In his first feature length interview since announcing the sad closure of Turnmills nightclub this coming Easter, the club's Director Danny Newman speaks openly about his reasons for the closure, reminisces about classic tales of yesteryear and discusses his plans for the future...

So Danny, after 23 years at the top, Turnmills is closing. Why?

The most important reason is that it seems like the right time to go. It's been on the cards for a couple of years now and I think it's a case of not outstaying your welcome, and knowing when is the right time. It seems right for me on a personal level. Turnmills was my father's place before me, he built it up from nothing He never really handed it over to me officially... sadly he died and it fell to me to continue it. I've always felt that I was kind of hanging onto the keys for him. I love the place more than anything. It's shaped me and who I am and the way I am. I've got nothing but fond memories and love the place to bits. I'm sure in 20 years time I'll look back and realise just how much it meant to me and so many other people and to London – For the last few years I've felt we're at a ceiling point with it. There was no way up for Turnmills you know, all we can do is just put on consistently great nights, keep ramming it out. It's just like there's no major change or challenge anymore and I feel like I've said all I've got to say with it, it's been a long time.

The landlords want to develop the club and we've decided not to stand in their way and move on, it's as simple as that really. Turnmills is closing, but there are new chapters opening. I'm a promoter at heart. I'm not a club owner or operations manager – I never wanted to be. I fell into it to be honest. After John died, I had to do it. I feel like I need a bit of time for myself and my own family and my own ambition's and my own legacy and Turnmills has laid the foundations for that , and I will always be grateful for the life I have had and the way in which I grew up, words could never quite describe. I hope to be in clubland and doing what I have been doing for years to come.

So it's got nothing to do with dwindling numbers or ganglang violence as it's been reported?

No. There was some bullshit piece in the Evening Standard in January that said "it's due to clubland's demise and numbers going down, the spot where Frankie Fraser got shot, Lisa Mafia, blah blah blah" and so on... but look, they're just trying to sell papers. At the end of the day, we don't have to explain anything to anybody - to be honest its quite the opposite, it's been the best few years on record, but as a wise man once told me "it's best to finish at the top, know when to call it a day, and finish the way you want to be remembered".

When is Turnmills officially closing and what are you doing to celebrate?

We want to go out on a real high and we were looking at doing New Year's Eve originally. But with The Cross closing it wasn't appropriate – so we had a re-think. It's very important how we're going to say goodbye to the place properly and it's my responsibility to put on the best nights possible for everyone to come and say farewell. So after NYE, the next best date was Easter – you've got the Friday, Saturday and the Sunday – it's a long weekend, with the Monday being Bank Holiday. That weekend is probably the biggest time of the year for clubland, behind New Years Eve. Ultimately, I was thinking of a weekend where we could fit in The Gallery, Together, and some past treasured nights like Heavenly Social and Headstart, and then something really special on the Sunday night for the final fair-well. We've had so many great residents, DJs and parties at Turnmills over the years and the club is loved by so many different people for different reasons and different nights... so it's hard to think of the perfect time to go which allows us to do everything. The forthcoming Easter Weekend however is that perfect time, for the perfect send-off, we couldn't just do it all on the one night. It would not be fair.

What will happen to the site?

They're going to develop it into Grade A office space.

What is your earliest memory of Turnmills and how did it all begin?

