HISTORY & CULTURE
So many people have contributed to our history & culture that it’s important we point out that in this section, when we use the word ‘we’ it applys to everyone involved with our team at that time. Now, we’re gonna have to assume you’re sitting comfortably…
‘What we’re gonna do right here is go back… way back… back into time.’
Newcastle in the 1980s.
‘Either we will find a way, or we will make one…’
In the 80’s Newcastle was a very different kind of place to what it is today. We were young kids with nowhere to go & nothing to do. Margaret Thatcher was in power & we felt we had no place in England. Radio was rubbish, TV was rubbish, as were clubs & you would not get let in them anyway, if your skin colour wasn’t whiter than your socks.
Kajagoogoo’s ‘Too Shy’ & Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ were no.1 records & life really, couldn’t honestly, possibly, have been more mind numbingly boring…
Nearly all the bars in town were run by a tiny clique of small minded individuals who held a stranglehold monopoly on beer licences & just copied each others wank ideas.
Newcastle night life was one big homogenised mainstream load of shoulder padded nonsense. We had no scene to hang out on & we went about like complete outsiders.
There were so few places to go in the early 80s that we ended up hanging out on the fringes of the New romantic & Hippy scenes. From around 1981 we worked in the beautiful old Handyside Arcade (now flattened to make way for the Eldon Garden Mall).
We went places like the Delby on a Saturday where we got exposed to artists like Bowie, Iggy Pop & electronic music. They were ok times, but it was obvious that the kind of music & diversity of stuff we were really into, was sorely missing in Newcastle.
All our wages went funding trips to Amsterdam where we just felt more at home. From the start, more liberated Amsterdam bar culture became a major early influence on us.
There were only a handful of places in Newcastle that offered any respite from the boredom & one of them was a bar called the Trent House tucked up on Leazes Lane.
The Trent House in the 80s.
In 1984, 25 years ago, we started working in this little bar collecting glasses, because we were just bored & liked the variety on the jukebox. It was already a happening place & we worked our way up the ranks & took over the management of the bar. We promoted it with multiracial images & took control of the jukebox, filling it with rare soul & funk. We then set off developing an Amsterdam type vibe the City hadn’t seen before.
There was a backlash to the notion of ’darkies’ controlling a City bar in the 80s & the windows went out every night for weeks as racist elements tried to push us out. We stood firm & hit back anyway we could, we were prepared to fight for our fledgling scene. It was all we had & we weren’t gonna give up our one shot at changing things, ’cos a bunch of tupp’ny 80s halfwits, chose not to respect us as proper human beings.
They could not beat us & after 5 years & with a lot of help, we purchased the lease of the premises in 1989, altering the name to the Trent House Soul Bar. The Bar, led by it’s astonishing jukebox & far out publicity went from strength to strength & became really well known as the firm market leader, on the more credible end of the night life scene. This created a cultural basis & platform from which the WHQ has now evolved.
The Underground Party Scene in the 80s.
Around the same time we began to play records in public. With a strong Northern Soul, Funk & Jazz background, we were already well on the way to having a really great music collection & were eager to share all our top tunes with anyone who would listen.
Back then other than a couple of club nights in the City’s main gay club, odd Soul dos at the Mayfair & a selection of bars you could count on the fingers of one hand, there was nowhere worth going. Small house parties would take place every weekend in the West of the City where all the students used to live, but they were a bit hit & miss really.
Clubwise, if you were a non white, a student, a girl, or anything other than a white geordie male you got hassle almost wherever you went, if not from the customers, then the doormen of almost any club you visited. Violence was commonplace & the Cops would hassle the life out of you as well. We got so pissed off with it all that we just started to get involved with secret, bigger party events to cater for people like us. We rejected all that was middle of the road & the little underground scene kicked off.
Epic parties ensued, like the classic Jesmond Cemetry bash, which the newspapers sensationalised with… ‘Rampaging Students have Sex on Graves!!’ type headlines. The best Djs on the scene were all in on it & the big tune was ‘Night to Remember’ by Shalamar. Rare Groove, World music, Soul & Reggae were big & Barrington Levy’s ‘Here I Come’ & ‘Across the tracks’ by Maceo & the Macks were really massive beats.
On the back of that we really got our act together & did ones like the 24hr Party, which we held all over the place, ending in an empty property in the West End with mattresses at the windows. Proper madness, but there was a kind of innocence to it.
We used the Trent as a kind of mission control, as from here we had a central point from which we could meet people, to let them all know where & when the next do was.
The Beach Party 1986.
Probably the greatest underground party ever to come out of this City & certainly the peak of our DIY party activity was the 1986 Trent House Beach Party. 700 people, marquees, pool tables, generators, space invaders, food, beer, sound system etc., all brought up & assembled just for the one beautiful Summer night, in a natural amphitheatre between the dunes, at the beach on Duridge Bay, up in Northumberland.
We’d been up in the afternoon to give the farmer with the land nearest the bit of beach where we planned to have the party, a bottle of whiskey to knock him out. Worked a treat & by the time the cops cottoned on, it was the next day & we were long gone, having taken our 5 a side goals, all our rubbish, plus 700 weary, happy chums with us.
