something special, something illicit. I remember having that feeling at Shoom, you knew the outside world was unawares that you had a secret that you wanted everyone else to know, but at the same time you weren’t going to be the one to tell anybody ‘cos then it would be out.
Pete – I’d been with Robin to see The Dust Brothers at a house party near Finsbury Park a few months before the club started I think it was one of those nights I wanted to stay in but got press ganged into going out. As soon as they came on I thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard. Every single night at The Social was like that. The music was so refreshing for the time, no one else was playing records like that, things like the Manics, their own records, soul records, hip hop. It wasn’t at a blistering pace, which at the time was quite a different thing to do. Also they didn’t have a scary DJ mentality, which seemed to be all the rage at the time, they were such nice blokes to be around.
Stuart - The NME student kids were all wittering on about Megatripolis and Club Dog, like it was the start of a new era. I didn’t get it. But The Social was exciting in a very different way. It was happening on a night when people didn’t normally go out. A lot of the emphasis was on people becoming mates. There was an interesting mix of cool faces, music fanatics and minor hooligans – bits of that Loaded culture slipping in. A lot of good haircuts, white jeans and Harrington jackets, as I remember. I imagine the ’60s clubs like the Bag O’ Nails and the Speakeasy were a bit like this.
Nick - It was funny because it was in the days before all day drinking on a Sunday was legal so you'd go for lunch at the pub, then end up going back to someone’s house before finally making it to the club. It was all over the place and made for a crazed atmosphere.
Justin – First impressions of The Social? It was the last days of the Roman Empire! Like the Queen Vic meets Studio 54 with Bobby Gillespie as licensee. I wasn’t really surprised it exploded so quickly for Tom & Ed, they had such a unique sound from the start, it was so intoxicating, you knew something truly great was happening – they were an irresistible force!
Pete - The first week, someone dragged one of the chairs from the upstairs into the middle of the floor, like a kind of makeshift podium. It became a thing that had to be done every week, there was a weird determination to place the chair in the middle of the floor, then people would get on it and dance. We’d head down there early every week, we’d all meet upstairs before the doors opened. I remember we were used to drink Flaming Drambuies before it started, which is really naff but it seemed to start that night off pretty well. It took a while to get to the right level of drunkenness needed to be getting on a chair in the middle of a packed dancefloor in a grotty pub. The Drambuies probably helped.
Wendy - When it got really busy the queue went up the stairs and into the pub. If we had any mates we wanted to get in we’d sneak them in the fire exit. People seemed to come from everywhere. Tash eventually got sacked from the door for letting everyone in for free. We cashed up in a little room behind the bar and someone worked out how much we could pay the DJs. The warm up DJs usually got fifty quid. We had a great spot on the door because it overlooked the dance floor. We had a never-ending supply of beer and by the end of the night we’d be up on the little table dancing. Both staircases would be packed with people.
Sean - The thing that sticks in my mind most is the amyl run (RT - at the point where there was £30 profit in the till, someone was sent in a wait and return cab to buy three bottles of amyl from Old Compton Street – this happened every week). That was genius. I remember walking in one night to a heavy stench of rotten socks, only to discover that it was amyl nitrate. I quickly learnt just how important amyl was to the night – you’d time your amyl blast to coincide with records that sounded like they’d been beamed in from outer space. Tom & Ed’s remix of “Bug Powder Dust” by Bomb The Bass really represents that part of it, you’d really try to time your blast to coincide with that one.
Nick – One night down there, I’d been chewing this African twig called Kat all night, thinking this was the best thing since sliced bread. No one else seemed to be too taken with it though, which I thought was picky coming from people sniffing amyl nitrate like it was going out of fashion.
JDB - I remember being there and thinking that “Chemical Beats” was the best thing I’d heard since “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” or “Fear Of A Black Planet”. Also, “Under The Influence Of Love” by Love Unlimited. I’d never heard a record like that played at that volume. It made me think that they were trying to rock ‘n’ roll-isize everything, which I thought was brilliant.
Martin – I really remember records like “Live Forever” and “Weekender” standing out, Tom & Ed playing them alongside their own records, those were the points where you’d really stop and go “Fuck!” I remember someone coming up to me and going “What the fuck is this???” It was “Tomorrow Never Knows”, they were convinced it was some kind of remix, it was the original, played off the original vinyl, just out of its normal context. The fact that it was being played alongside mad acid records, well - it is the original mad acid record. Tom & Ed had the ability to make all those records meld together, that was their secret.
