The Funky Slug Club 30th Anniversary
30 years ago I started my very first business, the Funky Slug Club, a club night at a seedy nightclub called Klute, in my home-town of Durham City.
School friends Pete, Nick and I were three scruffy kids who listened to grunge, post-hardcore and American alt rock. We attended (I don’t think I can say we studied) Durham Sixth Form Centre, were in a band together and we drank in a pub called The Angel. If you weren’t into ‘alternative’ music you wouldn’t dare venture up Crossgate bank to the pub as it had a reputation of being a rough biker bar. Of course, as I discovered at the tender age of 15, it was one the friendliest pubs in town. It had a great jukebox, a pool table, goths, punks, bikers, indie kids, rockers and a whole load of friendly weirdos. The staff were also happy to sell bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale to underage teenagers. Lots and lots and lots of Newcastle Brown Ale.
We used to spend 2 or 3 or 4 nights there every week. We’d drink as much beer as we could for a tenner, play some pool, chat up girls, try and look cool (but disinterested) and perhaps smoke some weed in the beer garden when the landlord was off duty. But, come 11.20pm, we had to be out. And Durham being a small town (I know it’s a Cathedral City but it’s a town pretending to be a city really) we only had two nightclubs to choose from if we wanted to continue our libations; either go to Klute and risk sticking to the floor or go to Rixy’s and risk getting punched in the head by a lunkhead. We generally opted for the former but the music was, well, shit. We didn’t feel at home.
The Start
So, Pete and I decided to start our own indie night (Nick joined us a few months later). We would only play music we liked and we would book good local bands that struggled to find decent venues to play in, outside of Newcastle.
We figured that there were enough like-minded people in Durham to make it work so we approached the owner of Klute, Phil, with a proposal. He would let us take over the club every Wednesday night and we would fill it for him. We’d book live bands, sort the DJs, arrange drink promotions, dress the club to make it feel different and we’d also do all the marketing and promotion. For our efforts we wanted 50% of the door take.
Phil didn’t take us seriously — we were a couple of long-haired, ripped jeans-wearing teenagers and he was a ‘serious’ local businessman — but Wednesdays were a dead night for the club so he had nothing to lose. Plus, around this time, Klute had been voted the worst nightclub in Europe in FHM magazine. Well, it had actually been voted the second worst but, when the winner of this prestigious accolade, a club in Belgrade, was burned to the ground, Klute took numero uno position by default. And if you don’t believe me read this Vice article.
So, we shook hands and agreed a date for launch night. Pete and I went off to determine how we could use the inevitably popular night to our advantage, particularly to:
- Promote our own band.
- Meet girls.
- Drink lots.
- Have a great time every Wednesday night and still come away with a pocket full of cash.
We decided on the name Funky Slug Club. To this day we can’t remember why but we assume some herbs were involved in the decision-making process.
One thing we do remember though is deciding to set up the business properly and get a business bank account (by this time we’d branched out into promoting gigs at bigger venues, our most successful being The Orb performing their pilled-up, chilled-out electronic vibes to a thousand pilled-up, chilled-out ravers at Durham University Student’s Union).
We decided on Funky Slug Promotions as our business name but our new bank manager said people wouldn’t take us seriously if we printed that name on our cheque book. Being naïve and compliant we assumed he was right because he was wearing a suit and probably got paid, like, thirty grand or something. So we shrugged our shoulders and he kindly christened us FS Promotions instead.
(Incidentally, if you are a budding entrepreneur, don’t take advice from your business bank manager. They may know banking but they don’t know business.)
The Campaign
To promote our opening night at Klute we created a logo with a black marker and got hundreds of posters and stickers printed up. There was so such thing as social media in 1990 so we pounded the streets of Durham, pasting posters to bus shelters and covering lamp posts with stickers, all under the cover of darkness of course.
One night I arrived back at my parents house after another successful mission slugifying Durham City. As I was going to bed I noticed a message that I had to call Klute urgently. “For fuck’s sake Rich, why are you getting us into trouble with the Police before your night has even started?” Phil had taken a call from the Police because they we mightily pissed off about the Funky Slug Club posters that kept appearing around town.
Don’t worry Phil, we responded, it’ll be fine. “Well, the Police are going to prosecute unless you remove all the posters straight away. So that is exactly what you’re going to do. Right now!”. But it’s after midnight, it’s pissing down and I can’t be bothered were my thoughts but, of course, our response was “Erm, OK Phil”. So that’s what we did. I jumped in my mother’s beige Fiat Panda again and drove around town until the early morning removing all the posters we could find. It wasn’t hard to find them mind, because they were everywhere. They were tricky to remove though because we’d use industrial-strength wallpaper paste. And it was raining hard which made it nearly impossible to peel the posters off the Perspex windows in bus stops.
