The dance party beat goes on

By STPEHEN JEWELL

With the closure of English super-club Cream, similar setbacks experienced by big-name rival brands such as The Ministry of Sound and Gatecrasher, and former leading dance publication Ministry magazine ceasing publication in Britain, this has not been a vintage year for clubbing.

But the homegrown market has proved to be remarkably resilient. Kiwi brands such as Velvet and Deep Hard and Funky have thrived while international superstar DJ's such as Sasha, who played the St James last week, still attract big crowds.

However, the true test for Auckland's crowded nightclub market is perhaps yet to come with New Year's Eve, traditionally the biggest and busiest night on the calendar.

This year, four large-scale parties - Welcome 2003 at the St James, Lightspeed's One Way Wyndham at the Wyndham Bowling Club and Centro, Velvet at the Civic and Slinky Planet at the Town Hall - will be happening within blocks of each other in central Auckland. They'll be competing against not just themselves but also the lure of the great outdoors as open-air dance parties such as Alpine Unity attract many.

Considering that the casualty rate of previous New Year's events has been high, with both Millennium and The Gathering biting the dust, some contenders are sure to be licking their wounds come January 1.

Andy Pickering, who runs the New Zealand dance magazine Remix with Tim Phinn, says New Year's Eve is no longer what it used to be.

"It will be interesting to see what happens because New Year maybe doesn't have the draw that it used to two years ago," says Pickering, whose publication is sponsoring a room at Welcome 2003.

"Part of this is because it is so well established now and there are so many big nights. So if you've got something like Sasha, in some respects that does compete with New Year's Eve. In Australia, the trend is towards massive parties on New Year's Day where you get 30,000 people going out during the day. A lot of those people will go out the night before but some of them won't."

Jon Davis from One Green Apple, who is staging Slinky Planet, refused to speak to the Herald, stating that "it wouldn't take much to skew anything I said into an extremely negative article".

However, Travis "Velvet" from Velvet believes that the selective clientele his event attracts means that it is not actively competing with the other parties. "We're R22 and were aiming at an older, more discerning market, he says.

"But those who are competing for the younger market - Slinky, Welcome 2003 - they're R18 and they're all competing against each other, whereas we're more boutique. We've got a specialised audience with a higher dress standard. We have corporate, professional people who have children and have moved on in their lives. They still like to party but they don't party every week. They only come out every two months, have a big night and then go back to their lives."

Lightspeed's Chris O'Donaghue experienced the global clubbing decline first-hand when fewer than 1000 paying punters turned up to the two events he staged with DJ Kenny Dope from House legends Masters At Work in Wellington and Auckland this year.

"The trend is towards intimate, quality club nights. Perhaps things are at a crossroads, both musically and socially," says O'Donaghue

But according to Sam Hill, DJing in smaller clubs is not economically feasible.

"It's now easier than ever to get DJ work, but having said that, most clubs have a limit to what they want to pay a DJ for a night's work," says Hill.

Eighty per cent of clubs are paying between $30 and $50 an hour for DJs. "I was getting that rate 15 years ago when I first started, so that's why a lot of the more experienced guys are avoiding small club work and playing big parties."

Last year Hill and Grant Kearney (aka Sample Gee) were recruited by the St James to headline the much-vaunted Chemistry night, which aspired to become one of New Zealand's first homegrown super-clubs. Chemistry's proposed six-weekly frequency was quickly reduced to irregular status and the all-local DJ lineup bolstered by well-known internationals after Kearney, one of the country's most popular DJs, moved to Australia.

Nevertheless, Hill believes rumours of New Zealand clubland's death have been exaggerated.

"The scene in New Zealand is getting bigger and, of course, with a growing scene comes mass commercialisation," he says.

"In the UK it's reached saturation point where it's no longer about the music. The dominance of UK super-clubs has virtually killed off the smaller club nights. It's been like gold-rush fever with everyone trying to get in on [club culture] in some way, whereas now it's coming back to a realistic level."

Simon Woods, who runs dance music distributor In Music, suggests that New Zealanders have grown wary of famous super-clubs, which mounted international tours fronted by DJs with tenuous links to the nightclub concerned.

But confidence has been knocked, says Woods. "The fact that you have certain sections, particularly in the media, who aren't exactly pro-dance and they're always looking to shoot it down ... They've been served it on a plate this year and have gone quite hard to tell everyone that Cream and co have closed down and reassessed how they're working.

"But New Zealand has never had a nightclub called Cream. We've had special Cream nights but here it's just a brand name."

Woods suggests that any downturn in the New Zealand club scene can be attributed to the demise of a certain Warrior Princess.

' If you look back about 18 months, you had film production houses based in Auckland making Xena and Hercules, says Woods.

"They employed a huge amount of people. So you had this influx of cash and it's a creative industry which works hard and plays hard.

"You had an incredible number of sectors, from clubs to people who sell music like us, that had a receptive and well-heeled audience."