Too late to say happy new year, too early to have written off 2026 completely – this must be it, the ultimate locking-in phase!!
We’ve been busy so far, with a stack of interviews coming down the No Tags pipes in the next few month, but first we return to a conversation from our sold-out event at the ICA last month.
If you couldn’t make it down, or if you were there but forgot to take notes, this episode is a keeper. London-based rave researcher Anjali Prashar-Savoie joined us at the ICA to set out her vision of a ‘club commons’ – a radical, positive and participatory kind of nightlife inspired by her research into the history of queer scenes in the UK, from lesbian sound systems with childcare provided to George Michael-themed free parties on the Heath.
Anjali’s new book, Club Commons, is available from Velocity Press and comes highly recommended by us. (And if you see her name on a lineup, don’t miss out, she’s a great DJ too.)
The interview section of this episode begins at the 41 minute mark. Before that we spend some time reporting on our New Year jollies, our seasonal “locking in” progress, and recent film-watching (Into The Abyss, Marty Supreme, The Smashing Machine).
Then a conversation about the growing magnetism of Substack, a nine-year-old newsletter platform that’s suddenly having a moment with musicians and celebs. Does the Troye Sivan newsletter herald a new intimacy in fan-artist relations? Or is this just another example of Brands Saying Bae? (With apologies to Shawn Reynaldo, who wrote his own First Floor newsletter on this subject a few days after we recorded ours. Soz.)
So an episode in two halves: chat in the front, education at the back.
In other news! We’re hosting an audiophile evening at the OJAS Listening Room at 180 Studios in London on 16th March with two of our longtime favourite collector-selectors, Call Super and Parris. Tragically, both slots sold out within a few days of the announcement – how embarrassing! But if you missed out, keep your ears peeled for more listening sessions throughout spring – we will return.
Chal has also written about Britney Spears and the madness of her conservatorship for the latest issue of the London Review of Books. (This piece also references Jeff Weiss’s book Waiting For Britney Spears, which we interviewed him about last summer.) And Tom has more dance music out on his label Local Action – from Hodge, JIALING and LWS.
A reminder, too, that the ICA event was also a book launch for No Tags Vol 2: Conversations on underground music culture, featuring interviews from the second year of the podcast and five brand new articles, designed with flair and Blobbies by our good friends at All Purpose.
The book is available from our Shopify, and from select bookshops and record shops – including but not limited to Pages of Hackney (London), Idle Hands (Bristol), Rova Editions (Bristol), Magalleria (Bath), Unitom (Manchester), 20K and a Dead Sheep (Manchester), Well Read (Lisbon), Head Hi (New York City) and online at Bleep. If you would like to stock the book, please get in touch.
CR: Your book is about various intersecting ideas and strategies to create what you call a ‘club commons’. I’m sure people might be familiar with this idea of the commons, but could you just introduce us to this idea of the club commons and paint a picture of a hypothetical venue, Club Commons, that is running under this logic. What does it look like? What happens there? How is it different?
Anjali Prashar-Savoie: The commons refers to land or resources that are communally managed and shared by the people that use them. It comes from the history of land enclosure in this country, where people had free access to land to have their animals graze in pasture. Then that land was seized by landowners and rented back to these people at a cost. So the original idea of the commons refers to land, or resources, or access to water, but it has also been updated to refer to different kinds of less material resources, as well as the social relations that people form around sharing the things that they have access to. I’m thinking about the way we listen to music today. Back in the day, we used to go buy a physical CD, then we would have that CD. It was a one-time purchase. Today we often pay a subscription, which is like endless rent forever, and we don’t actually own that MP3. We pay it to companies that don’t really pay their artists and that money might also be going to the AI military industrial complex–
TL: –while also doing unpaid labour for them.
APS: Exactly! It’s this endless rent, we’re caught in a perpetual subscription, but we don’t actually have access to those resources. That could be thought of in terms of enclosure, which is what happened with the land. I’ve looked through this lens of the commons and the enclosure in the context of queer nightlife, looking at stuff that we had a say in, in terms of how it was managed, and stuff we had more free access to. In the not so distant past, queer nightlife might have been more of a subculture in community-led spaces, whereas today it’s a global commercial industry, so there’s this process of enclosing our nightlife spaces, our club spaces.