I was around 10 years old when my Dad showed me the site. Turnmills was an old gin distillery before that. I remember it was a ghost town at that time. Even the cabbies would say, they knew where the Angel was – but where's Clerkenwell, never heard of it mate?! So it seemed like a good enough spot to move to. Before my dad got Turnmills he had the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park it was an Irish Pub, which had lots of the big Irish bands of the day. My Dad was the first promoter to bring over The Pogues among many others. He had always been a publican and into music - he had record shops and promoted most of the pub nights himself. Later, he sold the place to the Mean Fiddler as well as his other wine bar The Rathbone Arts Club in Rathbone Place, and then shortly after that he found Turnmills. When it first opened it was so much smaller than it is now. T2 for instance never existed , or the back rooms , You had the side bar bit and the main bar, and where you go up the three stairs to the (main room) DJ box, but you had a wall there and that's all Turnmills was! Then the mezzanines where you've got the Topfloor going through to Anexo; that was an actual floor with seating and where the kitchen is now was a floor with seating too. it held about 300 people in total... it was basically a wine bar. Then around the time of the mid to late '80s there was a bit of a slowdown, a recession. People stopped coming down for lunches and dinners and it hit the after-work drinking crowd hard too. So then we started to all sorts of stuff to get through it – karaoke mainly. It was around the time of the Poll Tax riots, and it was proving hard to keep afloat in the current climate. A loophole presented itself that we were paying for tax all year round – 24 hours - yet as a venue we weren't allowed to be open 24 hours. So we applied for a 24 hour license and god knows how we got it, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – Turnmills was the first venue in the country to get one. I remember the aftermath of the whole thing - everyone was trying to find reasons for years to take it away, down to noise etc etc and I'm sure we did impact on the area quite a lot in the early days, but its different now we've been there for such a long time and made so many changes to policy concerning clubs. Back then we had to make things up as we went along. If we had a problem, we'd find a solution and it would get passed and become policy. We went through the rough times with it... but getting back to the point, literally at the same that happened an old friend of my Dad's used to do a gay night called FF on a Sunday afternoon. His name was Lawrence Malice (he now owns The Egg) and my Dad offered him the Saturday night / Sunday morning – which was called Trade and that was it, One week later it was 300, then 600, then in a matter of weeks it was banged out . This went on for a good few years. Then as I was getting older I started to come down now and then helping out more on the corporate side of things, getting into the business and I remember going down to Trade once for the first time with my brother Paul and thinking "what the fuck!" "Why is everyone so happy and why are they staying here 'til midday? They must be really loving this music and having such a great time!" Obviously I was very wet behind the ears back then! I then came to the realisation that this was amazing and asked myself why wasn't I involved in this. So back in 1995 on May 5th – my brothers' birthday, we did a night and called it The Gallery - I was a student at Chelsea Collage of Art at the time so it seemed like a great name. It was always meant to be a one-off. Steve Lee was there, my brother of course, Darren Stokes and Lottie (some things never change eh!) – so we thought we'd do it again; I mean how hard can it be... anyway three weeks later we had 75 people in. I was closing up early thinking "this game is hard", but we decided to persevere and there was no other real place to go either, it was a case of getting your head down and making it work, simple as that. We'd do whatever it took to make it work. It probably took about 4 months of getting 150 people, then 250 people before we started to really go somewhere. But one thing about The Gallery was that it was consistent. The music was always good, it always looked great, the decor was wicked, the atmosphere was always fun and the DJs were top notch. In the early days, Mixmag described The Gallery as being the only London club with a "northern" atmosphere, and pretty much wrote about us every month. We were known as the friendliest club in London and that's what everyone said. The club started to get a really good name for itself and was going places. We had a great mix of gay and straight people, mainly because of Trade and that created an amazing atmosphere – and most importantly, it was great because all the idiots stayed away, leaving us with the perfect mix.

Then the Heavenly Social started about 2 years after The Gallery, The Chemical Brothers were residents and it was the first time I'd heard non-dance music in a club. Heavenly stayed at Turnmills for around 4 years and those years were the haziest for me! Heavenly brought a whole different crowd to the club. It had indie roots but with a dance kick. You've only got to look at who was there then and where are they now to see how influential the night was... it was bonkers. Can you imagine The Chemical Brothers as your weekly residents?! Fucking mental. For me the best times of my life were at Heavenly. Truly amazing times.



The Gallery has always been a pioneering event for Turnmills though right?

Yes, one DJ in particular that I will always take my hat off to is Paul Oakenfold. The first time we sold out was with Paul on the decks. He did us a great favour playing, at that time he was everywhere - it was amazing. Everyone was after him at the time and my brother asked him to do it and that was the turning point in The Gallery's history. From that point on everyone was like, "yeah, I've heard of The Gallery... it's pretty good my mate went down there... yeah I saw a flyer for it the other day"...and then everyone had a reason to come down who hadn't been before – Oakenfold was playing! People were like, "fuck, let's check this club out" And by that time the foundations were already laid. We were already getting in 300-400 people, the music, visuals, decor etc was perfect. We were ready for it to happen. And it fucking happened on that night, BANG! I can't remember the exact date, but once Oakey played, that was it – week in, week out. We were rammed. Word of mouth kicked in and everyone wanted to play and everyone wanted to come. We were getting compared to Cream in Liverpool, and Cream was the club in the UK at the time. They were booking all the same people we were booking, punters were turning up in their droves...it was like that every week to be fair, it never really took a dip. Everything around The Gallery has changed (the club's size, decor, infrastructure, sound system etc etc), but the main room programming has always stayed the same – it's the backbone to the club and the reason why people still come back week after week.

Ok, so after Heavenly Social, which other Saturday nights and DJs have been some of the big ones for Turnmills...?

Well, after Heavenly went, we did a night called Headstart for a while. That was a great night. We had Darren Emerson monthly resident, Josh Wink monthly resident, Andy Weatherall monthly resident with Haywire Sessions and Dave Clarke and Dan and Jon Kahuna were weekly residents , we had a good long run at it but in the end Headstart went monthly and we started looking at other monthly nights. We did a few one-offs before we started London Calling with Danny Rampling – who I consider to be the best London resident DJs there's ever been. We got him on board and London Calling was a truly unbelievable night, it lasted a couple of years. We had some amazing guests like Frankie Knuckles, Roger Sanchez, Tony Humphries... it was huge! And then from that, we had interest from Roger Sanchez in doing his own night and then Bob Sinclar...and so the list went on. Then we started having a bigger team down at Turnmills where we took on different people to work on individual nights and we just got bigger as an organisation and eventually all our events were totally in house – the two main flagship nights that represent Turnmills right now though are The Gallery and Together, keeping true to form as ever.

Aside from the club nights, Turnmills must have hosted some pretty interesting events too?

