Fred Deakin

FRED AGAIN

If you went clubbing in Edinburgh during the late 20th century, there’s a good chance you were on the dancefloor of a night created by Fred Deakin. As Neil Cooper discovers, the artist, professor and one-half of beloved electronica duo Lemon Jelly is attempting to honour those heady days in a new interactive show

When Fred Deakin started putting on a series of clubs in the 1980s and 90s, he never expected that decades later he’d be auditioning actors to help tell his story. Yet this is exactly what the promoter of such iconic nights as Going Places, Misery, Devil Mountain, Thunderball and Impotent Fury has been doing in the run up to Club Life, a quasi-autobiographical show-and-tell which celebrates an era of Edinburgh clubbing when imagination mattered. Introducing elements that went beyond the music to become total environments, Deakin’s nights were social sculptures in a democratic creative playground where fun and games could be had by all.

From early days promoting nu-jazz night Blue at the original Gilded Balloon bar, Deakin and his assorted collaborators moved operations into venues such as Wilkie House (now Stramash), and Designer Frames Gallery on the site of what is now La Belle Angele. From here, Deakin’s canvas expanded to take in the Fruitmarket Gallery, Murrayfield Ice Rink, the ABC Cinema on Lothian Road (now the Odeon) and Stirling Castle, selling out the entire Assembly Rooms en route. And let’s not forget The Cooler, a basement dive on Calton Road where Misery, ‘the worst club in the world’ (his words), held court in a self-created fly-tipping zone.

Crucial to all this were the extra-curricular activities of the nights themselves. As Going Places rode the easy-listening wave with a sense of well-dressed irony, nights included karaoke and screenings of classic films. Misery’s themed cornucopias of terrible records, meanwhile, became a form of self-destructive anti-theatre with a set of broken fridges and dirty newspapers, while the dry ice was so deliberately thick it caused the club upstairs to complain.

All of these events were flagged up across town by Deakin’s distinctive poster and flyer designs, which promised a good night out of quality and distinction that might just take a turn for the epic. ‘Clubs are an artform, and they should be respected,’ says a post-audition Deakin. ‘One of the real premises of Club Life is that we’ve heard the stories of The Haçienda and Studio 54 many, many times, but let’s get some actual stories from the coalface. I wasn’t running clubs to get famous or to make money or to do drugs or anything like that. I was doing it because I knew a bunch of people who loved what I was doing, and I loved doing it for them.’

For Deakin, it became a kind of micro community where he learned everything he ever wanted to know about creativity, passion and joy. ‘I didn’t want anybody else to know about it. It was just for me and those people. It was a community thing. For me, that spirit is what running clubs is about. We were making it up as we went along, and that was the joy of it. It was a very fertile time, when we could take over the whole of the Assembly Rooms, whereas now it’s a lot more corporate.’

Working with theatre director Sita Pieraccini, Deakin is trying to recapture the spirit of his clubs in a whistle-stop tour through a back catalogue that began as a south London teenager growing up with punk, before putting on nights while a student at Edinburgh University. ‘I could have just done this show as a club night: get a room and play a bunch of old records. But that felt too easy. This felt like it deserved more of a narrative thread. Another option would be for me to do a one-man show, where everybody sits down and listens to me tell funny stories and show some pictures and videos. But what if it’s neither or both of these things? So the concept is for a different kind of show.’

The result of this is a hybrid that will feature five performers recreating various clubs in between Deakin’s chat, inviting the audience to join in as they go. ‘What I don’t want,’ he says, reassuringly, ‘is for people to feel like they have to get on the dancefloor and dance, because there’s always a moment at the beginning of the night when you’re playing tunes and people just hit the bar. They’re not quite ready to dance yet.’ As with the nights being lauded, Club Life might be styled as immersive theatre, a more participatory experience in which the audience plays a more active role in proceedings than merely sitting in the dark.

Deakin channelled some of his more playful ideas into Lemon Jelly, the Mercury Music Prize-nominated electronic duo he formed with Nick Franglen in the late 90s. For their live shows, a support act would be replaced by the audience taking part in a mass game of bingo. By this time, Deakin had set up ground-breaking digital design studio, Airside, before spending seven years as Professor Of Digital Arts at University Of The Arts London.

His 2007 mix album The Triptych was hailed by The Guardian as the greatest mixtape ever, while 2019 sci-fi rock opera The Lasters was compared to vintage Doctor Who. Deakin currently runs FANDCO, a studio specialising in creative technology and performance. Beyond such futuristic sounding endeavours, Club Life is more of a prodigal’s return.

‘In 20 or 30 years time, all this will be gone from living memory, so Club Life is about honouring those times,’ Deakin says. ‘We all put a lot of sweat and blood into running these clubs; and for the people who came, again there was that sense of community. I really want to say thank you, for teaching me how to have fun, and for showing me this creative groove I might never have had otherwise. If I hadn’t had these experiences with these people, I would have been doing something completely different. Everything I’ve done since came out of these weird random clubs that have been lost in the mists of time. I just wanted to tip my hat to them.’

Club Life, Summerhall, Edinburgh, Thursday 25–Sunday 28 May.