That was a proper do & it planted the seed in us, that we could maybe muster enough support to legitimise this kinda caper in the real world & build some kind of permanent scene. This was just as well, as the arrival of designer club drugs a few years later all but killed off opportunities to do the kind of cool, fun, underground partys we were into.
Once the 90’s arrived, charvers poured into the scene & all credibility, innocence & merit in underground party activity seemed lost. It became one big hassle, then kinda petered out, replaced with ‘raves’ & all the other pantomime stuff that came with them.
The Club Scene in the 80s
Rockshots in the 80s.
Rockshots was the main Gay club in the City & the only place tolerant enough to let people on our scene in. There was ‘Echoes’ club playing Black music there on a Thursday & ‘Rathaus’ on Tuesdays, playing bands like New order & emerging electro.
Within a couple of years we had residencies at these two pivotal nights & we now ran all straight aspects of the region’s best gay club. The more indie side of stuff we then took all over the North East, to Durham, Sunderland, Carlisle etc., establishing regular nights in every club that would have us, many of which went well & rocked on for years.
We watched how other people ran & managed their clubs & kept a close eye out for anything we could learn. We learned plenty, gained relentless hours of hands on experience, whilst serving the type of apprenticeship many Djs & promoters today don’t even realise they need. We put the really long hours in & we played everywhere.
Walls & walls of Culture.
You can see the old posters for all our past clubs covering all the walls above your head, as you walk into the front lobby of WHQ, or you can check out our photo albums.
As House music filtered in towards the end of the 80’s, the Thursday we did at Rockshots started to evolve more in that direction. We’d given the night a couple of names, at first it was ‘Determination Inc’ & after that we went for ’The Sound of Music.’
Then as the 8os played out & the 90s dawned, a new drug called ecstasy arrived in Newcastle for the first time. The scene exploded… & we do mean properly exploded.
Ibiza 1989.
Nationwide (apparently except Scotland, see below), 89 was known as the Summer of Love & the easter before we hit Ibiza. The influence of english clubs was already there, though nightclub tourism like you’ll see on ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ today hadn’t kicked off yet.
The Island was nothing like that at all. The scene there was beautiful in it’s innocence & unlike now, many of the clubs were open air & absolutely fantastic. Musically it was anything goes, which became known as the ‘Balearic style’, describing what, seemed to us was the art of the old reggae selectors, based around house & then broadened out to encompass all styles. Mixing records mattered, but selection was King out here.
Being there at the start of that scene & to see the way it has now turned into such a tourism monster, opened our eyes & has taught us a lot about what you stand to lose if you sell out to mainstream influence. Dilute your ideas & you risk losing your dream.
It already was the case, but Ibiza in ‘89 made us actually realise that for us, it was gonna be Clubs or nothing…
Bigbird, Edinburgh 1989.
In 1989, things were going well, so we got cocky & thought we knew everything. However, we didn’t really know what we were doing & were therefore perfectly poised, to bite off a bit more than we could chew…
We were now playing clubs 6 nights a week & we pushed our expansion into Bonnie Scotland. After taking a long time to case out venues, we took over a big old building called Wilkie House, in Edinburgh’s Cowgate on Saturday nights & basically did a version of Thursday Rockshots there we called Bigbird… It was an outrageous move.
This proved to be the steepest learning curve of all as it meant having to drive teams of kids up there, armed with pots of glue to fly post overnight. We ran a proper guerilla advertising campaign & we covered Edinburgh in our publicity & took a big & very young team up, to try & run all aspects of the Club each Saturday night. After a very shaky start it folded, then we tried a second big push & it became a runaway success.
This did not go unnoticed by the local competition who hated us. The subtle combination of black, with an apparently english background (which the majority of our young team were), was more than the scottish, racist, soccer casuals could bear.
They systematically targeted the club, arriving in small groups or with girls to get past our door & would then assemble & kick off big time inside, as the night wound down.
Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t talking simple fistiecuffs here, we are talking proper, knife carrying, highly organised, racially motivated mob violence, the like of which we have never seen anywhere else (& we’ve seen some major incidents over the years).
This was a level of mindless aggression that was sickening in it’s intensity. It seemed like drugs & crazy people had taken over the world & one night they literally came within inches of nearly killing one of us… Time for a rapid exit.
We left, quite probably in the nick of time. Just as importantly, we banked the experience & swore that if we ever got our own club, we would make a point of understanding what we were getting into, planning for the unexpected, making door security our top priority & controlling every single thing ourselves. Near death, from lack of risk awareness, is a remarkably quickly understood lesson. That lasting lesson was the real benefit of working in that mad place, at that particular insane time.
Club Afrika 1989.
Club Afrika opened in the Summer of 1989. The first record played here was Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ We did the music there from the very start & it was great to have weekend clubnights to play in where you weren’t in mortal danger of being killed.
It was on the same site as the old WHQ came to be, on Marlborough Cres. This was years & years before the area of Times Square existed, when it was really run down & it’s highlight was a derelict bus station. Playing here gave us a chance to turn away from the excesses of the rapidly emerging House scene for a moment & spin old skool Black music again, but this time with weekend slots. At first the crowd was nice & mixed. We played the Friday & Saturdays for a long while & it was really, really good.
Newcastle in the 1990s.
The Trent House takes off…
The Trent was ours now & properly established. It began to get national & international recognition for it’s overall groove & especially it’s far out jukebox. The multiracial, all inclusive ethos started to get across to people & the Bar slowly grew & moved forward.