To go back to this idea of the commons, in the book I go through different stories of queer nightlife from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and the present day. It’s not one linear process where it was a commons and now it’s enclosed, it’s more happening day-to-day as we move along. If the commons is about people having more of a say in how the spaces that they find meaningful are created, or what decisions happen in them, having a more active say in shaping them, then I would say Club Commons would probably look like workers having more of a say over their working conditions. A worker’s cooperative could be an example of Club Commons. I’m not talking about working in a club venue, going to your manager and asking them to pay for your taxi ride home because you finish work at 3AM and them saying they’ll think about it. It’s actually those workers, who are on the ground every night, figuring out how much money they make and portioning off a little bit of it to taxi rides home, because that’s what they want.
CR: You write, ‘I think that to truly queer clubbing is to common it and this requires more than assembling queer bodies in a room and calling it radical.’ I wanted to be more specific about why queer nightlife is a useful way to get into the idea of the commons. Why is that a route for you to think about these political ideas of worker-owned nightlife?
APS: I think queer nightlife has a lineage and a history in queer activism and queer culture building. Even when I was reading about queer histories completely unrelated to nightlife, the club would always make an appearance. I think that shows the significance of these spaces for queer communities in particular. The club has a history in this community that I was really interested in. Queer can refer to sexual orientations, practices or identities, but it can also bring together these ideas and theories about power and deconstructing power, about where power goes and being against heteronormativity. It can also be related to anti-capitalism. In the book, I look a little bit at the Gay Liberation Front, an activist movement that formed in the ‘70s that was very much about politicising a queer identity – not just about our sexual practices, but also tying it to a broader politics of liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Today, queer communities still find a lot of meaning in nightlife. It showed up historically when we look at these histories of queer culture building, but it still is such an important space for people to gather and commune and find each other, to find joy, or create and make art, to try things out. If it is increasingly commercialised, we need to take that seriously, given that they continue to be these important spaces for us to explore and experiment with culture.
CR: I feel like there’s a reverse to that as well, which is that if nightlife is so much part of a queer cultural and political history and experience, at the same time the other trappings of nightlife, or hedonism more broadly, become really hard to extract away from that experience. Some of the things that you’re writing about is the need for queer nightlife that has that type of hedonism, particularly around drinking and drugs, taken away from it. Where does hedonism go in Club Commons?
APS: I wouldn’t necessarily separate those things out. If I think about hedonism, I’m also thinking about pleasure and joy. There are parts of the book where I talk about sober clubbing, specifically Misery, which is a queer POC collective that runs sober raves for queer people of colour. It’s about finding joy and pleasure in the way we organise our nights, not just for the audiences, not just for the consumers, but for all kinds of participants, whether you’re running the night or not.
CR: And with Misery, it’s not that there isn’t joy or pleasure, it’s that there are other things too, there are other forms of community. Space for other emotions.
APS: Other emotions, but also other activities in the club space. I start the book looking at a group called Sistermatic, which was a Black lesbian sound system that formed in the mid 1980s. Their parties had food, had separate spaces to sit and chat. They had a games room! One of my all-time favourite parts was when I spoke to Yvonne, who is one of the founders, and she showed me one of her flyers. She only kept one flyer, even though it was this monthly sold-out party. It was kind of fuzzy but on one side it said ‘creche available.’ She explained to me that at their parties, which were 9PM to 9AM, full-on parties, they would have a creche available where they would have qualified childcare workers in a soundproofed room so that queer mothers could rave and bring their children and have them looked after.
When we think about hedonism and the commercialisation of culture, I also see a real flattening of experience, of what becomes possible in our nightlife spaces. Yes, there’s drinks and drugs and dance and that’s a huge part of it, but there’s also other spaces for connecting. People always lament the loss of chillout spaces and those aren’t very monetisable spaces either. It just reduces what we think of as being possible in nightlife. To go back to Sistermatic, that was also politically important because at the time a lot of queer mothers would lose custody of their children just for being queer. That provision was such an important way of making these nights inclusive to the people who might have needed these spaces the most. There are some really brilliant conversations in nightlife right now going on about inclusion and access, which are very much needed, but we rarely talk about intergenerationality in those conversations because we’re limited to 18-plus commercial venues. It’s not even on the radar to think about that. When I spoke to people who were much older than me, who have been partying on dirty, sexy dancefloors before I was even born, they often bring that up. It feels a little bit less intergenerational. There’s been a reduction in the kinds of experiences or the things that we can do in a club space, it becomes much more centred around just the dancefloor and the bar, or shivering out in the smoking areas, your only place to chat.