Nick - I was going to clubs all the time then which was great but I was ready for something different. There were some amazing clubs around like Sabresonic and David Holmes' Sugarsweet night in Belfast, but they were proper banging techno all-nighters. The Social was like a response to all of that. In a way it was what I imagined Sabresonic would be like before I went down there, the place to go and discover the source of it all, the inspiration for all that incredible music that people like Weatherall and Primal Scream were making and talking about at the time. And it was important because it's had a lasting influence, the unsung sister to Britpop in a way, the Velvet Underground to Britpop's Beatles; everyone went on to start labels or clubs or start making records of their own.
Chloe – I’d grown up in Glasgow where I’d gone to a lot of clubs, but I hadn’t really been to many since I’d lived in London. The few that I’d been to in London didn’t really have the same energy as places like the Sub Club and the Arches in Glasgow. Or the Hacienda in Manchester. There wasn’t the same sense of shared euphoria, maybe because there wasn’t such a loyally regular crowd so that lightening bolt of excitement when a longstanding club favorite was played was missing. The London clubs I went to seemed soulless by comparison. The atmosphere in The Albany was the closest thing to the Slam DJs’ in their peak at the Sub Club I’d found, which was my favorite club up to that point. Did it affect the way I thought about clubs? Well, I’d never seen poppers on the dancefloor before. So it changed the way I thought about poppers.
Martin - Really quickly it became like a religion, as soon as anyone went once, they were going to be going every week from then on. That’s why the numbers grew so quickly, people would come back, and they’d bring a few friends, before long it was road blocked.
Robin – The idea initially was that the club would only run for four weeks, every Sunday in August. After three weeks, we knew we had to keep it going, we were having too much fun. We hit the phones hard the next week to try to corral anyone we could into playing – I don’t think anyone we rang turned us down, no matter how far they had to come. Word must have spread pretty fast.
Stuart - The early ’90s had Kurt Cobain, Richey Manic and PJ Harvey, all grim as anything. The required reading was Prozac Nation. Britpop was a bit of a holiday from that and The Social reflected some of that escape. It was also the place where people like The Dust Brothers could work out a new aesthetic. I remember suggesting to the paper that someone should write about this, and they looked at me like I was mad.
Ed - Playing down there was always very intense, there was no booth, and the decks were on a table. You knew that if it had been a sunny day it would get a bit rowdy – the decks would jump all over the place which was a total pain in the arse.
Nick – There was an anticipation for the next record that was unlike any other club I’d been to. The records that Tom and Ed were playing and making at that time seemed to have been beamed in from another planet. Every week they'd come straight down from the studio clutching some new classic to try out alongside all those great remixes they were making at the time for the Scream, Bomb The Bass, The Prodigy. They’d play those with all these mad hip-hop instrumentals, psychedelic rock tracks and stuff like the Leftfield remix of Renegade Soundwave. It got heavier and more intense as the set went on. It was more like a rock 'n' roll show in the way it exploded from one track into the next, but at the same time totally unlike like any band you'd ever seen. I just remember thinking that this was the music I had been waiting to hear all my life.
JDB – It is weird if I think about, it was just a really strange mixture of people down there, people like Tim Burgess, Oasis, Bob & Pete, Mani, Tricky, Paul Weller. You’d look round and Beth Orton would be dancing on the bar. It seemed like a new gateway out of the whole Manchester thing, the last real ‘scene’ that had happened. Also, it was on a Sunday. Sunday is always a good piss up day.
Robin – I remember one week finding myself at the bar, stood next to Paul Weller. I’d never been a Jam fan so didn’t have that slightly deranged obsession that a lot of blokes my age seem to have. A polo shirted, modish guy stood next to him and blurted out “Mate, ‘All Mod Cons’ made me the man I am today.” Without missing a beat, Weller looked him up and down and said with notable distain, “What, that’s supposed to make me proud?” I immediately asked him what he was drinking. The answer, obviously, was Lowenbrau.
Ed- Tom’s family were a massive part of it from the first week, his wife Vanessa and his brother Huw, they were mad party heads and they found some like minded people in Heavenly and the people who made it down there every week.
Nick - One night a light bulb went off on my head down there. Not metaphorically, the bulb literally exploded onto my head as I was walking to the toilet. I’m not sure how that happened but I do remember everyone finding it hilarious, falling about laughing, with me feeling like a bit of a buffoon. Ultimately I was very proud the following week when I saw it mentioned in The Broadsheet.
Pete - There were a lot of weeks when half the club piled back to our flat, it was pretty hard to avoid carrying on the party back there. The off-licenses on the corner got to know us so we could usually get booze after hours. I was pretty embarrassed to bring people back to the flat mainly as it was so small but also because we had a really young kitten that was shitting everywhere and stinking the place out. No one seemed to care though. Most people’s sense of smell seemed to have given up on them by that point.