The next morning we decided that our marketing campaign should focus on word-of-mouth instead, by handing out flyers to anyone who looked a bit like us. And it worked. We filled Klute to capacity, much to the surprise of the management. Those two Kurt Cobain wannabes had actually pulled it off.
The Morning After
We all had an amazing night. Pete and I walked away with £300 each in our sky rockets and serious hangovers the next afternoon. Our first week’s profit was dented a few days later however when the Police kindly decided they were going to prosecute us for fly-posting even though we’d removed the evidence. We ended up in the local magistrates court and were fined £120.
All I remember about the event was the Magistrate telling me off for having my hands in my pockets when I stood up to be addressed. It’s like being back at school I remember thinking. I always had a problem with authority. Still do. Fuck ‘em I thought, I’ve still got the £300 from the first night, I’ll pay now, that’ll show ’em. I thought I was Ace Face in Quadrophenia, played by Sting.
The Backstab
As word spread, we continued to fill Klute with drunken indie kids every Wednesday night and people started travelling in from around the North East. However, after a few months, the management of Klute got greedy. They thought that they could run the night without us so dissolved our partnership without any warning.
We didn’t have time to transfer our night to Rixy’s on the other side of town so we found ourselves littering the town once again, this time with flyers saying that Klute had cancelled the Funky Slug Club and were trying to do their own night, so please don’t go. We weren’t prepared for Klute to benefit from all the hard work we had put in up to that point and, anyway, this town ain’t big enough for the both of us.
The Retribution
The flyers paid off. We went along to ‘their’ new indie night when the doors opened at 10pm. We stood at the bar drinking bottles of Brown Ale naturally, while keeping an eye on the entrance. We waited. We drank more Brown Ale and waited some more. Nobody turned up. Beer has never tasted as sweet as it did that night.
Suffice to say the management asked us back the following week. The Funky Slug Club went from strength to strength and became the longest-running indie club night in the north east, going for well over 10 years.
The Lesson
I learned the importance of identifying with your target audience, and cost-effective marketing. I also learned that, just because something is working well doesn’t mean you can’t change or improve it. I don’t subscribe to the saying ‘if it isn’t broken don’t fix it’ because that can breed complacency and discourage innovation. Running the club night for over 10 years meant that our audience was constantly changing, particularly when there was a new intake of students at the University and colleges. We had to make sure they wanted to keep coming back for more so we were always reinventing ourselves.
I also learned never to trust nightclub owners.
Oh, that reminds me, and please excuse this digression, but Phil’s surname was Cummings. His nephew was none other than Dominic Cummings, strategist behind the Brexit campaign and Barnard Castle’s favourite tourist. Dominic was studying at Oxford University when the Funky Slug Club launched but, during the holidays, Phil employed him to collect the door money (he wasn’t a bouncer as the national media recently suggested). I won’t go into any details but I’ll just say that, on the nights when he collected the door money, our 50% share was more like 30% share. And our cash was always handed over when the doormen were in close proximity. To be fair to Dominic, he was studying History not Economics so they were probably genuine accounting errors.
The Playlist
Anyway, to celebrate 30 years since the Funky Slug Club started, I have put together a Spotify playlist of some of the songs we used to play on a regular basis. I started off by selecting the top 30 tracks, which soon became 300. Then I remembered another bunch of songs that I couldn’t leave out, so it’s become Now That’s What I Call the Best 359 Funky Slug Club Classics. 24-hours worth of brit pop, baggy, goth, grunge, alt rock, shoegaze, post-hardcore, kerplunk-rock, post-rock, grebo, big beat, breakbeat, trip hop, hip hop, jangle pop, industrial, nu metal, twee, drum n bass and emo*.
Chances are you didn’t frequent the Funky Slug Club but, if you were a teenager in the 90s, and you liked alternative music, then there’s a good chance some of these songs will bring back happy/hazy memories. There will be many glaring omissions no doubt (I very nearly missed Creep by Radiohead for God’s sake!) so feel free to leave a comment with suggestions and I’ll add them.
‘Fools Gold’ by The Stone Roses, ‘Add It Up’ by Violent Femmes and ‘Been Caught Stealing’ by Jane’s Addiction are dedicated to my old friend Dominic. Enjoy.
The End
*One of those genres is made up.
