Conor McNicholas

Club NME

controlling interest

CLUBBING WITH THE NME

interviews, controlling interest, december 2006, COMMENTS

2006 was the year that indie clubbing changed forever – thanks to Club NME, which has spread from Nottingham to New York and beyond, exploding stereotypes and packing dancefloors as it goes. Love or hate the magazine itself there’s no detracting from the runaway success of its night, which has captured the imagination of the club-going public. But did its creators anticipate the revolution they were about to unleash? Dan Martin finds out.

For years the world of indie disco was a depressing place: all Ben Sherman-wearing students drinking £1 bottles of lager, falling about in stinking venues to ‘Saturn 5’ by Inspiral Carpets and ‘Sit Down’ by James. And the malaise lasted a long time after the revolution in alternative rock sparked in 2001 by the release of the first Strokes album. But fast forward to 2006, and in most cities the indie scene is now characterised by a new generation of fashion-savvy hipsters queuing up to see breaking bands play to packed houses in-between boutique DJ sets of new music. What’s changed? Well, a big part of the transition is fairly attributable to the unstoppable rise of Club NME.

Long running champion of new music NME has, since its creation in 1952, perennially reinvented itself in a bid to keep ahead of the scene. The latest of these reinventions happened under the editorship of Conor McNicholas after his appointment in 2002 with the move to a full-colour glossy format, the appointment of a new generation of writers and photographers, the creation of an agenda-setting Cool List and an all-star televised Awards Ceremony. But perhaps the most unprecedented facet of this reinvention has been the runaway success of its club night: quite an unusual venture for a magazine, but since the most marked change in NME values has been to become increasingly reader-led, a club night was not so far of a leap in imagination, as Marketing Director Nick New explains. With the shift of music industry wealth to the live scene, the idea presented both a challenge and an opportunity.

“About three years ago we felt that the readers of NME had got older,” he remembers, “and we just wanted to put a bit of effort into making sure that the people who were dancing around and having a good time to music were aware of the NME too, so we decided to get into club nights. At heart, the night is about live music, which is what NME is about at heart as well.”

But the idea took a while to get off the ground. According to Editor Conor McNicholas, “Club NME was an idea that had been knocking about for the four and a half years that I’ve been here. But there was a lot of stuff that needed fixing on the magazine first. Once things were up and running a couple of years ago, we set ourselves the task of pulling the night off. What would it look like? How many people would come? How many clubs would we have? In the end, we took a decision to hit and hope and just do it and see what happens.”

Thus the first Club NME started in September 2004, at Stealth in Nottingham, closely followed by the London edition at the recently re-opened 1,500 capacity KOKO in north London, formerly the Camden Palace. After an initial sell-out starring the then up-and-coming Kaiser Chiefs, numbers dropped off and McNicholas admits that “for something like three months, we a had a couple of hundred kids floating about that enormous dancefloor at KOKO, and it was just people biting the backs of their hands thinking, ‘when is this going to stop?’” A move to Friday nights, and moving a chunk of the NME Awards Show season to KOKO turned things round. For the past year, the London slot has been selling out every Friday night, becoming a cornerstone of the city’s alternative nightlife. “We always wanted to make it as big as we could but we had to get London right first. Interestingly, London is the biggest which was the second and Middlesbrough was the third and that’s now the second biggest, so there is kind of a longevity thing with them: the more time you get into it the more you get back.” Since then, Club NME has successfully launched in Huddersfield, Leeds, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Aberdeen, Birmingham, Dundee, Glasgow, Hull, Newcastle, Oldham, Sheffield and Sunderland - serving up a winning combination of new music and live bands, each tailored to the local scene, with local bands and DJs making each night bespoke to its city. It’s a formula that has made it the fastest-growing club brand in the world, and certainly the biggest indie night anywhere.
Club NME’s ubiquity, and its success, is thanks in no small part to its unique operational model.