As attitudes began to change, people started to take notice & it became very well known for all the right reasons. People started to love it & friendliness in Newcastle seemed to us to be moving forward too. Our tagline was, ‘Trent House, For Health & Beauty All Seasons of the Year’. ‘It’s a Family Affair’ by Sly Stone was our biggest tune.
In our eyes it was now equal, if not better than, the majority of cool bars in Amsterdam.
As time marched on & years turned into decades we kept it tight. The Trent was the first ever Observer bar of the week, was then featured in GQ Golden Bar Guide & really started to reach people , becoming known all over the country for it’s music & diversity.
Whilst it was a nice surprise, it was water off a duck’s back really, as we were so deep into it we didn’t care what people looking in might have thought. We ran it because we just always had. It had been the start of good things & we were properly in love with it.
Citizens of the Planet.
We finally woke to media appreciation though, when the Lonely Planet mob gave us a write up a couple of years ago. They wrote…
‘The wall has a simple message: ‘Drink Beer. Be Sincere.’ This simply unique place is the best bar in town because it is all about an ethos rather than a look. Totally relaxed and utterly devoid of pretentiousness, it is an old-school boozer that out-cools every other bar because it isn’t trying to…
And because it has the best jukebox in all of England - you could spend years listening to the extraordinary collection of songs it contains. It is run by the same folks behind the superb World Headquarters nightclub’.
They were internationally circulated & loads of Australians & people from many other countries came to check us out & totally got it. We felt like a circle had been closed. We had taken the game from dreaming in Amsterdam & upped it to to reality in Newcastle.
We gave The Trent up in Spring 2009, after 25 years & further down the page there is all the inside stuff on it. Now, to get back to the 90s…
Maximum Potential & the influence of bands.
Maximum Potential was a thing we briefly ran promoting live music by teaming up with friends. We dabbled a bit promoting artists like Bob Mould from Husker Du, in the old Jesmond Cinema & Irish songstress Mary Black at the City Hall. The peak of this caper came when we booked Nirvana to play the Mayfair Ballroom, sadly now demolished to make way for the Gate complex. It was months prior to the release of ‘Nevermind’ that we booked them, but as the show approached, the album blew up, ‘Teen Spirit’ entered the charts at no 7 the week of the show & Nirvana were massive.
Total sold out madness & we had never seen anything like that before, or since. We hung out with them in the Trent later & they turned out to be much better rock stars than they were pool players…
Other than the stuff we promoted, we were greatly infuenced by other artists we met. Michael Franti first came to the bar after a show on the first Disposable Heroes tour. We hung out & when he returned with his then new band Spearhead to play Newcastle, we hung out some more. If you have never heard of Spearhead, it’s time you wised up & got with it. They are one of the best live bands you will ever see & all their albums are on. Try ‘Stay Human’ or ’Everyone Deserves Music’ & you’ll get with it.
We follow Spearhead & Michael’s career closely & catch up, with them any time we can. He’s been a great infuence on us, we are all part of the same movement & whenever we see him, he always reminds us we are on the right track & to stand firm.
Public Enemy were also a massive infuence on us & we followed them as they toured around the UK to every show they played. Their positve input pushed our whole thing to a new level. Great things started to happen & we were smack in the middle of them.
Around this time seminal albums like ‘Club Classics Vol 1′ by Soul To Soul & ‘3 Feet High & Rising’ by De La Soul had just dropped & they completely redefined modern music & got mass radio airplay. House was huge & as always, we embraced absolutely everything, kept on playing tunes & our groove just got stronger & stronger.
It was a new decade, Newcastle was rocking, Amsterdam was beautiful, Black music was healthy & we were inspired to take it up a gear.
The Club Scene in the 90s.
Rockshots in the 90s.
On the back of the house music explosion we decided to branch out a bit & mix things up a touch. We started to bring Djs like Danny Rampling up from the south to play & the whole City would go mad. He was totally running the London scene at the time, we’d seen him spin in Ibiza & knew we simply had to bring him to play tunes up here.
We would work with Clubs from other cities like G-Love from Liverpool, Love Ranch from London & our all time favourites, Mark & Adrian from Luv-Dup, bringing outside talent & tunes into Newcastle’s underground club scene in an attempt to make it grow.
We were so successful it was sick & we began branching out further, bringing top USA House music Djs like Tony Humphries & Robert Owens to play at our Thursday night.
Other clubs began to switch on to house music & we started to see people like charvers, coming into clubs for the first time. They were led by drugs, rather than music & it was here it all started to kind of diverge away, from where we were headed.
Rockshots kept rolling & got madder & madder until our activities there quite literally imploded. The guys from ‘Nice’ then followed in our wake & made a good go of it for a while after that, going on to create themselves their own scene, after it closed down.
Rockshots was a truly epic, decadent & liberating institution, that absolutely shaped night life this City. It is still sorely missed by us all & we are proud to have been so closely associated with it for so many years, during such an insane time period in the development of modern music.
Classic Record Shops.
Over time we have spent a load of time in local record shops. Trax, Flying, Looney Tunes, Bass Generator, Rpm, Oldhitz, Listen Ear, Volume & Chill Bill’s little place on Cross Street, were all massive shops in spirit. Small independents that catered to niche markets, before the big chains cottoned on to dance music & downloads began.
