Shoom

Shoom was a weekly dance music event held at a number of venues in London, England, between September 1987 and early 1990. Widely credited for helping to initiate the acid house movement in the UK,[1] and named number seven by Billboard Magazine in their 2015 list 25 Best of all time dance clubs.[2] Shoom was organised by the then unknown DJ and record producer Danny Rampling and his to-be wife Jenni Rampling. The nightclub began at the Fitness Centre, a 300 capacity basement gym on Southwark Street, South London. The club's growing popularity necessitated a move in May 1988 to Raw at Tottenham Court Road, and finally to a larger again nightclub venue on Charing Cross Road.

The Shoom logo on a grey background. Variants of this underlying design were used for posters, flyers and t-shirts.

The early club nights featured Danny Rampling and Terry Farley as the in-house DJs. Regular guest DJs included Carl Cox, Mark Moore and Andrew Weatherall. The club nights were characterised by eclectic music centered around Chicago house music and Detroit techno, mixed with contemporary pop and post-punk music, in an atmosphere dominated by glass walls, heavy and strawberry-scented smoke machines, strobe lights, and intake of the hallucinogenic drug LSD and the then fashionable psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known in the UK as ecstasy, or E).

Due to the limited capacity of each of the venues, the club's ever-growing growing popularity lead to a necessarily a strict door polcy, enforced by Jenni Rampling. She readily adapted to the unpopular role of refusing entry to patrons, which lead to a backlash and resulted in many clubbers viewing the club as "elitist". Shoom closed early in 1990 as acid house crossed into the mainstream, during a period when the scene was mutating towards Rave music.

Formation
The much larger Amnesia nightclub in Ibiza was the primary influence for Shoom

In 1995, Paul Oakenfold was working in Ibiza with DJ's Trevor Fung and Ian St. Paul.[3] That summer he hired a villa and invited the londons DJs Nicky Holloway, Johnnie Walker, Pete Tong, and the then unknown Danny Rampling, to celebrate his birthday.[4] During the trip, they toured the island dance venues, and Rampling took ecstasy for the first time. He became deeply impressed by Alfredo Fiorito's open air and after-hours Amnesia[5] and Pepe Rosello's Space.[1][6]

Neither Danny Rampling nor his then partner and later wife Jenni had experience in organising nightclubs. Yet, on return to England they sought to recreate the atmosphere of the Balearic beat clubs. and were described by journalist Louise Gray as a "very ordinary, upwardly mobile working class couple" from Bermondsey, in South East London.[3][7][n 1]

The crowd was small for the first three nights that the Ramplings could great each person as they arrived, and say goodnight as they left.[11] Shoom DJ [Fire Island (duo)|Terry Farley]] believed that this approach greatly enhanced the club's early standing and helped develop its cult like following.[12]

Shoom's formation coincided with the establishment of other seminal acid house clubs in London, including Holloway's The Trip (4 June 1987),[13][14] and Oakenfold's Spectrum (April 1988–1990) at Heaven) on Charing Cross.[3][15][n 2]

Early nights

Shoom opened at the downstairs Fitness Centre gym at 56-58 Crown House, Southwark Street, South London,[17][18][19] which Ramping hired because of its small, intimate size, and affordability.[5] The local council had granted the gym an events license, which meant that although it could not serve alcohol, it could stay open until 5 am,[20] which for clubbers gave it the feel of an illegal rave.[21] In the club's first months, Danny and Jenni Rampling would greet each patron as they arrived, and say goodnight to them as they left.[11]

Shoom was one of the first clubs to adopt the Smiley face in their promotional material.[22][11]

The club's name was inspired by a phrase Rampling heard in Ibiza to describe the effects of coming-up, or "rushing", on ecstasy, the club drug that became widely associated with the UK dance music scene.[3][23] Rampling says that the word came from a phrase he heard from Trevor Fung on their first visit the island.[24] The opening night in November 1988 was titled "Klub Sch-oom",[25] but this name was shortened to "Shoom" by the second night.[26][27]

Rampling borrowed from family and friends to fund the opening night, and asked Carl Cox to provide the sound system.[28] Although the night broke even, he did not view it as successful, mainly due to the unfocused variety of musical styles played. The gym had two rooms; Rampling and Cox played in the main hall, while Farley played funk and rare groove in the backroom.[1][26][27] By the second night, Rampling's sets focused on Balearic and House music. Over the following weeks, he retained Cox as a regular DJ, but employed a sound system owned by DJ Joey Jay.[29] The club quickly gained a reputation as a place for dancers and music fans, rather than the then-prevalent West End trend for places where is was cool to be seen.[3]

