Despite the popularity of summer festivals like Creamfields and Homelands, the future of dance music is to be found at the margins, writes Jim Carroll
In the mid-1990s, Sky One screened Cream, a series about club culture and DJs centred on the Liverpool nightclub of the same name, which was then a byword for the superclub brand. There was footage of club founder James Barton picking up awards, wining and dining DJs, and looking after business back at the club. A dynamic, innovative and hugely popular entertainment concern, it had expanded from weekly nights at its Liverpool base to include big outdoor festivals, media interests and club nights in Ibiza and South America. Like a lot of enterprises of that particular time - across all business sectors - Cream seemed to have it all.
Fast forward to summer 2002 and the announcement by Cream that the company is ceasing its weekly club night to concentrate on the Creamfields festivals - one of which, Creamfields Ireland, is at Punchestown Racecourse today - is widely viewed as the final bullet for the superclub era.
Other supposedly reliable club-cum-brands, such as Gatecrasher, Home and Ministry Of Sound, are either closing or experiencing hard times. It seems the days of wine, roses and thousands of people queuing up to pay good money to see a thirtysomething man in a loud shirt and baseball cap play records are over and superclubs are joining WAP phones, dotcom millionaires and share options on the 1990s missing-in-action list.
Here in Ireland, there have also been casualties, albeit on a smaller scale.
The Kitchen in Dublin closed its doors with a whimper in April after eight years in business, while there have been subtle shifts towards safer music policies in venues nationwide in an attempt to circumvent any slump.
Interestingly, there's a widespread refurbishment going on in Dublin clubland at present, with venues like Red Box, Temple Theatre and Mono closing for either a lick of paint or serious renovations. When Red Box re-opens later this year, it will be as a multi-room venue capable of hosting events for audiences of between 1,200 and 2,000 people.
Such bold plans aside, there's little doubt that clubland is experiencing a spot of the jitters at the moment. The certainties which fuelled its growth during the 1990s can no longer be taken for granted. The allure which made clubland such a crowd-pleaser no longer exists. These days, only a handful of DJs can pull a crowd capable of paying all the bills. And, significantly, for the first time in many years, the charts are not dominated by hits produced in clubland, and guitar rock, which so many had taken for dead, is in the ascendant once again.
However, some things have not changed, and this is where the failure of superclubs is most abject. The audiences who used to fill clubs like Cream have not suddenly decided to stay in at night and do the crossword. They're still going out, but they've changed how they choose to spend their nights out - and there's very little superclubs can do about it.
For a start, superclub audiences were getting older and older. Spending a night in a packed club may be OK when you're a 22-year-old pumped up on energy drinks and what-have-you, looking to dance and/or score, but it's somewhat harder to sustain that momentum when you hit 30 and take on a mortgage. While these clubbers still go out (once they can get a babysitter and providing they still have a job to pay for said night out), they're now heading to trendy bars in which they can stand around, sip expensive lagers and nod their heads knowingly to the chill-out sounds of the ubiquitous in-bar DJ.
Realistically, superclubs can't compete with this because their business is about the creation of big, extravagant events aimed at the largest possible number of people.
If these elder statesmen and women, the ones who fought for their right to rave in the fields and dodgy clubs of the early 1990s, do head to a club, it's increasingly to an old-skool nostalgia night which plays hits from that halcyon era when the smiley ruled the world. Clubland's answer to 1970s nights, these old-skool bashes have been the only nights to fill certain venues this year, a searing indictment of clubland's inability to move forward.
While it might sound like a good idea, you can't have nostalgia nights seven nights a week - which means you need the kids.
The generational shift in clubland should have left the way open for younger brothers and sisters to dominate the dancefloor but most of these are also voting with their feet and moving away from the big clubs. For them, worshipping DJs who have been doing the same thing for years and years is just not appealing. Promoters who knew how to appeal to a crowd five or 10 years ago are totally out of the loop when it comes to pitching that club at a different age-group - a problem endemic in Ireland, where the same coterie of promoters and DJs have dominated venues and clubs since the early 1990s.
This audience is also far more cynical and astute when it comes to responding to sponsorship in clubs. Hence the rather paltry results which big brands are now experiencing from their clubland spending sprees, which will inevitably lead to decreases in the budgets allocated by these patrons in the next financial year. In some ways, the manner in which everyone from Smirnoff vodka to Impulse deodorant bought into clubland in search of a positive brand association has had a detrimental effect.
The manner in which superclubs embraced these sponsors for their easy money has made what was once perceived as a cool and somewhat anti-establishment lifestyle as commonplace and sterile an experience as going to the cinema or supermarket. Because it got greedy, clubland has shot itself in the foot.
Instead of staying around to take advantage of any free product samples which are knocking around, this audience is now heading to the margins where few marketing executives venture to communicate their messages about brand loyalty. There, in the back rooms of small pubs and dingy basements, a million miles away from the corporate superclubs which are choking clubland, tomorrow's sounds, movements, trends and stars are getting it together. There, the music really does sound much better.
You shouldn't underestimate the importance of the music to the equation, as superclubs have found out to their cost. For the last couple of years, trance and progressive house have been the big-room sounds which every DJ who wants another gig has been flogging to death and which have dominated both singles and compilation charts as a direct result.
But what may have once been innovative or exciting is now bland, over-played and lacking in any imagination or spark. No wonder that kids hell-bent on making a racket are taking up guitars rather than samplers. With exciting, brash and highly cool gigs and albums suddenly the sole domain of bands such as The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Hives and The Vines, dance music has, strangely, become the prog-rock of the 21st century.
YET there is hope and it's to be found, naturally, on the fringes. There, the people who will always be five or six steps ahead of the curve are already in action, creating futuristic music which will rock dancefloors in some shape or form in the coming years. You probably don't know their names, and that's the way they want to keep it for now. They may not be the ones who will eventually reap the rewards (cultural pioneers never get to cash in), but you'll be able to trace it back to that particular source, that particular basement, that particular innovation, when the new techno or drum and bass eventually breaks through.
Good news, to be sure, but that next big thing will be some time coming. For the moment, just as every other large business embarks on concerted rounds of cutbacks and more cutbacks, the superclubs will be taking stock. Some may think that the popularity of summer festivals such as Creamfields, Homelands and Fatboy Slim's bash on BrightonBeach may point to a resurgence in demand for their wares next winter, but most are realistic enough to read the writing on the wall.
Maybe they'll turn their clubs into bingo halls, maybe they'll create huge drinking factories, maybe it will be old-skool nights Monday through Sunday after all. Whatever happens, though, you can be sure of one thing: people will always want to go out and have a good time on a Friday or Saturday night. The location may change, but that habit never will.
Creamfields is at Punchestown Racecourse today