There’s one simple question when it comes to finding out what motivates a club promoter, and that’s, “Why do you do it?”. The answer is never short!
Rob Johnson tells QX what motivates him to promote club night One More Time at VFD, Dalston.
He told QX …
I’d been wanting to do this night for a few years – the mid-late 90’s were when I started getting into music and there was so much pop and accessible dance music around then – come the late 90’s there would be several big new pop release each week and record labels were going all guns blazing. Yet given there was so much of it, only a handful of songs managed to stick out from the rest and still get played at retro nights.
I wanted to give some justice to all those also-ran songs – songs that were still big hits back in the day selling thousands of copies that get unfairly looked over nowadays, including many songs I bought and danced to in my bedroom as a teenager. I wanted to play those songs loud and proud in a club and thought the best way to allow those songs to shine was to set up a club night where each date would focus on one specific year from the late 90’s and early 00’s – allowing me to play the well remembered hits but also the forgotten gems.
People who come along to the club night can expect a whirlwind of pop and dance music from that year along with other music that was in the charts. The night is full of songs pop lovers bought (and probably danced to in their bedroom like me) but have never heard loud in a club, along with lots of songs people had forgotten all about yet find the lyrics instantly rushing back to them. If you wanted a night out where you could hear [insert name of pop acts] third single which spent a brief dalliance in the Top 20, or that overlooked second single which proved your favourite act wasn’t the one hit wonder everyone makes them out to be, then this is the night for you. I even throw in a few ballad medleys! For the hardcore pop fans, the first hour of each night is the ‘Bargain Bin’ hour of flop pop tracks that didn’t make the Top 20 – from tragically naff songs to underrated songs that should really have been big hits.
Whilst some may think the night might be a bit too niche, fear not! Even if I play an ‘obscure’ song, there’s a very good chance you will know it – the late 90s/ early 00s were a time where there was huge general public interest in the charts – when a song would be all over the the main media outlets of Top of the Pops, Live and Kicking, Radio 1, Smash Hits and all the other TV and radio shows and magazines and newspapers – and that song will spark the muscle memory! Playing those tracks can often be the most fun on seeing people’s reactions as the memories all come flooding back!
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I try and go all out with the nostalgia in the venue too, creating a Top 40 chart wall and new releases drop like you used to see in HMV/ Virgin Megastore, posters of films from that year on the wall along with magazine covers and other random things I can find (the 1998 night had a collection of Free Deirdre images and the 2002 night a collection of Pop Idol images and Excel sheets with messages from Kelly Rowland). We also have some silliness where possible, from fake lip-pierced Victoria Beckham masks, to serving toast during Des’ree’s Life.
The club night is a nice little distraction from my day job working in a law firm and my other ‘spare time activity’ of getting record labels and rightsholders to put undigitised pop music (from the same era) onto digital platforms – @pop_activism on Twitter. Whilst I’m only planning to cover 1995 to 2004 (when my interest in chart music waned and pop music mostly fell out of vogue and the record industry had little cash to splash on pop), I do have plans to repeat years again. For any one year I have a bank of 400 songs and can only play half of that in one night so any repeat night will definitely be different!
One More Time 1999 is on Saturday 19 March, 9pm-3am. VFD, 66 Stoke Newington Road, London, N16 7XB
TICKETS HERE £6 or On The Door