By January 1988, Shoom was using smiley face logo in promotional flyers and posters. Widely used during the summer of Love, Shoom re-popularised the image, leading to its eventual widespread use as an iconic emblem for the UK acid House movement.[30]

Within months of opening, the number of people queuing to get in grew from a few hundred into over a thousand, leading to a move in May 1988 to Thursday nights at Raw,[14] a club located in the basement of a YMCA on Tottenham Court Road,[31][32] and finally to the larger again capacity Busby's music venue on Charing Cross Road.[33][34] The popularity began with early scenesters such as Anton Le Pirate and later celebrities including Sada, Michael Clarke, Paul Rutherford, Alan McGee and Bobby Gillespie.[4][31][35] In each venue, Shoom was usually tightly packed with an above-capacity number of attendees. Writer David Cavanagh describes an atmosphere dominated by "heat and crush".[36] Richard Norris (later of the electronic dance group The Grid) describes nights where "there was no oxygen. We were lighting our lighters and the flames were going out."[36]

Soon after the move to Tottenham Court Road, Jenni Rampling began to publish a free newsletter promoting the club's "peace and love" ethos. It was filled with cartoon drawings and smiley face logos, which according to Collin "bounced down the page like a shower of pills",[11] as well as poetry[14] and extracts from fan letters containing exuberant and hippish praise such as "Shoom...creates the freedom to be ourselves."[32]

Throughout, the Rambling's sought to maintain the club's underground status, and thus tried, as far as possible to minimise attention from the music press. While they consulted with PR companies to help promote the nights, they ensured any publicity was low key and local while Jenni personally asked journalists who showed up at the club not to write about it.[37]

Club

Music

The first Shoom nights attracted funk, soul and rare groove fans, who came dressed in flares.[16] Danny Rampling focused the club on the Balearic sound.[38]

Rampling's style was praised by a number of the early Chicago house producers, including Marshall Jefferson who said that he "was surprised because I'd never heard a white DJ play like that."[39] Chicago DJ Bam Bam played at Shoom in 1988, and was impressed enough to compare it to the Muzic Box club made famous by the early 1980s pioneer DJ Ron Hardy.[37] A number of regular attendee's noted how Rampling positioned himself level to the dance floor, rather than, as was then usual, in a booth high above the crowd.[40]

Farley said that DJs at the time were "trying to find records that would make perfect sense on E."[5] Shoom developed a reputation for promoting innovative new music inspired by early US house, and notably introduced Phuture's seminal 1987 Roland TB-303 based "Acid Tracks" to a UK audience,[41] and popularising UK act Humanoid's seminal 1998 single "Stakker Humanoid".[42]

The DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall had been a regular attendee at the club before being asked to play sets at the club. His set at Shoom were built around Detroit and Acid House tracks, interspersed by songs by Dub Syndicate, Public Image Ltd, Chris & Cosey and Ravi Shankar.[43]

Due to the widespread popularity of acid house music in London, Manchester, and other major British cities, 1988 became known as the Second Summer of Love, a title borrowed from the 1967 Summer of Love in California; but whereas the earlier scene had been driven by the popularisation of the psychedelic drug LSD, 1988 was largely based around the newly discovered ecstasy.[44] The writer Matthew Collin notes how both movements shared a degree of communal beliefs and the idea of "collective consciousness". Markedly, because ecstasy is a psychoactive rather than hallucinogenic drug, the acid hose scene was rarely intellectualised or placed in context, and there are only a handful published contemporarily accounts, and very little surviving video footage has been made available.[45]

Lighting

While the interior design was minimalist, it contained mirrored walls and multiple reproductions of the smiley face logo.[5][46] The Rampling's early adaption of this logo was a deliberate reaction to the prevailing trend in then-popular London nightclubs. Fashion designer Coleman, an alumni of St. Martin's College of Art,[47] said that at Shoom "everyone was smiling and losing themselves in this incredibly powerful music...it was the beginning of a new youth culture."[5]

The strawberry scented smoke machine was often so thick the club became claustrophobic, which, combined with flashing strobe lights, often meant the dancers were unable to see more than a few feet around them.[11] Mark Moore of S'Express remembers, during his first night at the club, being unable to see anything, or detect "what people were wearing, or who was there." However, when the smoke lifted during the breakdowns "suddenly the dry ice would clear" and he could "see and look around and suddenly...realise that everyone was on E."[27]