Yes, you don't go through nearly 25 years without having some pretty amazing stories. And there have been loads. Absolutely loads. A lot of them have been publicised. There have been some bad moments, some very happy moments and some sad moments. We've lost some people along the way. Some very close people. It's been one long adventure. It's almost impossible to pinpoint any one thing really, there's just so much to talk about. Essentially, of course, you're talking about from birth to death – 23 years. That's a long time, most of the people reading this interview may not have even been born when Turnmills first opened! It's been around for THAT long! Looking back and realising where you were, you know. We've had film premieres and all sorts. Most people have been down there at some stage. At Heavenly you'd walk around and see Noel Gallagher, then go up the stairs you'd bump into Paul Weller. Bobby Gillespie was down every week. At The Gallery, Robbie Williams would turn up with his entourage on occasion. Once when Oakenfold played, he turned up with Grace Jones. Madonna came to Trade. Everyone's been down here at some stage, I mean everyone!

One of the most memorable nights we did was with Carl Cox on Boxing Day, so as a bit of fun we decided to call it Coxing Day! We made these big polystyrene heads in the shape of Carl's head and had them hanging around the club... so low from the ceiling, that people could nick them – which was what we wanted people to do! They were all over the place, these luminous heads. Anyway, Coxy was rocking it, rocking it so hard in fact that the fucking plaster board was coming down from the ceiling! It was chaos, and all these people were dancing with these heads and passing them to Carl, and when he played his final track he came and joined the clubbers on the dancefloor with his horn and was dancing with us all. Amazing night. Shit, there's been millions of amazing nights like that one... I don't even know where to begin. The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Together's, New Years Eve's, The Gallery. So many great memories.

A lot of people have met at Turnmills and got married, had kids. Our designer Ed for one, his sister met her husband at the club and remains happily married with children! I remember a couple of times at the Gallery witnessing guys at the end of the night, down on one knee. I've been invited to a number of weddings over the years down to that place I tell you. But I've seen other mad stuff as well, I caught these two guys one time sprinkling ashes on the floor... I mean, what do you say to them? You can't do that, kick them out?! So I just let them get on with it.

Do you have a favourite tune?

This is a funny one because I've always vowed to play the last ever tune at Turnmills when we close, so I can't really say. I might play a whole set on the final night, I'm not sure yet, there might be a compilation of stuff, who knows! But when I think about what tune to play last – the final tune ever at Turnmills – I always think about my Dad and think what which tune he'd want to play. I always think of him when I think about this. I dunno, maybe that will help me to make that decision.

The Easter weekend will probably fly by now...

Everyone who knows they should be there will be there. It's about saying goodbye and most of the people we've approached have said yes they'd love to play and be involved. There are so many different punters (from all the different events) who will all want to come. That's why we chose to do the closing spread over three nights and not just one. This weekend is so important that we must get it right. It'll be such an experience. Open early. Finish late. People might wanna only come down for a few hours and say goodbye, who knows.

To those people who don't know, what other projects are the Turnmills team responsible for and what does the future hold for you?

A lot of the people who work for Turnmills are also affiliated closely with all the events we do outside of Turnmills, i.e. all the Lock N Load Events. South West Four, Get Loaded in the Park, Electric Gardens, as well as Bedrock to Release Yourself, PUSH and Swedish House Mafia. We want to do the club events as well as doing the festivals. Promoting is what we love to do. It's what we do well. You never know we might end up buying a bar here or a bar there perhaps, 'cos I can't just switch off 20 years of madness! Turnmills is like running a cruise ship! We're used to dealing with problems on a grand scale and I don't think I can go from that to nothing; it's not in me. I'm always on the lookout for new opportunities... but it won't be another club though. No chance, no way. But then again, who fucking knows?! I may well change my mind in a few years.

Do you have a closing thought for those people who have made Turnmills the club it is today?

It's part of history. We've all earned our stripes. We've been there through the rough and the smooth and survived doing our thing. Leading from the front. We've never conformed to how other people have gone about things, we've just done what we feel is right and a lot of the time we've accidently discovered things and other like-minded people, with Heavenly we found each other. Good people find each other in life and we just try and do the best we possibly can. At Turnmills there's an energy in the walls. An atmosphere already exists. You don't need it packed out to have an atmosphere; Turnmills will always have an atmosphere with the synergy that surrounds the building. It's a very special place that kind of thing can only be created, it doesn't just happen. It's the people that have made that happen over the years.

But nothing lasts forever. It's a celebration. I didn't want the whole "Turnmills is shutting oh dear, how sad, no tears" – because that's not the case. The good ship Turnmills is sailing off into the sunset, and thank you for the memories and thank you for the good times. We'll be back in different guises – whether it be club nights or festivals... and you know what, you're all invited. We've always strived to do the best by our people, our punters... and I think we've achieved it. It's time to say goodbye now. It's time to hang up the headphones.
 
 
Turnmills says goodbye to clubland over the Easter Weekend, 21-23 March with three spectacular events featuring all the favourite DJs and club nights from over the years. The line-up will be announced very shortly, so watch this space.
 
www.turnmills.co.uk