As kids in the 70s we had bought Northern Soul 7′ pressings & original Disco 12’s like ‘We are Family’, ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’ & ‘I Want Your Love’ on the day they came in, from a shop called Callers, which was a department store on Northumberland Street. It sold furniture & holidays & had a fab record shop in it upstairs. Tony was the top dude you saw here, who always kept you right musically & smack up to the minute.
He went on with his chums Joan & Ronnie to open ‘Hitsville USA’ in Old Eldon Square, prior to most of the other fine shops namechecked above starting out. This was the first proper & finest record shop ever in Newcastle. They hooked us up with the beats that shaped our movement around this time & were a proper music specialist. We bought records like ‘Scream’ by Mantronix here & ‘Can you Party’ by Todd Terry, early Marshall Jefferson stuff, ‘Strings of Life’ & the real big Rockers tunes.
There are way too many Rockshots classics to properly list, but Ce Ce Rogers ‘Someday’, ‘Voodoo Ray’ by a Guy Called Gerald’ & ‘Let the Music Use You’ by the Nightwriters, are just three of the tunes that still, when we hear them today, sum that incredible period up correctly.
Surprisingly, more recently ‘Weak become Heroes’ from the first Streets album, was well on the money in recalling how it was for so many people, to be a part of the late 80s-early 90s dance movement, that swept the country…’We all smile, we all sing’.
Club Afrika in the 90s.
No longer willing to risk our lives, we now fell out with the management at Club Afrika, as after a couple of years they just couldn’t manage the door. It got to the point where people were threatening us with knives, quite literally bringing in pit bull dogs & sitting them on the bar… honestly, it was totally out of control, so we left. Foolishly, we returned for a short while because they got desperate & offered us a much better deal.
Was the same deal with the security though so we left again. We’d seen it all before, so we went & played on level 6 of the Students Union on a Friday, at a night we called ‘Eargasm’ bringing our multicultural message & reached out to the University instead.
Club Afrika enjoyed a slight resurgence as Shindig started out there after we left, but the owners couldn’t hold it together & Afrika was repossessed by the brewery early 1993. Shindig moved on to carve out a scene in Newcastle night life that they have held strong since way back then. Now, in 2010 they work with us on a regular basis, promoting their events on selected Saturday nights in WHQ @ Curtis Mayfield House.
We were convinced from all our crazy experiences, that with total control of door security we could make it work, so armed with the reputation we had from the Trent, we took on massive debts & bought the now vacant Club Afrika, to try to run it again as a club. This was a massive risk, as the City’s clubland doors were still predominantly run in a shady fashion & a great many of them were dominated by drugs & nonsense.
We were taking a big chance & all the money we could hustle to borrow was tied up in buying Afrika. We shut it for six months, then reopened it in Summer 1993 under a new name. We had a new plan, based on everything, everywhere we had ever played had taught us. About music, atmosphere, security, but most of all… How not to run a Club.
World Headquarters opens 1993.
So, World Headquarters was born on Marlborough Crescent & for the very first time we really did have total control of every aspect of a Club, from the door, to the tunes & the knowledge to make it work. It felt great, so we knuckled on down & never looked back.
The first tune played here was ‘Galaxy’ by War. We were used to working the Trent, but this was different, we’d finally made it from crazy beach parties to the promised land of legitimate actual nightclub ownership.
We were now ready to offer Newcastle nightlife a proper lasting musical alternative, to the homogenous desert it had been for us, when we were growing up as kids.
We based the entire thing around the music, our friends & the fact we were gonna keep it completely drug, charver & trouble free. We believed in ourselves & gave it time.
We ran a very strict membership system & kidded everyone their membership applications would be vetted by the cops, which was nonsense, but an essential part of the hustle to get the crowd just right. We altered the layout to make it safer, more clubby & it had a really all inclusive feel from day one. We knew now that if we just remembered all we had learnt & stuck totally to our plans, this could really take off…
World Headquarters takes off…
The first night 36 people came, they told their friends & it began to grow, just like that & we were off. We remember being overjoyed two weeks later when 136 people turned up. A week later it was capacity & stayed that way right up until the day it was flattened.
It only held 180 people, but we converted the downstairs to ‘The Muhammad Ali Cafe’ & got the numbers up to 280. ‘When We Were Kings’ came out & we were on point.
We rocked it for the next ten years & kept quality black music alive in Newcastle while for the first time being able to financially support things outside of music, we felt were good for the City, like sponsoring the visit of the Anne Frank exhibition & travelling abroad to learn (see below). It was around this time we first coined the phrase ‘Racially Harmonic’ in our publicity for the Club & we had never ever been so focused.
We also started to hire it out midweek to other people & began to learn how to work with new promoters & use our experience to help realise the type of events they were into. This led to us hosting nights like Curves, Moonbase & Triky Disco, giving new promoters that first foot in the door that we had had to fight so hard for, back in the day.
It was such a special place & in the 10 years we were there we really did up the level of diversity that was available in the City. It was an exciting time as genres like Drum & Bass appeared & Funk & Soul shone brightly. Everyone reading this who ever went there is smiling now. It really was like one great big, never ending, beautiful dream…
Everyone shared in it & artists like Jamiroquai & Moby would pop in when they were in town. It was the most amazing musical scene & tremendous little, far reaching Club. ‘Powershow’ by Fela Kuti, was just one, of the many big uplifting anthems down there.