Ed - A lot of people felt very isolated from clubs around that time, this was at a time when clubs like Ministry Of Sound were massive. It wasn’t like I didn’t like going to the Ministry, half the time I’d have been in there on the Friday before the Social anyway, it was just that people wanted something smaller and more intimate, something with an incredible atmosphere. That’s what it became very quickly.
Chloe - You had to really want to squeeze in there. It wasn’t for the lighthearted. I remember thinking that they couldn’t possibly squeeze any more people in each week but they always did until it got to the point where people were just jumping up and down on the stairs, and at the top of the stairs, in the upstairs bar, and outside on the street. If it had kept going it would have taken over Great Portland Street tube station.
Nick - I threw myself in with both feet. You had to really, it was all or nothing. It wasn't the sort of place where you could stand at the bar trying to look cool. Once you were in you were in and there was no escape. You went to the bog at the start of the night because there was no way you'd get all the way over the other side of the room when it was in full swing. I’ve been back to the Albany since and it's only about two feet from one side of the basement to the other so they must have really packed them in. There wasn't really a dancefloor, more of a pile-on. It was a bit like when you play football at primary school and you all form a big swarm that moves around the pitch with no proper passing or tackling just everyone hacking away at the ball. It wasn't really dancing. By the end it would be like the sleeve of the Pogues' "Rum, Sodomy and The Lash", you’d be clinging on for dear life. And the heat was unbelievable, you'd come out soaked to the skin, it was like something from ‘Tenko’. I can't imagine anything worse now but at the time I loved every second of it.
Sean - Having spent the majority of my life going to clubs, from slightly naff suburban soul boy beginnings all the way through to acid house, I’d always felt like a person on the outside looking in. I took what I wanted from those clubs. These were all nights that I went to and had my moments. Nothing came close to going into the cellar of The Albany, hearing that music and forging relationships with people who have since shaped the way my life has gone since. Sounds dramatic but it’s all true. It’s probably worth mentioning that I ended up going out with one of the girls who did the door (Tash) for the next three years.
Chloe – I’m pretty sure I went to almost all of them but I can only remember about 10 minutes of any of them. 10 minutes total, not 10 consecutive minutes. My memory is murky. As was the club. It was rowdy and sweaty and frenzied. I first laid eyes on a lot of people who would soon become some of the very best friends I’ve ever had... all red-faced, covered in sweat, splashing beer all over themselves as they pogo’d on top of tables.
Pete – One of many reasons why The Social was great because there wasn’t any of the usual crap you got at clubs – there was no guest list, there wasn’t any door policy, it was egalitarian. It did mean it was horribly packed... no one really cared as long as they were inside. I remember when I played records down there with Bob. I’d only just started DJing just around that time. It was a fairly wayward set, but people were asking what things were, there was no heckling. We were made to feel very welcome, it was great to be playing stuff that wasn’t house music and not get some idiot having a go at you.
Sean - Of all the DJs who played before Ed and Tom, Tricky was the one no one who saw it will ever forget, one of the most insane sets of records I’ve ever heard…
Martin - When we booked Tricky, I don’t think any of us realised just how mental it would be. He’d been coming down for weeks as a punter and we were all pretty in awe of his records. We offered him a slot on the final night. David Holmes was on the same night, he refused to play after Tricky, thinking he’d play some kind of messianic set that couldn’t possibly be followed. Tricky played for one very bizarre, very brilliant hour. I remember leaning over to tell him that the heavy metal record he had on was playing at the wrong speed. He just looked at me and said, “I know.”
Sean - The club always got tagged as eclectic, which missed the point. I’m obviously not a snob but I did get protective to the club, very much like “If you don’t get it, just fuck off”. The anything goes philosophy got very misinterpreted, not within that night, more with what came after and got lumped in with. There were great life affirming moments in the warm ups, they really did have that magical ‘all back to mine’ feel. This was a totally new twist, it did mean you could play a Northern record next to an acid record next to god knows what. What was really special was that constant changing of someone’s take on it, which, even if it didn’t quite work, you didn’t mind getting there early and being a bit disappointed cos you knew you were about to get delivered the goods by Tom & Ed. The guests had the feel of a support band – some are fantastic, some weren’t quite right, no one cared, you got there early and hung in there.
Nick - Some people from the dance world were quite snobby about it at the time, I remember someone describing it as like a student disco but that was so off the mark, it was serious about music and you were in the hands of people who knew their onions. I discovered some of my all time favourite records down there and the club shaped everything musical and beyond for lots of us in a way. We went from boys to men.