TL: Speaking of Sistermatic, there’s an amazing line in the book where you say ‘both migrants and mothers are often overlooked in accounts of UK nightlife history, even though they have been essential to its evolution.’ It would be great to hear you expand on that line a bit, because it was a sentence that really struck me.
APS: I’m really building on writers like Caspar Melville, who wrote a book called It’s A London Thing, as well as sound system collectives like Nzinga Sound, which was one of the longest running all-women sound system collectives and who also write about their own history. Other people have written a lot about the importance of migration, especially in UK club culture history, specifically looking at sound system culture coming over from the Caribbean and how foundational that was to nightlife in the UK. If you think about most music genres we play in the club, their lineage is in that, from jungle to grime. When you look at queer nightlife, it also takes a lot from the organising models, collectively running sound systems, throwing parties in spaces that weren’t necessarily clubs. Sistermatic’s Yvonne tells me a lot about her parents running parties in domestic spaces or street parties, places that weren’t commercial clubs. That lineage is sonic, but it’s also in how we organise the parties and where we throw them as well. In some ways, starting to look into these stories of intergenerational partying, of older people partying but also having children at parties and what that would mean and what that feels like, even with all of this hedonism going on, it was also maybe a bit selfish. I want to party until I’m really old. I want to keep going. So I was looking out for those stories and I definitely found them. They’re there, for sure.
TL: In a context where we have fewer community centres and youth centres in the UK, how feasible is it to use Sistermatic as a model of how to run inclusive, intergenerational parties? It would be nice to highlight some contemporary parties that you think are in that lineage.
APS: In commercial clubs, I would imagine it’s very hard. I’ve never tried to throw a party with childcare or a creche in a venue. You bring up something really important: when I was speaking to Sistermatic, or other people like the DJ Katherine Griffiths, who was very active in the grassroots lesbian scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, one of the big things they bring up is that they weren’t just throwing events in commercial clubs. Actually, they found it quite challenging to throw events in commercial clubs. Not only could they not do everything they wanted to do, it was also kind of hostile for a lot of Black people and queer people. The venue didn’t want to give them a Friday or a Saturday night, because they didn’t think they were going to make any money. Your crowd’s not gonna come, we don’t trust you, we don’t believe you. They were just throwing parties in other spaces.
Sistermatic ran their parties in the South London Women’s Centre on Acre Lane in Brixton. It wasn’t a club, it was a women’s centre and an activist social centre as well. They had this club set up because they felt like with a party like Sistermatic, they could get women into the centre and engaged with the other things that were also going on there. There was also the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. For a moment these were funded by the Greater London Council. These spaces were set up for parties as well as all these activist meetings, organising meetings, self-defence classes, legal resources, whatever you needed! I don’t really know where those spaces are right now. We do have community centres, but it would be really hard to throw a 9PM to 9AM rave in them, I would say. If anyone knows of any of these please tell me, because I want a space like that!
I think the spaces that I’m looking to are not necessarily in the commercial club industry. I run a party called Lilith with a group of friends. We were first running it in some of our most beloved venues in South London, like Spanners and Avalon Cafe – Spanners is my favorite club in London at the moment. Two years ago we decided to take it out of commercial clubs, precisely because we felt like we were limited in terms of what we actually wanted to do in it. So we have ended up running the past few in housing co-ops, or domestic spaces. We did one of them in Esme’s house! Obviously, it’s a lot of fucking work to do that, sometimes it’s easier to go to these commercial venues. But the impact has been crazy. The first one we had food, my friend Anna made this edible swamp landscape, which was horrific and beautiful and everything all at once, because it was a swamp themed party. We covered the house in fabric and lighting. With another one we did jelly wrestling and a baby showed up. I was very happy! Mothers came up with their baby and I was like, this is the success of this party. There was an expansion of activities, whether that’s being able to bring your baby or being able to jelly wrestle.
TL: The pros of doing a party in that kind of space seem quite obvious, but what were the biggest challenges?
APS: It’s so much work, you have to run everything yourself. We weren’t doing full-on free parties or raves, but there are still challenges around selling alcohol and navigating that, having to keep it a private party. And also actually finding the space. We used our own spaces which, again, not everyone can, not everyone will, not everyone wants to run a full party in a house in Peckham, so that isn’t the solution. That isn’t the answer, that’s just what we did because we wanted to try it out.