On the right hand side of this page is a little movie we found from New Years Eve 1994. It is the only existing film of WHQ at Marlborough Crescent we know of & will give you a good feel for just how small & precious it was & the kinda mad parties we threw.
The Middlesbrough Arena & Cornerhouse mid 90s.
During the mid 90’s we accepted an invitation to play a regular Friday night at Middlesbrough’s Arena Nightclub. This was a massive place & a nice counterpoint to the intimacy of WHQ. A friend of ours, who now runs the Cluny in Byker worked as a Dj with us back then, playing Friday night cover at the Club, so we could play at the Arena.
Playing the Arena taught us a great deal. The guys down there were from a far more advanced Club culture than we had ever had in Newcastle. They had run the epic Havana Club in Boro, which was to House music in the North East, what Studio 54 was to Disco in 70s New York. You couldn’t possibly overstate it’s ground breaking importance.
The example they set & their single mindedness helped shape & hone our ambitions. Every time we went there the Club would look different & those guys hustled like crazy & didn’t miss a trick. We felt part of something there, saw loads of parallels with what we were up to & took the opportunity. We learnt a lot from working as part of their team.
We had a really great time there too & got to play nice long sets of music. We went on to play a residency for them again, at a cool new place they opened in Boro, under the railway arches called the Cornerhouse. Here they mixed music with cutting edge art installations & it made sense & a big impression on us.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything…
In all aspects of what we have done during the last 25 years there has always been a clear, unifying, multiracial message. Having started out as outsiders, with WHQ we now represented a growing section of society who shared our ideals around music, entertainment & inclusivity. Many people finally found the place they really felt at home.
By plugging away year after year, we had created a scene where all nationalites really were welcome & diversity was celebrated. We always want to reflect those principles & provide a strong model as a Club, company & team of people, who do actually care & are willing to stand up for what is right & make a difference. We often wondered if people outside of our extended Club family took notice & by 1997 they had started to…
Representatives of the City Council approached us & invited us to attend a conference in Rotterdam on the subject of promoting multiculturalism at mass events, like festivals & such like. We went along on this trip to represent Newcastle with some other delegates & met some truly inspirational characters. People like the ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ team & other folks from cool organisations we work with today.
This trip made us realise that we could maybe do even more to promote the multiracial thing & on returning, we decided WHQ on Marlborough Cresent was no longer big enough to house the expanding ideas we had. It was time to go up a gear…
Quest for a new Club…
We decided to write a book. Just a small book, but one that outlined what we did at WHQ & what we felt we represented to the City. The idea was to float it to the Council to see if they could be persuaded to sell us some of the land at the back of the Club to expand the building. We got a shock when they got back to us with the news that not only could we not have any more land, but they needed the land we were on, to become part of the City’s major transport system expansion. We were 100% mortified.
We had a load of meetings with a couple of inspired guys from the Council & quickly realised that they were well switched on & were not about to compulsory purchase us or force us out of business. Instead they worked with us, to discuss alternative places we could move to. They knew what WHQ meant to the City & wanted to help us grow.
A great many different ideas were kicked around, including housing the Club under what is now the Dance City building (which hadn’t been built yet) & also the idea of us maybe occupying the building which was then the Gala bingo hall (& is now the Carling/O2 Academy), which would have meant us branching out to host big, live stuff.
Neither was right for us as they could only have been achieved by compromising our independence & would have taken too long to realise. The developers who wanted our building started lengthy negotiations to buy it off us. We didn’t kid ourselves & knew that they only did so, because the Council made them by refusing to issue a compulsory purchase order.
Other people think like us…
This positive stance from the Council, who got what we were about & like us, genuinely wanted to promote musical diversity & racial tolerance, bought us precious time. We scanned the City looking at every derelict premises to see if one would fit the bill. Eventually we stumbled upon what was then called India House in Carliol Square.
It was for rent, but after lengthy negotiations we cut a deal to buy it. It had everything. It was in a cul de sac, no passing trade, wasn’t on any drinking route & totally off the beaten track, yet was under 5 mins from the centre of town. It seemed just so perfect…
But… It cost a fortune & the cost of converting it into a nightclub was simply ridiculous.
Do the Hustle…
So we went hustling & after facing the fear of ending up with nothing, re mortgaged anything that moved, kissed the brewery & secured the backing of a properly forward thinking manager at our new bank. He listened to us & then fronted a large chunk of the finance, based solely on his judgement, our track record & the strength of our idea.
It was at this point that we sold the Marlbourgh Crescent building to the hungry developers & sunk the money into the new building. We stuck a clause in that they had to allow us to occupy it for another year, so we could still keep old WHQ open, play records & retain continuity. The idea was the year would give us time to do all the conversion work on the Carliol Sq building. This was where the real problems began.
Grand designs up colon creek…
Struggle is not the word. Up to our eyes in debt, totally sleep deprived & sick with worry, we stumbled through the next year. Grand designs eat your heart out, we were hustling. We put the word out about our plans to move & talked it up to remind ourselves what we had to do to reach the next level. We landed fab architects & cool builders, but this kinda caper never runs smooth. Days turned to weeks & then into months. Suddenly, lyrics began to take on a new deeper, almost mythical significance.
