Clubs and nightlife have always been key spaces for subcultures and countercultures to take shape. Dancefloors after dark offer an arena for exploration of the self as well as the collective, and have fuelled resistance and activist movements many times throughout history. They’re also spaces where connections are made and communities built, which is as important as ever in a society increasingly defined by individualism.
The underground London nightlife is filled with exciting club nights that are home to thriving subcultural communities, but how do you balance successfully running and growing your night while cultivating a community and keeping it protected? We spoke with one of the people behind the relatively new rave Nameless Entities, someone involved in the 90s rave scene, and the founder of the well-established queer club night Riposte to hear their thoughts and perspectives on the topic.
“I think it's nice to grow as an event, and it's nice to see success, but when something grows and you attract more of the general public, it does jeopardise the idea of having a safer space because of certain types of people that will be attracted to the event,” says Miles E.G, who is one of the founders of Nameless Entities, a multi-genre alternative rave which has been running since November last year.
Nameless Entities x Audible Mania x Tinashe Collaboration Forest Rave I Images by @rati0head
Nameless Entities started as a celebration for Miles’ friend Hayley, who wanted to put on a rave for her birthday, which became more successful than expected. Since then, they have done three more events, one of which took place in a squat in collaboration with Tinashe (@bbyb0ng), and another which was a forest rave created together with Audible Mania and Tinashe again. Community plays an important part in why they exist.
“It's a trans-founded rave, me and Hayley are both trans. We want to provide a safer space for queer people to come and dance, and we want to showcase people's art and give people platforms so that they can grow as well. We want to have sort of a safe queer, creative community that we can support and we can care for,” Miles says. “We need these events. We need safer spaces because as a trans man, I've been to non-queer events, and I've wanted to dress how I like to dress, and I wanted to dance how I like to dance, and I've gone with my friends who are femme presenting as well, and they dress alternative, they look queer, and then they'll get comments, or they'll get touched up.”
Nameless Entities I Left image by @m2snappy I Right image by @adriiianme
Keeping a space safe is not necessarily uncomplicated though, especially while growing as an event. Part of it, according to Miles, is being clear and transparent about the vision and identity of the event while promoting it. “We’ve got a mission statement; we state what we aim to do with our raves and with our events. And it's about being transparent about the type of event we are, being transparent about what we want to achieve, being transparent about the people that come. And the designs and the themes of our events are all public, and those will attract certain types of people and push away people that we don't want coming to our raves anyway.”
"A bit of gatekeeping is good"
But navigating keeping your community protected while also growing it by inviting more people in is a balancing act. “You don't want to limit it from people that aren’t part of the community but really want to be. But then at the same time, a bit of gatekeeping is good. I want to be able to gatekeep it so that certain people can't come, but people who are not going to disrespect the space can, because we need more people like that. We need to expand the community. Everyone deserves the right to have a safer space to dance, a safer space to meet people like them. I've met so many people, made so many friends through queer raves, and I have met so many people that I know and love now, but at the same time it is difficult.
“It goes against the idea of the scene being an inclusive space for people if we start being like ‘Oh, you don't look like this, you don't dress a certain way, you can't come in’. But then, unfortunately, it is those people who look out of place in the rave that end up causing proper issues. But it's bad to stereotype. That is hypocritical when a lot of us in the scene, if not all of us, have experienced some kind of rejection because of our sexuality or gender identity or the way that we present ourselves, and we just want a space where we're not going to have to think about that.”
Nameless Entities x Audible Mania x Tinashe Collaboration Forest Rave I Image by @synapsefirer
And although growth can mean more exciting opportunities and the opening of doors for people who have yet to find their place of belonging, there is also the risk that the original community gets dissolved. Miles says: “There have been events where I've been going to them for quite a while, and I've seen how, over time, they become more mainstream, they become less queer. And there will be these random people pulling up and acting in ways that go against the idea of this safer queer space, therefore making the people that initially found peace and comfort within these raves feel less safe. And these events are great, and they have been great, and their music is great, their organisers are great. However, when you grow as an event, you're going to attract more of the general public. And that's not always a bad thing, but if initially it was made to accommodate certain people and give certain people a safer space, when this starts happening and there's growth, then, you know...”