“We knew from day one that what we couldn’t do was start going into individual towns and promoting an indie night for a couple of reasons. One, the kids and the scene and what they want varies from city to city, and equally if we went in and started competing with all the established promoters, it’s a very good recipe to get run out of town pretty quickly.” Instead McNicholas, along with Assistant Editor Pat Long, liaise with whom they identify as the best promoters with the best venues in each individual city. The promoters pay IPC – NME’s publisher - a fee to license the name, and in return they get the use of the name, listing and promotion through the magazine, and access to a fast growing live network operating closer to ground level than big business promotion. With live music at the very heart of the brand, a Club NME tour is an attractive option for a new band. Breaking artists like The Holloways, Polytechnic and The Gossip have all recently enjoyed UK tours with the night - with the benefit of a guaranteed audience at each gig.

All good for the band and the audience, but how much control can NME actually have over the promoters effectively running their own clubs in its name? “It’s not always smooth sailing,” says Conor, “because we obsess about our brand and how it works and how it interacts with people, and we spend a shitload of time making sure the magazine is the best we possibly can each week. And then here we are taking our wonderfully constructed brand and giving it to some local promoter in some town. So it’s quite a dangerous thing for a big brand like us to do because you’ve suddenly got ten or fifteen people running around using your brand in a way you’ve got no control over, and that’s where there had to be a very strong level of trust between the promoter and NME.”

Yet as a relatively new venture growing at an exponential rate, the question of what ‘is’ Club NME has become a more immediate concern. The London office doesn’t provide playlists, and with the current alternative scene such a broad church, stretching from retro rock to emo, angular indie to new rave, there is far from a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, just as it is the magazine’s job every week to incorporate these diverse strands into one articulate whole, the club needs to be equally malleable. Likewise, there are strands which run through all Club NMEs across the country.

“It should be a glamorous indie night,” says McNicholas immediately, when asked to define it. “We didn’t want to do just another sticky floor club night. People dress up for Club NME a lot more than they do for other indie nights, which is great.” Certainly, the red glitter and velvet opulence of KOKO has been a factor in setting Club NME apart from the beer-soaked slums more traditionally associated with the format. But perhaps a more fundamental thread, and actually one of the most encouraging aspects of the brand, is its musical daring. “The other thing is that with Club NME you will hear more new music later in the night than you would do at other traditional indie clubs. With a traditional indie club, obviously you just want to keep the dancefloors as packed as you can the whole time. So you’re just playing big hit after big hit and it’s very hard to work tracks up to that point in the evening. The kids who go to Club NME are much more open-minded, so you can put the big Gossip single on at midnight and it won’t clear the dancefloor because they’re active music fans who are going out and they know this sort of thing already.”

And the craze shows little sign of slowing down. Alongside the magazine’s Awards, New Music, and Rock’n’Roll Riot Tours, there is now Club NME On The Road over Freshers’ week, which this year featured the white hot Klaxons. In September, Club NME launched in Los Angeles, closely followed by a New York version, launched to co-incide with the CMJ Music Marathon.

“As soon as we cracked London we knew we could make it work elsewhere,” says McNicholas. “And as soon as we made it work elsewhere it raises the question, where does this end? And you start having serious conversations about opening up Club NME in Shanghai or in Tokyo. It’s just surreal. We have an offer on the table for Madrid, we’re in discussion for at least six, maybe eight additional Club NMEs in the West and East coast of America, and we’ll soon have conversations about Australia. But when it gets to that point you have to ask yourself some questions about why would you ever want to do that?” And he remains mindful of remembering the reason the thing was started in the first place. “Ultimately, from a business point of view, it’s about selling more issues of the magazine and getting more people onto NME.COM. And I can’t honestly say that opening up Club NME in Shanghai is actually going to do that at the moment, so we might put it on the back burner.” On the back burner it may be, but not, you suspect, for very long.

Words: Dan Martin

From: December 2006 Issue

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