Ecstasy

Until the summer of 1987, ecstasy was a legal but obscure chemical available to a select few British pop stars frequenting the drug scene at New York clubs including Studio 54 in the early to mid-1980s, including Boy George, Marc Almond of Soft Cell and New Order's Bernard Sumner.[48][n 3] As relatively little was known about the drug, a common misconception was that it was legal,[45] when in fact it was registered as Class A under the UK Misuse of Drugs Act.[49] While house music and the sub-culture around ecstasy developed independently, it is widely accepted that both became widely popular when combined at London clubs during 1987.[50] Sherly Garratt, one of the earliest journalists to write about the scene, believes that the music worked so well with the drug because the warm and empathetic high from E's aligned with both the small and intimate scale of the early London clubs, and the shared excitement of discovering a new and revolutionary form of electronic music.[51]

Off-white ecstasy pills with brand imprints

The 1980s pop-star Boy George believes that ecstasy "defiantly had an effect...It changed people", but like many early regulars he says that MDMA in the 1980s was different to later pills and "wasn't very toxic, it was much purer."[35] According to DJ Terry Farley, "some of those early Shoomers were almost like disciples of Danny's. I remember one girl telling me she could see his aura while he was DJing, and, do you know, to a certain extent maybe you could."[52] A popular meme became that a significant number of the early regulars at Shoom and later Acid house clubs were football hoolgans and drug dealers who, within weeks of taking ecstasy, gave up violence.[35] Boy's Own founder Cymon Eckel said that "people only did one pill; you only needed one because they were so strong. I hate it when people always say that, but it's true.[35]

Pernod water and the energy soda Lucozade became the most popular drinks. This was in part because the gym could not sell alcohol,[53] while many clubbers found that alcohol dulled the impact of the ecstasy high. Another common believe was that vitamin C also reduced the high, so orange juice was taken off the bar menu.[3]

Weatherall viewed Shoom as a far more spiritual experience than later house clubs.[35] Reynolds agrees and sees Shoom as "unlike any West End club...the Shoom scene was not about being seen, but about losing it - your cool, your self-consciousness, your self."[3] Clubber's experiences at Shoom were of then so intense, that eventually the club's newsletters had to advise clubbers not to get too absorbed into the scene, as it seemed like "suddenly nobody wanted to do anything except take E and go out all the time.”[54] However ecstasy did overwhelmed a number of the patrons who attempted to live a full-time, long term, hedonistic lifestyle.

Rampling claims he did not take E while DJing, as he feared it interfere with his performance. He says that as Shoom was a weekend club night, he restricted his intake to the early week, as he felt a responsibility to the clubbers. He said that at times the nights became so heavy that he had to physically carry out those who had passed out or were overcome by the room's intensity and heat.[55]

According to the writer Simon Reynolds, the imagery in the club's flyers, posters and newsletters openly evoked drug use via graphics of pills and smiley faces, and text urging clubbers to "Get Right On One, Matey."[17] Boy's Own fanzine writer Steven Hall describes how he had "never seen anything like Shoom – completely open drug-taking".[52]

By January 1988, Danny Rampling had employed the graphic artist George Georgiou to design Shoom's fliers,[56] Georgiou was instructed that they contain smiley faces, a visual symbol Rampling intended to evoke "happiness, joy and euphoria",[57] although Georgiou says he was not at first interested by the image. His designs became iconic mainstay of the acid house movement, leading to adaptions often showing the face contorted in joy as if as an inebriated partygoer. According to Georgio "everyone interpreted it as an ecstasy pill, but it wasn’t really. It was just me trying to make it 3-D."[15]

Dress style

Shoom was the first clubs to bring the US house music to the UK, and was thus at the forefront of the development of the movement's look and style. Shoom crowds typically wore baggy clothes and Tie-dye or dayglo colours, with items such as bucket hats, bandanas, dungaree jeans, ponchos and converse sneakers becoming popular.[24][58][57][59][60]

While the baggy style was born of necessity to combat the intense heat in the original small gym, the trend spread outside of the regular Shoom crowd, with celebrity fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood producing clothes influenced by the scene.[59] DJ Jay Strongman observed how, after Shoom launched, both older established figures in the dance scene and "ultra-trendies" were suddenly viewed as "cultural dinosaurs."[61] Nick Coleman said that after visiting Shoom in July 1988, he went from wearing designer clothing and standing around trying to "look cool" to "a t-shirt...white jeans and...50 new friends."[5] He views the impact of Shoom as initiating a move away from expensive dressing towards simpler and casual, functional designs, and launched a range of clubwear that met what he perceived as a cultural trend towards "dressing down".[62]

Leading the emerging trend, Shoom regular Fiona Cartledge's shop on Camden Market became a popular source of acid house style clothes.[63]