"... you then have this dilemma of 'okay, do we want to grow [...] or do we want to stay as we are [...]?'"
Nevertheless, gaining in popularity and being able to accommodate bigger audiences usually means that you’re doing something right, and it makes sense to want to see how this momentum can be used to evolve your event. “We want to see if we're able to book something like Electrowerkz or The Cause in the future, which is ambitious, but I don't think there's anything wrong with being ambitious,” Miles says. “But obviously, therefore, you attract more people, you attract more random people, and it can maybe get in the way of some things. So you then have this dilemma of 'okay, do we want to grow and do we want to achieve bigger goals or do we want to stay as we are, but potentially that puts us at more of a standstill?'.”
[La Fomo note: Since the time of this interview, Miles has decided to step away from Nameless Entities, choosing instead to turn his attention towards starting queer-focused live music events.]
Questions around scale, and how you maintain something at a large scale in a sustainable way while simultaneously curating a community have been around for a long time. Lucy Wills, artist, technologist, and founder of Health Heard, who was involved in the London rave scene in the 90s, says: “The rave scene was about scale. You know, it happened at a crazy scale, and then it dissipated again. So I think there are times when things scale up and times when things scale down, and it's interesting to see when they scale down, how people talk about the scale up.”
"The rave scene was about scale"
She was part of the people working and volunteering for Megatripolis, a festival-like underground club night which ran weekly in central London for several years at the start of the 90s. The club attracted thousands of people every week, but the scale made it hard to keep up with. “[Running Megatripolis] couldn't be done without volunteers and people on low wages. And over time people started to complain and say ‘we need to turn things around, we need to be more professional’. So there was management brought in, and it kind of worked, but there were things they did that had unintended consequences. The most significant is that they cut the guest list by about two-thirds and raised the entry price. Our guest list was what kept the scene so alive and diverse, as it meant that cost wasn't a barrier, and the people who really wanted to be there could be there.”
Still, Megatripolis was a place where connections were made and communities created. Lucy says: “It was an extraordinary hub for people to come together. A lot of people who were then, and are still, really involved in environmental campaigning met there as well, because activism was seen as part of it. On one level, it could be seen as hugely decadent, and everything that the papers said, you know, sex and drugs and repetitive beats. But on the other level, it was a philosophy shop, an education.”
"... we came to clubs to find our people, and we did"
Whereas parts of the early rave scene had a uniform, “kickers and white jeans and all being on the same drug”, Lucy found freedom in working with Megatripolis and later with decorating the main stage and drag bar at Heaven. “It was a real gift to have been around where it was okay to be different then, we helped make it okay to be weird. And I think ultimately, that's what subcultures are about. And if they're about being weird and different, they're about being neurodivergent. I think the other thing that needs to be made clear about the rave scene is almost everybody who was involved behind the scenes was neurodivergent, and that was partly because that made us good at music, organising things, connecting with people, but also because at the time the culture, schools, academia, our families were not supportive. So we came to the rave scene, we came to clubs to find our people, and we did.”
Lucy thinks that one of the biggest changes in the underground club and rave culture is the change in scale, from the time when “mega-clubs” were all the hype to the smaller scenes of today. “It's all fragmented, I think that's an artefact of losing the big central spaces, but also everybody connecting online, because that facilitates these sort of micro scenes that we've got now. And in some ways, actually, we wanted everybody to decentralise. But then you also kind of lose that sense of the collective movement. I'm also seeing other festivals experience the same cycle as Megatripolis went through. Where it starts, everybody chips in to make it great, and then people just can't keep up that momentum of volunteering and participating. And then it fades away.”
