INTRODUCTION
Back To Basics is a multi-award winning club night with a legendary status. It is the longest running club night in the UK and the longest running house night in the world. Considered by many in the electronic music industry to have shaped the underground club scene as it is today, anybody who’s anybody in this scene has played there including Daft Punk, Pete Tong, Frankie Knuckles and Basement Jaxx. It was the original ‘superclub’ of the early nineties founded by larger than life personality Dave Beer who is synonymous with the Back To Basics name brings his unique brand to Brit Week to put the art into party. The club fyers of Back To Basics became as notorious as the parties themselves – all tongue-in-cheek and heavily infuenced by the punk explosion of the 1970s where each piece of artwork utilised images and attitudes of that period. Basics customised iconography of the Sex Pistols God Save The Queen artwork - embossed with the Back To Basics punk slogan: Two Steps Further Than Any Other Fucker – has gone on to become an iconic example of club art and its culture. Various fyers were hung as artwork in Selfridges in London, at the Barbican Art Gallery, and a lot went under the hammer at Sotheby’s. In 2012. The aim is to showcase the art and the parties, along with the forthcoming movie 'Tales of Glamour and Excess', that have made this club night the stuff of legend.
FAMOUS QUOTES
“BACK TO BASICS IS TO ITS GENERATION IS WHAT ELVIS WAS TO HIS”
Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Acid House, Filth)
“BACK TO BASICS IS ONE OF THE FOUNDATION STONES OF THE UK CLUBBING SCENE AS WE KNOW IT”
Pete Tong (DJ)
“IF THERE WAS A DANCE EQUIVALENT TO PRIMAL SCREAM IT WOULD BE DAVE BEER”
Kris Needs (Primal Scream biography)
“DAVE BEER HAILED THE KING OF CLUBS” Mixmag ( DJ Magazine)
HISTORY
Back to Basics was started in 1991 by a group of friends from Wakefeld seeking an antidote to the whistle blowing, white glove wearing rave culture that spread in the UK in the nineties. Following the birth of the Acid House scene in the late 80's, a new dance music sub-culture emerged. It was forged on the dance foors of clubs like the Hacienda in Manchester, and in the consciousness of a generation of revellers still reeling from the effects of successive Conservative governments, affected by the black-clad ‘yuppie’ culture of the times. This was the period just after Thatcher and just before John Major’s fortuitously named Back to Basics campaign, and the introduction of a Criminal Justice and Public Order Act that focussed the authorities on a culture it characterised by the emission of “repetitive beats”. For many young people, it was a time that demanded reaction, the A6 fyer would be their platform of choice and the infamously anarchistic club at the centre of this exhibition would be one of their strongest voices.
http://leedsgallery.com/exhibitions/excess-all-areas/
“It was a case of either go out and kick the fuck out of something, or channel our energy into something constructive. Although I chose a career in the music industry, there was a time when I seriously considered a different path, in art. I was inspired by the work of Jamie Reid (an artist who designed our 1st birthday fyer – making him the only other person to design a Basics fyer) and I was excited by the possibilities of plagiarising other peoples’ work, taking existing and often already iconic images and overlaying them with my ideas to make a statement about the world outside. I’ve always approached each fyer as a piece of art, prioritising the image and its message over the actual information about the night it was supposed to be promoting. I spent so much time refning the fyers that many were delivered late; so late in fact that the party had often already happened by the time the fyer went to print. I look around at street culture today, at the work of artists like Banksy, and see a real connection between what we were doing then and what they are doing today. It’s crazy to think that there is so much of that work happening now, and not just on the streets – on greeting cards and t-shirts – it’s totally part of the mainstream, and yet back then we were the only ones doing it.” Dave Beer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-17145645
Dave frst met Alistair Cooke while the pair were at Art college in Wakefeld, he dropped out of college to work as a road manager for the Sisters of Mercy and Pop Will Eat Itself whilst Ali worked at a record shop. Their plans for the club came together when they reconnected at a warehouse party and, disillusioned by tone and colour of the Acid House scene, decided to go ‘back to basics’. They opened their club on 24th November 1991 in the Music Factory; “a seedy three storey gay club” on Lower Briggate, over looking the very bridge that gave the city its industrial heart beat. It is widely accepted that Back to Basics and the nightlife culture it spawned has been a catalyst for a growing student population turning Leeds into the top party city in the UK. It is also a fact that the club’s “no trainers” policy was the driving force behind one of the most successful fashion brands to come out of Leeds, Nicholas Deakins; just one example of how the club’s dress code changed fashion and retail at the time. The cultural and economic impact of Back to Basics on this city, and on our culture in general – the likes of Groove Armada, Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk are among those to have played their UK debut and found their feet in Basics – can not be underestimated.
PRESENT
Twenty two years later, Back to Basics remains a pioneer and continues to push boundaries with its punk attitude and rock and roll ethos. Against all the odds, for a club that deliberately turned its back on the commercial world of the club “brand“, Back to Basics has recently celebrated its 22nd anniversary and is now offcially the longest running club night of its kind, anywhere in the world. Sadly, some beloved friends have not managed the whole journey, most notably Alistair Cooke and Jocelyn Higgin who lost their lives in a tragic car accident in 1993, an accident from which Dave and Jill Morris had miraculously survived. It is to Ali, Jocelyn and the others that this exhibition is dedicated to as well as to the family of resident DJ’s and committed (and still discerning) clubbers who continue to help Back to Basics fulfl their motto “two steps further than any other fucker.” A feature flm documentary called 'Tales of Glamour and Excess' is coming out soon telling the full uncensored story of Back to Basics with Howard Marks (A.K.A. Mr Nice) as the narrator, featuring artists such as Fat Boy Slim, Groove Armada, Frankie Knuckles, Basement Jaxx, David Morales, Danny Tenaglia and many more.