Mark – To say period when The Sunday Social ran is a bit of blur is an understatement. What I do remember is that dance culture had evolved into a fluffy bra fuck fest and indie rock was so drab it needed a massive injection of life. Being in there, seeing people’s faces as they walked down those stairs into the room for the first time was a picture. To hear two records played back to back that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else or maybe have no common obvious link with each other. The club had no boundaries, no barriers - rules are for fools. Without a shadow of a doubt as influential a club on my life and thinking as Shoom, it captured everything Wall Of Sound was and would become for me. The sights, the happy queuing, the people, the smiling, the sounds, the beats, the bleeps, the soul, the smells, the amyl… I’m sure with some help I could recapture some moments in more details… problem is I can only just about remember where I live and what my name is now.
Chloe - I always loved Jeff and Martin’s warm-up sets. They’re still my favorite DJs.
Nick - I loved getting in early and hearing Jeff, Martin and Robin from Heavenly kick it off. All those great soul records like “Love Don't Come No Stronger” by Jeff Perry, “I Never Dreamed” by The Cookies with records by Stephen Stills, Sister Sledge, the Congos. Just one great record after another. It wasn't jokey or throwaway, well mostly not, there’s always a few exceptions. It was quite modish I suppose, it had that quest for the great pop moment. It was inspired getting these great DJs to bring along 'the other box' and play the sort of records that they'd play at home to mates. And a breath of fresh air for them not to worry about keeping the floor busy like in big clubs with seamless mixing, they could just play whatever they liked.
Alexis - I remember the first time I went. I’d moved to London about two weeks before, I was at journalism school, spent ages trying to get in, got in, Jeff was DJing and he was playing ‘Friday Night August 14th’ by Funkadelic which I’d never heard played in a club before. I’d only been to either indie nights or hardcore raves or techno clubs before that. It was a Sunday evening, everyone was off their faces and there were pop stars everywhere. I was like, ‘Fuck me, this is what living in London’s like’. I was on acid as well. What a fucking night.
Sean - I got asked if I’d play a warm up on my birthday. I was so thrilled to be asked. Looking back, I always end up thinking that, even though I played it, where else could you hear The Beach Boys “Sail On Sailor” in a club in 1994?
Justin – It’s hard to pick one highlight really, or in fact piece together most evenings. It was such a mixture of styles, truly carrying the Balearic torch, perhaps the first club to really truly combine rock ‘n’ roll with the spirit of acid house. I always loved the sing-along aspects of The Social, where records like “La Tristesse Durera” by the Manics always got a huge reaction. Which is odd when you think it’s a song about a quadriplegic war veteran.
Nick - I had just finished reading Jon Savage's book about punk, 'England’s Dreaming', and The Social seemed to tie in with that too, rockers and ravers getting down together to reggae and northern soul. It felt like our generation’s “London Calling” moment, a big melting pot of everything you loved.
Ed - At that point, it was amazing for us to be playing with the likes of Andrew Weatherall, Ashley Beedle, Justin Robertson, people who’d names we’d read in magazines, suddenly they were warming up for us. Weatherall played an incredible version of “Radio Clash”. I remember he put his set together so brilliantly, he played completely differently to how he would at Sabresonic, which had happened earlier that year - that was the last time I would have heard him play. Justin was great, he played a lot of reggae and, I think, “Tour De France”. Jeff’s set was inspirational, he’d play some fantastic records, mad Italian house records you’d forgotten about, then things like Sister Sledge “Thinking Of You”.
Nick - Andrew Weatherall was amazing. The next day we all went out and tried to find the records he played that night. It took ages to track them down, it was much harder to find music then. There weren’t any blogs crapping on about it the next day.
Andrew Weatherall – it’s really nice that everyone remembers that set so well. I honestly can’t remember a fucking thing about it.
Justin – The Social was totally different from everywhere else I was playing around that time because it was truly eclectic and open-minded, it had such a fresh approach. It was also exciting seeing Tom & Ed developing and really coming into their own, they were making all these alien new sounds and combining them with the cream of musical universe. Also, there was more amyl down there. Lots more. It was just something wonderfully wrong to do on a Sunday.
Robin – Every week you kept hearing these mad stories of things that people had seen down there. Some guy who was letching girls had been set on fire with a bottle of amyl and a cigarette. Someone chucked a pint over him to put him out. Then there was the guy getting a blowjob on a pile of coats behind the decks. Not sure if it was the smell of the place or the fact that it was so packed to the bloody rafters, but the one thing that place wasn’t was sexy. Call me old fashioned but I’m not really sure how that one happened.
