When Alan Simms booked the Queen’s University Students’ Union in Belfast in 1995 for a new club night, he had a few ideas in his head. Simms had DJ-ed in a few clubs around the city, such as after-hours joint Tokyo Joe’s, and promoted a night called Different Drum at the Limelight, so he knew there was a crowd in the city who wanted to go dancing.
“Shine started more as somewhere to go,” Simms recalls. “The city was still a bit sketchy at that point in places. You’d have a night that was very quiet because there were some problems on the streets and people were scared to go out.
“Belfast was a difficult place to go out and enjoy yourself. People didn’t come into the city and they’d travel instead to big rural nightclubs, like the Coach in Banbridge or Kelly’s in Portrush, huge 3,000-capacity venues in small towns 50 miles from Belfast. We saw an opportunity to have somewhere for us and our mates to throw a party and maybe make a few quid at the same time. There was no great plan.
“People see Shine now as a techno club, but we started it because we were fed up with the techno that was around at the time. We wanted a club where you’d have girls and a happy vibe, so we started out playing US house and gospelly vocal tracks. Then we got bored with that when it became cheesy and commercial and went back to techno.”
Going concern
Twenty years on, Shine is still very much a going concern. While the club has changed and morphed over the years – going from weekly to monthly, for example – the fundamentals remain largely the same: same building, same top-quality music, same fever to give Shine audiences the time of their lives.
Those audiences have naturally changed over the years as the people who were going out in the early days gave way to newer, younger clubbers.
“For a club to go on as long as Shine, you have to be able to bring in successive generations,” says Simms. “You have a two- or maybe three-year window when people will go somewhere on a reasonably frequent basis, and then they become bored and move on. We seem to have been able to reconnect with an audience every time that happens, so we’ve been lucky.”
Shine was quick to forge an online connection with its audience. “People formed a big social connection around the club,” says Simms. “We had a forum on our website from the start that a lot of people used, so we got the whole sense of online community, and that totally helped us.
“In the 1990s, we had 56,000 unique users on the forum and they were very active, and that’s when we knew we had something special. People were not looking at the club as some anonymous retail space; they were prepared to bring something to it and associate themselves with it.”
Winning call
The venue, too, was a winning call. “We have our own venues now, but we’ve never moved the club night because everyone associates Shine with the students’ union and I’ve no problem with that at all,” says Simms. “When we started, Belfast was a rough, dodgy place. One of the reasons why we chose the students’ union was because we figured that those hard guys who’d want to come in and take over your venue would not do that with the students’ union.
“It’s a university building, it’s the establishment, and it would be very bold of them to muscle their way in, and they didn’t. That helped the longevity of the club, and we were able to maintain a nice, safe environment.”
Over the years, Shine has put on hundreds of local and international DJs, and it’s the homegrown ones Simms lists as his highlights. “It’s always nice to see some local homegrown talent who emerges at Shine and goes on to bigger things in dance music circles all across the world.
“[For] the guys in Bicep, Shine was one of their first experiences, and they’ve always mentioned it. [And there were] others like the Japanese Popstars and Space Dimension Controller, and there’s current guys, too, like Schmutz and Swoose.”
Simms believes a club like Shine has “a responsibility to the community” to encourage and foster new talent. “We’ve always welcomed local producers. I’ve always tried to get younger guys in and give them a good slot and see how we can help them. We were very picky about who we worked with. Everyone got a go, but if you were playing regularly, it was because you were really good and we hoped it would be a platform for you to go on and do something elsewhere.”
Smaller clubs
When Shine moved away from weekly club nights, Simms saw a growth in smaller clubs around the city. “Before, we just swallowed up so much of the crowd who’d go out dancing every week that it was very difficult for other promoters. When we went monthly, all these other promoters appeared and that has been very good for the city. People started cutting their teeth in these 200-capacity rooms and it was great to see.”
While Simms is still involved with Shine, he has other ventures on the go and is not as hands-on as before.
“To an extent, I’ve already handed this over and Joe Dougan and Anthony Ferris handle the day-to-day running of Shine,” he says.
“It used to be that I looked after everything, but I don’t think it would have its edge if I was still doing it. I’m an old guy now and it’s very important that I hand it over to younger voices and guys who are immersed in that scene. Otherwise, it would not be fresh.
“The very nature of this is that it’s a youth brand. It’s almost embarrassing to mention we’ve been going for 20 years but we’re only doing that because it’s such a landmark.”