We had now publicly stuck our necks out, in a ‘pie in the sky’ fashion & as the clock ticked away, it became clear we were gonna run out of money & time. We kept putting off the moving date & people started to wonder if we were having them on… One day time finally ran out & money the day after. We had to be out of Marlborough Cres & the new club wasn’t gonna be ready to open. If we couldn’t keep the Cres site open, we weren’t gonna be able to make the money we needed to finish the new building. We were deeply stuck, up that well known, metaphorical colonic creek… Without a paddle.
We had sold up to a bunch of developers who needed our building to make a road, to lead to a new bus station on the Western Boulevard. These dudes had to provide this new bus station as part of a big project they were involved in, to eventually redevelop the Haymarket Metro Station. We were caught in high level, transport system planning.
They couldn’t get their mits on the Haymarket site, until they could ease traffic by delivering the new Western Boulevard bus station. So we were like the first & final piece of the jigsaw for them & holding up the whole scheme. They had waited a year, but were done waiting. All we could do was look to a sign we used to keep on our office wall, that now hangs on the ground floor of the Club by the pool table, stay focused & just keep on keeping on, believing the Universe would help us somehow…
As they prepared to pounce, we went again to the City Council to ask them to intervene as a last throw of the dice, so we wouldn’t be thrown out & lose everything. A sit down was arranged between the Council, the developers & us. The Head of Transportation was there too & it was make or break time. Concious of the many people we were representing & accutely aware of just what was at stake, we put an impassioned case.
Everyone listened & the ‘heated debate’ that followed with the developers, made it hands down, the most tense meeting of our lives. Justice was done & the City Council supported us, making them hang on an extra month, so we could ’skin of our pants it’ to our fly new home. It was finally a reality & time to say fond goodbyes to the old Club.
So, the City got it’s new bus station a month late & now in 2010, the new Haymarket Metro is now all finished too. Thankfully, the City also got to retain & upgrade it’s best Club. After all that, we are actually pals with the main dude from the development company now. So in the end, respect & karma prevailed & absolutely everyone won.
Back to Nature…
WHQ at Marlborough Crescent was a mad Club. It was so, so little & was the very essence of a good house party. The toilets were tiny & the facilities so unbelievably limited that you knew for sure, that the people only came purely & simply for the music.
It was just like some mad persons little house & people genuinely loved it to bits. The Sound system would overheat & we would be flapping record sleeves to cool it down & get the bass back on, while the floor would jump as another big tune went off. We had a magical 10 years down there from 1993 to 2003. It had been a fantastic home.
On the final night, we went to the woods & got a load of trees & bushes off the forestry commission. We decorated the whole club like a woodland & partied it back into the Earth. A fitting end to a great venue. It was demolished within days. Check out the photos of it in the albums above. It was a very special place where we learned a lot. The last record played here was the Rare Groove classic & WHQ anthem ‘Bra’ by Cymande, with the somewhat topical line in it ‘But it’s alright, ‘cos we can still go on…’
Curtis Mayfield House opens 2003 & WHQ Club is finally saved.
Finally, after all the struggles, we opened Curtis Mayfield House on March 11th 2003.
World Headquarters since we relocated.
The first record played here was ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by Nina Simone. We had made it to the new place by the skin of our teeth & had big plans. At last we could branch out, work with organisations we wanted to support, up our visual game & have a really nicely laid out place to properly let things loose. Ideas were coming from all over & we were buzzing. We’d reflected our love of all things natural in previous publicity, but now we had a lot of wall space, we decided to get it up in lights. We now also had a chance to move many of the ideas we had only dreamed of into reality & large pictures of endangered, beautiful animals were the very first thing we displayed.
Design.
Whilst all the old Club shenanigans were going on, we were also taking a long time to plan out how we wanted the new WHQ to look. We put design ideas from all the great clubs into it. There are little bits of the layout of the old Club, bits of Rockshots, the Arena, everywhere we have ever played really, has influenced & contributed to the evolution & layout of World Headquarters as it is today. In designing it, we had to prioritise our wish list as we had such limited funds. Top priority after all the building conversion work etc. was a booming sound system. Then we wanted to have really nice ladies facilities, as we had such unbelievably tiny & rubbish toilets at the old Club.
We decided to invest a large chunk of our dwindling resources to put in twice the legal requirement for ladies toilets. This was done so that there would never be any queues & we made them nice & large with a kinda ‘Dubai airport’ type vibe. The result is a space where girls can hang out & organise all their girlie matters in comfort & privacy with couches, bidet facilities & all that kinda caper. We’ve always been a girl friendly little Club & seeing as how the vast majority of our members are female, we thought this would go down well & be a good plan. Seems we got it right & all the girls loved it.
The main Club space truly is a hybrid of all the best features of everywhere we have ever played. The pillars give it the industrial feel of the Arena in Boro, the large Dj booth as a central feature is a nod to the old Rockshots layout. The end result is a Dj who everyone can see & that can see everyone. We deliberately didn’t raise the Dj booth too high & kept the low ceiling height so that the Club feels nice & intimate. It’s just like the old Club, with the Dj placed firmly in the centre of the party. As you walk into WHQ the Dj booth with the records lit up behind it, is intentionally the first thing you’ll notice.