Pete - There were times when I’d pray for a night off but I was petrified that someone would come and knock on the door and drag me down so I would usually head down there before that happened. It was pretty addictive once you’d started going.
Wendy - Sunday night back then was early closing but no one was ready to go home at half ten. Sometimes we carried on at home, pissing our neighbours off. Once, an antique vase was bounced across a table on the floor above us by a Studio One record - it smashed on the floor. Monday mornings usually ended up hurting.
Sean – Things did take a turn for the worse for a while. Sunday nights were getting more and more sprawling and pretty soon I was missing from work on Mondays. I went through a succession of lies such as “I went out this weekend and I got spiked and I’ll never take acid again”. After a few weeks, Tuesdays started to disappear, then Wednesdays. After a while of not turning up, I got confronted by the head of Planet 24 on a Thursday morning and said “I was out of Sunday, jogging, when I got run over and I’ve been in a coma for 48 hours. I’ve had a scan and I’m alright now.”
Ed - Although looking back at it, the whole thing must seem very hedonistic, but for me it was never druggy, it was just an endless bottle of Budweiser.
Martin – The Social couldn’t really have gone on much longer at the Albany, I think we were all very aware of when it needed to stop, Heavenly and Tom & Ed. It was getting out of hand, numbers wise. On the last night, Brian (the landlord) estimated there were 1600 people either inside the building or outside trying to get in. The capacity of the place was about 160 comfortably. We usually got 300 in somehow. That last night, Brian was stood on the bar taking a panoramic photo of all the people locked out, probably to tell the brewery it was just another average night down The Albany.
Sean - By the end of the run, I’d questioned so much of what was going on in my life, I walked out of the job, thinking there was way more fun to be had, there was much more to give that just taking Keith Chegwin round people’s houses at 7am. Pretty soon after I was pursuing the All Back To Mine idea that I’d begun to formulate while at the club. It eventually became a TV series and an album. Guilty Pleasures has evolved out of that, really.
JDB – If there was one thing I learnt from going to The Albany it was never to take my mate Mitch Ikeda to a club, ever. He fell asleep in the sub-bass speakers clutching a bag of pills. I had to carry him all the way home. Never again. Also, it made me realise that Heavenly, after a few heavy knocks, were coming back, that there was something culturally important about the label. Personally I was gutted when it finished. I remember when it moved from Great Portland Street, it never really got that same spirit going, which was I was always sad about.
Chloe - These days I can’t make it through a bottle of wine on a Sunday night never mind a bottle of amyl. Nowadays something like that would kill me. But I’m glad I was there. Even if it’s the reason my memory’s shot to bits.
Ed - It was an amazing time for us. It was the first time we’d had our own club, we were making “Exit Planet Dust”, it was a really hot summer, which seems even more incredible to me now, sat here in the worst July weather ever. 1994 really was one of the greatest summers for me. The best thing about it all at the end of the day was the people I met, people I’ve been friends with now for 14 years.
JDB - If it were to happen now, definitely it would kill me. And I wasn’t even taking drugs.
Sean - One of the great gifts that life can bestow on you is to actually really have, for a brief moment, a place where you can go and literally lose yourself. It’s probably not recommended, but I was lucky to have that in that period of time. I’d never in a million years dream of going back, but I wouldn’t swap the experience for anything.
Stuart – The Social was far more important than I realised at the time. Most of those periods probably are. And when it started to celebrate itself, the creative part was probably ending. There’s that line in “Complete Control” by The Clash, “We’re controlled by the price of the first drugs we can find”. The Social became full of people shouting too much. It was the first place where I heard someone say “Got any beak?” Britpop was fuelled on cocaine and The Social also reflected that. But it definitely made a difference and it was a privilege to have been there.
Ed – Right now, I think I could probably cope with it every other week. Although, I’m quite a big fan of ‘Coronation Street’ on a Sunday… I’m sure I’d manage to catch up with that somehow.
Pete - I was driving past The Albany the other day in a cab and I was trying to explain to the driver about The Social and what had happened down there, how absolutely incredible the club had been, how many amazing nights had happened in such an unassuming place. I don’t think he was listening. The screen went up, metaphorically, Spinal Tap style….
Martin - Stopping it when we did was like a great band reaching it’s peak and splitting before everything goes downhill. It was a collective decision and we knew we’d done all we could. Stopping then was what made it legendary. If you go to The Albany now, spookily it’s the same. I remember going down there a year or two after the Sunday Social finished and it was exactly the same downstairs except for some reason they’d put a Northern Uproar poster up on the wall.
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