Door policy

Within weeks Shoom drew crowds far above that which the 300 capacity gym at Southwark Street could hold.[5][52] Jenni Ramplin was left with organising doo policy. Today a businesswoman, she is credited by Reynolds as the "powerhouse" behind the club,[17] who organised its flyers, newsletters, and took charge of avoiding press attention.[3] She became its doorperson, at first adopting a strict policy of "no trendies, no pop stars in the club". According to DJ Steve Proctor, both Ramplings were overwhelmed by Shoom's immediate success, and had difficulty in controlling admittance.[3]

Jenni manages the door, and faced with a far above capacity number of patron, developed a reputation as rude and arrogant. The early Shoom regular Jason Hawkins said that as attendance grew and regulars could no longer get in, Jenni became "hated, literally hated. We used to call her Hitler".[64] However, Proctor puts this down to the fact that she was younger than Danny, had left school with few qualifications, and thrust into a high profile role "the only way she knew was straight talking".[65]

Jenni later said, "you can have 200 people in ponchos off their head on E dancing to acid house but that doesn't make a great club. You need that mix. I wanted Shoomers who'd dance to Danny, I wanted a lot of gays, black people, white people, old hip hop people... How do you do that? You've got to be strong. You've got to be prepared to be insulted...It was a hard job."[66] Wall of Sound label boss Mark Jones later said that "people slagged Jenni off...but I admire her for doing what she thought was right. Its fine to be lovey-dovey, but there are certain people who you don't want in your club, 'cos you won't be able to achieve that vibe."[17][67] Jones compared her entrance policy as being as strict and elitist as at Steve Strange's early 1980's New Romantic nightclub The Blitz,[68] located in London's West End. Because The Blitz was viewed with distain overly concerned with expensive suits or dresses, "being seen" and appearing jet-set, the similarity in door policy lead many clubbers to believe Jenni had betrayed Shoom's original promise of inclusiveness.[69]

Closure

Rampling ended the club in early 1990,[1] in part because the dance music scene had become, in their view, too popular and commercial; in a 2018 interview he said that "by 1990, the rave scene had deteriorated".[5]. House music had moved on from the acid house sound, evolving into the more aggressive and faster "rave" style. In addition, the scene had begun to attract attention from the police on foot of highly negative coverage by tabloid press who ran headlines such as "Evil of Ecstasy" and "Shoot These Evil Acid Barons",[70] which made many of the club and event organisers very nervous.[n 4]

By 1989, a rift opened up against the original "Shoomers" and the newly converted but younger ravers; who were dismissively referred to by some as "acid-teds". A number of Shoom regulars saw them as "laddish", and disparaged the fact that the males were teenagers, and would dance without shirts, on their first flush of "E". At the same time, early Shoom clubbers began to complain that the quality of pills were not as good as they had been in 1987/88, while Farley said that "clubs are full of kids now."[72]

Legacy
Andrew Weatherall, 2019

The London clubs immediately following Shoom often compared their success in terms of what Rampling had achieved, even as they sought to eclipse its music and style. According to Richard West (aka Mr. C), outside of sets by Colin Faver, Shoom generally played "namby-pamby sort of stuff, lightweight gear".[73] Mr. C explained how the music had evolved to become more "tripped-out" around this time, and as he explains, according to Reynolds somewhat dismissively, "a long way from Balearic."[73] According West , the harder rave scene that emerged during 1989 at clubs nights such as RIP (Revolution in Place) on Clink Street eclipsed Shoom and the Balearic sound, while in scale larger-scale, often illegal, open-air parties that attracted thousands of attendee became the prevailing trend. West notes how, although Shoom was important in popularising house music in the UK, by 1990 many felt that the Balearic sounded like pop music.[74]

New Order's 1989 album Technique was recorded in Ibiza, and was directly influenced by the then growing acid scene and band members Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook's visits to Shoom.[75]

Primal Scream attribute the geneses of their 1991 Weatherall produced album Screamadelica to the sounds and atmosphere they experienced while attending Shoom nights during 1989.[76][77][78] Weatherall said of his first night at the club: "I just couldn't believe it. I [was] a confused punk soul boy, and to me it was...the...dream come through. I just could not fucking believe the mix of music."[35] The band asked vocalist Denise Johnson, who played a pivotal role in the hugely successful album's cross-over success, to contribute after hearing her perform at Shoom.[79]

Two 25th Anniversary nights were held at the Cable Nightclub in London in 2012.[2][33]