Like the old Club, we wanted lots of places for people to sit, so we put loads of couches & stools around the dance floor area. As we are music led & don’t trade in the druggie areas of the night life market, we have never used flashing lights. The only lights are on the Dj booth & bar, with dimmer, coloured light around the edge of the dance floor. This gives the room a low level of light except for the focal points. We also wanted to kill the notion of dancing as a spectator sport that you see in so many clubs today. At WHQ with it’s subdued light & intimacy, the raw music is the only sensory effect we are giving you. You come here to enjoy the music & your friends & you can easily do that in such an intimate & clear layout. It’s the ultimate houseparty blueprint.
When we first moved some people who didn’t quite get it, initially criticised our layout as being ‘one big dance floor’. It’s not, there are loads of places to sit, but we are glad to have created that effect. This means after a hard weeks slog, you can get down with your bad self without a load of leering, non dancing idiots oggling you up. Ours is an upbeat groove & everybody dances in World Headquarters. We don’t do spectators.
Downstairs has big windows & a more bar cafe type feel. With even more couches it is laid out differently to upstairs, with the dj facing across, rather than down the room. This makes it ideal for smaller parties & events & lends it to hosting daytime stuff too.
Décor.
We really take our time to change anything in the Club. It is always evolving in terms of how it looks. Our aim is to in time, decorate all the inner walls with high quality murals & pictures of things we are interested in that reflect the culture of our Club & the groove of the type of people who come here. We have already created many beautiful things.
Murals take time. Time to decide what to paint & time to decide who gets to paint them. We always use people who are already working with us as members of staff. Many of our mob study art & if they have even a hint of the skills, they are promptly press ganged into creating murals they never even believed they could paint. From bar & cloakroom staff to doormen, if they have the shapes, we have the ultimate task ahead.
Eventually we see WHQ growing into a kinda big painted ‘cave’. A direct evolution of from when early men decorated the caves they lived & celebrated in, with images of the things they held dear, or felt had power & were major influences on their daily lives.
Every single thing on display in the Club has a significance to the ends we are trying to achieve, in terms of racial harmony & raising awareness of environmental issues. It’s also nice for our regulars to see the weeks it takes to create a truly great mural & watch it develop & grow from a basic line drawing, to a warm, colourful, fabulous thing.
The Records.
We display rare record sleeves behind our bars. This is to remind people that as a Club we are vinyl led, but also because 12′ record sleeves are very often great artworks in themselves. It started out as an easily available way to change & decorate the place, but given the vast collection of rare & iconic records we have access to it has grown into much more than that, visually underlining the Club’s musical integrity.
It also let’s any visiting Dj or music freak know immediately that when it comes to music, we mean business. Most importantly, the records displayed behind the bar reflect our musical heritage, keeping images of important artists in our movement alive & current. Then lastly, on top of all that, they are simply nice & inspiring to look at.
Publicity.
We’ve always tried to do good quality publicity to represent what we’re into properly.
That’s the whole point of this site. So people can see what we are about & decide if they fancy coming dancing, or to see some art with us. We had done a folding flyer for the past few years & in 2004, were finally able to show what we had on at the new site. The flyer was a kind of mini book you could fit in your pocket. Each face folded over & it would concertina open. We put the Trent on the back. If you can enlarge it, you’ll see most of the text is incorporated in some way around this site… That’s evolution for you.
We invest a lot of our time in publicity, we never use outside design agencies & all publicity is produced in house. This is not a brand identity type thing, it’s just been a natural progression. As time goes by & we get better at it, we constantly believe the last flyer we did was our best ever work, until we do the next one. It’s that kind of obsessive streak that runs right through every single thing we do with regard to WHQ.
The kind of people we work with.
It’s our choice to work only with the types of organisations that are switched on & cool, people like Show Racism The Red Card. We always try to be involved in good stuff so host awareness & fund raising events, linked to our weekends, with people like Unison & the World Society for the Protection of Animals. We have also done stuff with the Refugee Service & are up for assisting any quality organisation in any way we can. If you are involved with a cause or have a minority event you would like to see happen, do feel free to get in touch with us & we will do our best to help you turn it into a reality.
These are some of the many national & international artists that have played music here, as our guests, since WHQ at Curtis Mayfield House opened in 2003…
Mark Ronson, Iration Steppas Soundsystem, Brenda Fassie, James Lavelle, Frankie Knuckles, Giles Peterson, Benga, David Morales, David Guetta, Maxi Jazz, Jazzie B, Caspa & Rod Azlan, Zane Lowe, Roots Manuva, Soul Jazz Records, Trevor Nelson, Bloc Party, Joe Hot Chip, Nitin Sawhney, Evil 9, Instrument of Jah Soundsystem.
Also a broad range of other artists from many other genres from Hip-Hop & House, to Dubstep, have been brought in by outside promoters. These include people like, Dennis Ferrer, Mj Cole, Marcus Intalex, David Holmes, Prince Paul, Biz Markie, Man Like Me, London Elektricity, Mary Anne Hobbs, Toddla T, Greg Wilson, Alix Perez, Nu:Tone, Paul Woolford, Spencer Parker, Jesse Rose, Dj Zinc, Tom Middleton, Funk D’void, Jerry Dammers, Mark Rae, Smoove & Turrell, Mr Scruff, James Zabiela, the list goes on & on.
