Ours Was A Nice House, Ours Was.

Nottingham latched onto the house boom long before most cities but was too cool for smiley T-shirts, as Mike Atkinson recalls…

For me, it all began at The Asylum, in the autumn of 1982. Tucked round the back of Woolworths on Stanford Street, the basement venue had previously been a gay club called Whispers – and as a hangover from those times, it continued to sell little brown bottles of amyl nitrate (“poppers”) from behind the bar. “Avoid direct contact with the nose”, said the label – and so, knowing no better, we would hold the bottles at chin height, making vague wafting motions and wondering why nothing was happening. Ah, such innocent times.

The Asylum wasn’t Nottingham’s first poser’s paradise – that honour would probably go to the Saturday “futurist” nights at Rock City – but it was perhaps the first club in town to adopt the ethos of London venues like The Mud Club and The Wag. The music didn’t change much from week to week, but we were happy with the familiarity of Blue Monday, Buffalo Gals, Planet Claire, The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed, Blancmange’s Feel Me and Lies by the Thompson Twins. A year later, as its allure began to dwindle, a new place opened up in the Lace Market: the legendary Garage, run by the Selectadisc crew.

Back in the day, the Garage’s clientele split right down the middle, mingling only in the ground floor bars. Upstairs was for the togged-up trendies; downstairs was for the crimped and buckled Goths. Our gang liked it better upstairs, where Graeme Park mixed style-pop with funkier stuff, gradually nudging the music policy towards the latter. By the middle of 1985, the conversion was complete, with the harder, tougher sounds of early Def Jam (Beastie Boys, LL Cool J) and Washington DC go-go now dominating Park’s dance floor. Twelve months later, Chicago house hit The Garage – and clubbing was never the same again.

Your entry was never guaranteed, though – for this was also the age of style fascism, led by the fashion pages of The Face, Blitz and i-D. “Dress up, dress down, dress sideways – but above all, dress”, ordered one of The Garage’s posters – and the door staff had been instructed accordingly. One Friday night, a group of us showed up in less than cutting-edge apparel, only to be turned away at the door. “But we’re interesting, creative, exotic people!”, I pleaded – not entirely seriously, but giving it a last-ditch shot none the less. “Oh, OK, you’d better come in then”, muttered the doorman, remembering his brief. A couple of months later, faced with the problem of sneaking in a mate-of-a-mate with a streaked mullet and stone-washed jeans, I tried the same line again, with equal success. It was like uncovering a magic password.

1988’s fabled Summer Of Love might have revolutionised the scene in London and Manchester, but the acid house explosion largely passed us by. Down at The Garage, now re-branded as the Kool Kat, Graeme Park continued to ride the entire spectrum of BPMs: half an hour of hip hop, half an hour of house, and back again. And it wasn’t druggy, either. The eccies didn’t make their empathy-inducing presence felt until the early Nineties, and so we continued to sulk in designer threads, sucking on bottles of Sol with wedges of lime stuck in the necks. Zhivagos in the Viccy Centre tried a one-off acid night, but it didn’t really work. The usual crowd turned up, aloof as ever, but obediently sticking their hands in the air because that was what you were supposed to do, right?

Meanwhile, James Baillie had opened The Barracuda on Hurts Yard, where Michael Murphy’s anything-goes “Queen Vic” nights became the stuff of legend. (Abba’s Dancing Queen, in a cool club? It felt radical at the time.) In the spring of 1988, Baillie and Murphy upgraded to Eden on Greyhound Street, and in late 1989 Ballie’s Venus – housed in the same venue as the old Asylum club – brought clubbers of my generation full circle. Next came the hazy hedonism of the Nineties – but that was a whole new chapter…