CR: This idea about what’s happened to physical space comes up a lot in your book. There are these traditional half-bar half-club gateway spaces, there are community centres, and then, as I’m sure a lot of us know, the bargain that was made in the ‘90s with rave and the Criminal Justice Act, was that everyone was going to go back indoors. The licensing laws that we live with now and our understanding of how the modern club works was worked out in that period. The reason that you can’t just do a party anywhere is because there are now rules about that. There are rules to do with alcohol. And you wouldn’t have been able to have your edible swamp because there would have been some health and safety issue.
In the book, you speak to Dan from the This Is My Culture party. Tell us a bit about the strange bind that Dan’s party finds itself in. What is that party and how do they navigate rejecting the limitations of physical space?
APS: I spoke to Dan Glass, who’s an incredible author and activist with Act Up. He’s part of a group called This Is My Culture–
CR: –AKA the George Michael party.
APS: Yeah! Maybe you know it by that subtitle. They run a protest party every year in Hampstead Heath and I think they’ve been running it for 10 years now. It’s a really joyous event, they have ancestor honouring in their speeches, they often have a piñata that you smash, last year it was a Tesla. This is a queer free party, so they don’t seek permission for this event. They do it in Hampstead Heath because it’s a historic gay cruising ground and it’s just about being in public, being queer and having fun and owning that space in some ways.
The police presence at these events seems to be increasing every year, they face enormous challenges in running this. Last time I was there it was basically shut down before the music even started and particularly in 2024 they did a Palestine-focused event and that drew way more police than in any other year, so the policing of these events was very focused and targeted, I think particularly because This Is My Culture is very explicitly non-commercial and political – as in ACAB, anti-police. George Michael, as you know, was entrapped by a police officer, so it’s rooted in that lineage, It’s really hard to do this and when you really sit back and think about it, these people are potentially facing arrest, or their equipment being taken by the police, just for wanting to play a bit of music and dance in a park together. That’s crazy! It was always difficult, especially with the lack of these other spaces, like social centres, women’s centres. Katherine Griffiths also tells me that in the ‘80s and ‘90s there were a lot more squats that queer people lived in, so they would socialise in those but also throw their own parties. Squatting was also criminalised, so again, along with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, it shuffled more and more people seeking out these activities into these commercial clubs where we can do less stuff.
CR: You use this term ‘carceral clubbing’, which struck a chord with me immediately in comparison to carceral feminism – the idea that feminism can be achieved when we throw all of our abusers in jail, using the criminal justice system to get where we want to be.
You use it to talk about this shift, first of all in the tension around queer visibility, where different factions wanted to be more and less visible in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but more recently about the fact that clubbing is under surveillance in so many ways. You’re in the club and there are so many things that you need to do to be allowed in the club – all your data is taken from you and you’re on CCTV. Could you just unpack that a little bit more and explain how this carceral clubbing problem could potentially be met by Club Commons?
APS: When we start to think about surveillance in club spaces there are lots of things that could come up. It could be clubs’ licences dependent on them installing CCTV, but it could also be scanning your ID when you go into a club and having that information taken from you just to get access to that space. It could be people filming each other without consent on the dancefloor. Some of these might not be issues for a lot of people, but when you look at the history of surveillance, specifically of queer communities over time, that has a lineage. When our spaces are reduced and we start to gather more and more in these increasingly surveilled spaces, that’s really important. As queer nightlife in general becomes more visible in urban economic policies, that is very much tied to policing and surveillance. I was reading the Westminster At Night strategy, about them wanting to increase their economic activity at night in clubs and bars and pubs. Some of the key points are increasing the amount of police and CCTV cameras on the streets. It’s a big part of nightlife being more visible, so there’s a lot of layers to that. When you look at it in the context of queer nightlife, it’s not hard to make the leap between this history of surveillance and how this might impact people now, especially with CCTV in bathrooms. As we get more and more used to that, or normalise that, people also become self-policing, or self-surveilling, so it can impact how you move on a dancefloor, just like when someone is filming you and you don’t know where it’s gonna go.