Many of the people promoting here have done so year in, year out & events like the Forensic Easter dos & clubnights like Deviate, Inertia, Rusty Bucket Bay & Shindig, have become well established & regular events throughout the calendar. Guest speakers like Shami Chakrabarti & Darcus Howe have also spoken here, so it’s an exciting, broad & diverse mix of events.
Leaving Trent House, Jan 2009.
Having worked there since 1984, we decided to give up the lease on the Trent in January 2009. It had been a fab little power base for us for the last 25 years, but as there was no opportunity for us to buy it, or move it further forward, it had to go. The Brewery we had worked with on it for so long had become more distant, as they were taken over by larger business interests. Things change a lot in that long a time period.
The Trent was a fulltime job & we just reached a point where we felt like we were working for them instead of ourselves. Brewery personnel changed time & time again & to get anything done was just taking so long, it was starting to detract from what we were doing at WHQ. We never owned the Trent, we just leased it & paid a rental, so beyond our emotional attachment & time spent, we had no investment in it. Once people know you love something, they often seem to think it is ok to take your input for granted. Towards the end of 2008 we started to feel like that was becoming the case.
So we decided to let it go & handed the lease back to the Brewery who sold it on to some new people. We left certain things of ours behind, like the outer ‘babies’ sign & the globe lights above the bar, for an initial period to allow the new tennants to bed in. We also left behind the ‘Drink beer be Sincere’ on the wall & the lovely mural upstairs.
The new tenants & the brewery wanted us to leave the epic jukebox behind too, but we were not willing to sell the soundtrack of our lives & all our capers over the years, to new people who weren’t around to share in those experiences. It’s kinda nice to leave some things behind after so long, especially in a place that came to mean so much to so many people, but to ’sell on’ the music would have felt completely wrong. No one will ever duplicate or improve on that jukebox. To even attempt or pretend to, without a real understanding of the years of deep culture behind the music, would just be silly.
It was the end of an era for sure & the closing weekend was ballistic as people poured out in their droves to kiss it goodbye. It was reminiscent of when we closed the old Club & emotions were running high. No one could understand why we were leaving it behind & it all got a bit ‘Princess Di’ for a little while back then, as the emotion spilt out.
The Trent opened many doors for many people & most of the Amsterdam type bars in Newcastle today, are either run by our ex staff or people closely associated with us.
We really appreciated all the good wishes, thanks & positive media we received for what we achieved there, in terms of making the City more friendly over those 25 years.
In the photo album section ( above on the right), are images from behind the scenes & how it looked. The new tenants took over & changed the Bar totally. They removed the pictures of rare & endangered animals we left & even painted over the beautiful mural (below) that we left for them. Now a little over a year later, they are out of business & the Bar has changed hands again. There’s a moral in that somewhere…
What a great place it was to work, it really was a blast. We grew up in there & we want thank everyone who came & all who worked with us on that fab little, far reaching Soul Bar from 1984 - 2009. We held the line, all the way from Thatcher… to Barack Obama.
The last night we played all the top tunes that all meant so much, like ‘Hardest Fighter’ by Little Roy & the last of our tunes played here was ‘Brickhouse’ by the Commodores.
Looking to the Future…
So with that chapter concluded, we have a bit more time on our hands & our team is now totally focusing on WHQ Club & Curtis Mayfield House. This means stuff like this website gets done (at last!) & we can do more of the many inspiring & exciting things we have planned for the building as a whole, to make life for all of us, that bit more fun.
Our area is said to be on the rise, as the East Pilgrim Street zone becomes what the Planners describe as a ‘Truly mixed quarter’. Once the current economic downturn switches, all kinds of new, varied, shops & businesses may spring up around us. Over these next few years we’ll be even more at the heart of Newcastle as it expands.
Pop back anytime as we are constantly updating & all shows & exhibitions are announced here first. If you would like to become a member of WHQ drop us an e mail. Membership is free & you get a cute ‘jaguar’ card that will bring you good fortune.
Thank you.
Hey, thanks for visiting us, did you really read all that..?! Well if you did, thanks again, especially if you support us & the music & art we bring to the table. You now know exactly what we are all about. If you are a lazy punchliner & skipped to the end, don’t be a naughty little bad. Peep in another time, or simply just go back & try it again. Alternatively you can see the abbreviated version below…
Curtis Mayfield House & World Headquarters Club represent longevity, positivity, consistency, harmony, creativity, inclusivity, musical quality & love x.
We’re up for artistic, social & musical diversity in this City, we think it is worthwhile & precious & we are having it. We’re truly independent & only answer to the people who support us & those who work with us, or are part of our team. We grow from the inside.
It’s taken many years & we now fly the flag for the new Newcastle, the one that exists outside the imposed horizons of overused media stereotypes & free money/high finance ‘rentaculture’. The friendly scene we grew, all these years in parallel to all that waffle. We’ve also got all the best tunes, so come along & visit the Club this weekend.
Our Autumn/Winter lineup is taking shape nicely, so check out our Upcoming Events section & thanks again, for taking the time to get to know us.
Love from the team behind Curtis Mayfield House Independent Multiracial Arts Venue & the World Headquarters Music Club.
‘Nothing of any real or lasting value was ever achieved by people who conformed…’
Stand firm x.