A contemporary London event that has seen huge growth but shows no signs of fading away is Riposte, a queer art rave. Starting as a house party offering artists a space to show their work, Riposte soon outgrew its home, with people queuing on the street to get in. Their founder, Eden Topall-Rabanes, says: “Quite naturally, we decided against going to a gallery space and thought of investing in the clubs with our art. January 2019, the first Riposte in a club was born, and since then almost all events have been sold out.”
"We wanted to create a safer space for ourselves and by extension to others in our circles"
When moving to a club space, they had the ambition of going big from the start. “All of this is for and by alternative queer people, with a majority of gender non-conforming babes in the organising team. We wanted to create a safer space for ourselves and by extension to others in our circles.
“We are very much part of this community, we go out and we live it daily. We are very down to earth and speaking about the problems we are facing, our everyday thoughts, and it is incredible to see it resonate with that many people. It is also important to say that when we started, we felt like the only rave with an aim to be big – more than 300 people – that we knew of who were catering specifically to trans, non-binary and gender fuck people.
“We were adamant about it and people told us that it wasn’t going to work, the gender fuck community was too small to do a big rave. We wanted to be big as we wanted a playroom, a performance space, a dancefloor, a chill area without loud music so there were places to chill that weren’t just the smoking area, we also wanted to pay artists well and to have art installations. All that requiring a lot of money and space.”
"We communicate often and loudly about being a queer rave and what this entails"
Community has always been at the core of their work, and is one of the reasons they think they’ve grown so much: “We provide so much care, for ages we created group chats on Instagram for people coming for the first time and wanting to meet new people. Can you imagine the time it took to add one hundred people one by one through their username to the group chats? But by doing so we had people following each other and keeping in touch much more than on WhatsApp. We constantly do these kinds of initiatives for people to connect, and through that it makes the event grow.”
With the growth, the way they work with the community aspects of the night have evolved. “More people means more care and learning on how to do it better, more professionally. We got trained in accessibility and improved our policies, internal trainings, access documents etcetera. It also means that our communication about our ethos and our door policies needs to be stronger as it isn’t anymore just friends coming through the doors. We communicate often and loudly about being a queer rave and what this entails, putting queer in all our communication.”
Riposte I Image by @999999999boyscrysendpics
Protecting the community and making sure its identity remains while inviting new people in is also something they actively put work and consideration into, both while promoting the night and behind the scenes. “We have monthly meetings and a welfare lead whose main job is to think about community safety. We put money into this and have it as a priority. We never, as we grew, accepted articles in newspapers or big media pages, although now we allow it a bit more as we are very sure of our policies and we have a very strong community that helps us keeping the events safe.
“We are not scared of advertising it a bit more as we believe that a lot of queers would really benefit from hearing and experiencing this space instead of thinking that the only scene is in Soho. I wish I had heard of the raves earlier myself! In our promotion we speak about our safer space policy rules, but it also goes to less visible things like making sure that our artist bookings and teams are diverse, that we show diverse people in the pictures, that we train the clubs we work with, that we make sure on the night all toilets are gender neutral etcetera.”
On the question of whether growth is always positive, or if there’s a risk of growing too much, they say: “It really depends how one does it, the event will change, it depends what the promoter wants and what is the purpose of the night. For us, it has been positive as we can pay the queers we employ and help artists paying their rent. It is quite incredible.”
Evidently, there’s not a one-size-fits-all response for what upscaling does with underground club nights. However, maintaining a strong and clearly signalled identity and keeping the community values at the core seems to be fundamental, and this allows us as attendees to help out. By making sure we’re aware of the vision and policies at the core of the night, we can self-reflect to figure out if this is an event meant for us to attend, and if it is, ensure that we understand how to fully respect the space. Organisers in the London subcultural nightlife are working hard to nurture communities, and as guests and participants, we can do our part by actively considering which spaces we insert ourselves in and how we do it – allowing the underground club scene to thrive.
[La Fomo note: Riposte’s next event is on 10 January, it’s a Witchcraft-themed rave that will feature 45 artists, and you can get tickets here!]
Riposte I Image by @999999999boyscrysendpics