With stuff like licensing and surveillance, there’s also the question of drugs and harm reduction. I spoke to a lot of welfare workers who work in clubs right now and a lot of them found that licensing and surveillance and policing in nightlife made it really hard for them to do their jobs, which are caring for people in the clubs and providing information on safer drug use. It impacts so many different ways of how we move through the club, but also how we care for each other in the club. When I spoke to a lot of these welfare workers, because they’re on the ground doing this work, they had so many ideas. They knew how they could care for people in the club much better. When I used to work in a club in East London a few years ago, there was a very popular queer night that increasingly was having issues with the drug GHB, where people were overdosing in the club. The promoter was really worried over whether they could put safer use information up in the bathroom, because the club could risk losing its licence. It prevents the care that might’ve been a little bit more prevalent in the queer club from actually happening. People have the answers, but some of these restrictions make it very difficult to actually bring them to life.
CR: The club doublethink: we’re all gonna pretend that there aren’t any drugs and then also not do any harm reduction.
TL: I’m pretty confident that if you polled club owners and club workers, everyone would be for what you’re talking about. Everybody wants to take more care of the people in their club, but the issue is with licences and the people in the council that ultimately make the call on who’s getting them.
APS: It’s people in the council, people outside of the club, who are making these decisions. When you go back to the idea of the commons, it’s about people making decisions about the spaces that matter to them and about the spaces that they actively participate in, rather than somebody else making these rules that don’t make sense in practice.
TL: They often come from people that have never really even stepped a foot in a club too. To go back to the commons idea, you advocate for this more horizontal view of nightlife workers, where bar staff, welfare, toilet attendants and DJs should all be seen as nightlife workers in the same way. It occurred to me, if we’re talking about trying to make positive changes and moving towards a more equitable vision of nightlife, are DJs the key here? Is it DJs with their financial clout and status, are they the ones that should be taking a much bigger role in this?
APS: I think that’s a really, really good question. One of my favorite essays ever is called Abolish DJ Idolatry by Mathys Renella. I highly recommend you give it a read. DJs have so much more visibility in nightlife and in the nightlife economy. More recently, when we look at the DJs boycotting KKR-owned festivals, they’ve had a massive impact. When I spoke to some welfare workers who were part of a team who pulled out of a festival because of unethical sponsorship, they basically said that in the end, it felt like the only impact that had was that people no longer had welfare at the festival. It didn’t create this momentum like DJs pulling out did. So in some ways I love the Abolish DJ Idolatry essay, and what the author advocates for is looking at the broader ecosystem of nightlife workers, but if we want to make change that involves looking at where power is currently held and visibility, and that involves DJs. So I think they should absolutely be playing an active role. I think a lot of them are. When I spoke to behind-the-scenes workers, they often brought up wanting more solidarity, wanting more collaboration with more visible roles and behind-the-scenes roles, because it’s very easy to just think that nightlife equals DJs. I’m sure a lot of us here know there’s so many other roles behind the scenes and I think we can make more changes if those roles start to work together. A big part of that is going to be the DJs, because they have a lot of clout. They can make some of these changes quicker. Those changes will be even more powerful with the people behind the scenes backing them up.
TL: Are there other practical things that DJs you think should be practising here?
APS: I think by thinking about themselves as workers. The idea of being a worker aligns you a little bit more closely with other people in the nightlife ecosystem. Something that has come up in conversations I’ve had is financial transparency, understanding where the money goes in a night: what’s going to DJs, who’s a volunteer on the night, and is that right? That would also be something that DJs could really advocate for and lead as well.
CR: That speaks to this difficulty that you mention in the book, which is how do you organise among nightlife workers who are doing such different things? There’s not an obvious union for people who work in nightlife, and that’s not something that DJs could join either. Really it is about collective action. We talked about this earlier in the year regarding the Superstruct-owned festivals: it’s one thing for big DJs to pull out of Field Day, and well done those DJs who did, but what they really need to do is talk to each other and agree that they’re also not going to accept that booking next year. There’s only power in making a collective decision and drawing that line in the sand, but that’s really difficult to do in nightlife.
APS: Absolutely! Specifically, timing and sleep schedules have come up so much when I speak to people about work or organising! There’s a lot of practical barriers to worker organising. Timescales, but also, different workers in nightlife have different material needs and material conditions. Sometimes that can be difficult for people to cross. Since I first started writing about these things it’s changed so much and has continued to change. I’m seeing a lot more spaces where different kinds of workers are talking about these issues together, rather than in silos. I feel hopeful!