DJs

Resident

Frequent guests

Footnotes
  1. The couple had only just recently met before their visit to Ibiza.[8][9] They married in February 1988.[10]
  2. The well established Holloway and the newcomer Rampling fell out around this time, as according to Holloway, Rampling started Shoom without letting him know, and took The Trip's flyer designer, head of security, and Cox's sound system. Holloway said "Danny was my mate and my [record] box carrier, and no one really took him seriously, and then all of a sudden he was catapulted to superstardom. I had my nose put out of joint, I really did."[16] Rampling disputes this and said he was "pissed off" by Holloway's reaction. The two resolved their differences shortly afterwards.
  3. Even by the time the pills became widely popular with clubbers in late 1987, London dealers had difficulty keeping up with demand, and supply often came from clubbers bringing back powdered MDMA from trips to Ibiza or Amsterdam.[45]
  4. The negative media continued until the mid-1990s, culminating in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which in section 63(1)(b) outlawed gathering to dance to music or "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats."[70][71]

References

Notes
  1. Matos 2017.
  2. "Dance Clubs: 25 Best Of All Time". Billboard Magazine, 12 November 2015. Retrieved 29 November 2020.
  3. Reynolds 1999, p. Chapter 3.
  4. Richards 2017.
  5. Walker 2018.
  6. Carroll 2003.
  7. Garratt 1997.
  8. Reynolds 1998, p. 45.
  9. Garratt 2020, p. 126.
  10. Shulman 2019, p. 135.
  11. Collin 2009, p. 61.
  12. Shulman 2019, p. 114.
  13. Warren 2007.
  14. Garratt 2020, p. 145.
  15. Marshall 2018.
  16. Bainbridge 2014a, p. Chapter 3.
  17. Reynolds (1998)
  18. Corrigan 2017.
  19. Roberts 2009.
  20. Shulman 2019, p. 95.
  21. Shulman 2019, p. 126.
  22. Cavanagh 2000, p. 227.
  23. Sedazzari 1989.
  24. Thomson 2018.
  25. BrewsterBroughton 2014.
  26. Collin 2009, p. 58.
  27. Shulman 2019, p. 96.
  28. Shulman 2019, p. 99.
  29. Shulman 2019, p. 101.
  30. Shulman 2019, pp. 102–103.
  31. Shulman 2019, p. 104.
  32. Collin 2009, p. 70.
  33. Hubzin 2012.
  34. Collin 2009, p. 77.
  35. Bainbridge 2014a, p. Chapter 4.
  36. Cavanagh 2000, p. 226.
  37. Garratt 2020, p. 132.
  38. Rose 1989.
  39. Garratt 1994.
  40. Shulman 2019, p. 103.
  41. "The History Of Acid House in 100 Tracks". Mixmag, 3 May 2018. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
  42. Aitken 2013.
  43. Push 1991.
  44. Reynolds 1998, pp. 57–59.
  45. Collin 2009, p. 65.
  46. "About". shoom.london. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  47. Collin 2009, p. 63.
  48. Bainbridge 2014a, p. Chapter 2.
  49. "MDMA (ecstasy): A Review of its Harms and Classification under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971". Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, February 2008. Retrieved 30 January 2021
  50. Garratt 2020, pp. 132, 150.
  51. Garratt 2020, p. 150.
  52. Bainbridge 2014b.
  53. Shulman 2019, p. 102.
  54. Harrison 2016.
  55. Shulman 2019, pp. 107–108.
  56. "Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 – Today". Vitra Design Museum. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
  57. Turner 2018.
  58. "Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992". BBC Four, 16 Sep 2019. Retrieved 30 January 2021
  59. Shulman 2019, p. 110.
  60. Garratt 1993.
  61. Shulman 2019, p. 112.
  62. Collin 2009, p. 64.
  63. Shulman 2019, pp. 110–111.
  64. Collin 2009, p. 66.
  65. Collin 2009, p. 67.
  66. Banies 2015.
  67. Nozari 2017.
  68. Moore 2008.
  69. Shulman 2019, pp. 128–130.
  70. Hinton 2018.
  71. "The New Ravers: Repetitive beats". The Economist, 17 August 2013. Retrieved 30 January 2021
  72. Reynolds 1998, p. 63.
  73. Reynolds 1998, p. 52.
  74. Collin 2009, p. 74.
  75. Hook 2009.
  76. Cavanagh 2000, p. 280.
  77. Huxley 2020.
  78. Robb 1992.
  79. Snaped 2020.
  80. Shulman 2019, pp. 99–100.
  81. Shulman 2019, p. 105.
  82. Gray 2020.

Sources
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