Malice In Wonderland

It s taken a long time for Trade to be accepted in Ireland, but I m really glad it has been. So enthuses Laurence Malice on stage at the opening night of the first Trade Eire Tour in Castlebar s most vibrant club, Panama Jack s.

Dressed in his trademark black Gucci suit and with his ever-present dark glasses highlighting his pale features and ginger goatee, he s got the Mayo kids eating out of his hand as he struts his stuff with obvious star quality. Like a week previously at the inaugural UK Love Parade in Leeds, when 40,000 adrenaline-fuelled loons in front of the main Trade stage illustrated how hard house has taken that country by storm, Laurence Malice stands on stage in Mayo a very proud man indeed.
It was in the early eighties that he first dreamed of putting on parties in club surroundings, but he never envisaged things would turn out as they have. Laurence and friends like Spider from The Pogues took regular trips to New York to put on fashion shows, and hung out at places like The Paradise Garage, which along with The Saint was one of the after-hours Big Apple clubs where MDMA first reared its head in a club environment.
House music was still a few years off, and Ibiza was half a decade away from becoming the Balearic heaven that gave rise, through people like Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling and Nicky Holloway, to the UK s acid house boom of 88. But New York s gay clubbers in particular were experiencing the emergence of ecstacy culture on the dancefloors of those clubs as early as 1981: everyone intrinsically connected as one love spread and the often similarly clothed bodies danced in unison to the repetitive 4-to-the-floor beats of hi-NRG sound familiar?
Each of these clubs was renowned in its own way; the innovative music at The Paradise Garage, the sexual antics at The Saint and the wild glitterati parties at Studio 54 (where admittedly cocaine was the leading drug, although ecstacy was available) all provided Laurence Malice with some inspiration for Trade.
There s a tremendous sexually charged atmosphere at Turnmills every Sunday morning from 4am until 1pm the next afternoon when Trade closes it doors and sends home nearly a thousand primarily gay men weary from a barrage of deep, funky, tribal and banging house beats in one of the sweatiest environments you can imagine. It s tops off all around, and the bizarre mix of professional types, drag queens, DJs and producers, podium prancers, perverts, chancers, showbiz celebs and wannabees create the sort of exuberant atmosphere you generally don t find outside of Ireland. (As one of the club s original DJs Trevor Rockliffe put it recently: there are two types of crowd I enjoy playing to more than any other: the gay crowd and the Irish crowd. )
To its regulars, Trade is far more than just a club. Week in, week out they attend their Sunday morning service (where the late Tony de Vit will always be God) with the same religious fervour you d normally associate with old-skool Irish Catholic devotees on the way to Mass. For the Turnmills crew, Trade is all about release. A release from their mundane realities and stressful professions, the ultimate all-night bender where all inhibitions are left at the front door.
It s a safe haven too: papparazi and cameras in general are not welcome (for obvious reasons). Excess and debauchery are the order of the day, the soundtrack a pioneering new groove that was conceived and born within its walls, the dancefloor a place where you can drop yourself and immediately sense being as one with everyone else there. It s like one big family, and it matters not who you are or where you re from, just that you re there. The original acid house ethos is alive and kicking, just a few minutes walk from Farringdon tube station.
As the most important and influential hard house club in the world, Trade in 2000 sits on the verge of global clubbing domination; the sound it spawned is careering through mainstream clubs across Europe like a turbo-powered juggernaut with no brakes. The club presently runs over thirty gigs a month worldwide, in cities as different as New York and Moscow, and in countries as far afield as South Africa and Australia. But no country in which the self-confessed home of hedonism attempts to establish itself, is more significant to Laurence Malice than Ireland.
Ten years ago, when we started, it would have been the last place in the world you d have expected Trade to become a success, he reflects. But Ireland has liberated itself rather dramatically from its past, and I think that the way Irish clubbers have warmed to us shows just how far down the road you ve travelled. I ve got a lot to thank Ireland for, and I really want Trade to make its mark here.
Both of my parents are Irish but I wasn t actually born in Ireland, although I spent a lot of my youth here, says the quiet spoken Trade founder who used to be Laurence Mullane. Half the time I used to spend in Charleville, the other half in Dublin. My mother s family owned some hotels in Dublin and my father s family were farmers. I grew up in the East End of London at a time when there was a lot of prejudice against the Irish, but fortunately where I grew up all my friends were Irish. At school in the seventies though, when the IRA started bombing the UK, I d get picked on and be told your family are out bombing again which made it difficult, as it was for all the Irish living over there.
So when did the young Mullane realise that he was cut from a different cloth and that a typical 9 to 5 and 2.5 children was not going to be enough for him?
I think I ve always known I d do something quite interesting with my life, he recalls, while posing for photographs on the sofa of his hotel suite. I started acting at the age of about seventeen in Holland. From there I went to Australia where I got my Equity card. I worked on a few movies and did commercials milk ads and puerile stuff like that.
It was in Australia that Malice began putting on parties, although being a club promoter wasn t the initial appeal.
I was more into putting on different styles of party. My passion has always been doing something that s a bit different, a bit quirky.
When I returned to England in the early eighties, after a period of time I was in a band and then I started doing parties with Naz s ex-boyfriend. [Naz is the freelance photographer who has accompanied him on this trip.] We took over this sauna and used to hold these really wild parties there. It was called The Kiss Club and it was the first place in England to play hip-hop music and I used to run it with the guys who later became Renegade Soundwave. Tim Simenon (from Bomb The Bass) used to break off school to come and DJ for us. I believe if you put on a party with a quirk or in an interesting setting, people will come for the quirk and afterwards the music kicks in, which means you can have the license to introduce new and different styles of music. Which is not too dissimilar to Trade basically.
Making money from the ventures was a long way off though.
The parties were always secondary. I was going from job to job working in theatre and as a wholefood buyer and I was in a band. At the time people like Steve Strange were running nightclubs and I didn t really see myself as a Steve Strange type character, but I was really into music; I suppose because I was a songwriter.
Laurence s passion for parties with a twist in interesting settings eventually led to some transatlantic adventures.
I was using my talent for putting on parties quite well and started putting on fashion shows in America wearable arts for durable people we called them. At that time fashion was very important and I wanted to take the catwalk and introduce it into a club environment, so about twenty of us would go to New York once a month and wreak havoc.
The group included Spider from The Pogues and after the party the gang would hang out in after-hours clubs like The Paradise Garage.
We used to attract really top celebrities. I was hanging out with people like Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Andy Warhol. They used to come to the fashion shows because they were so different. I was never in it for the money we just did it for the lig.
The New York jaunts had a profound effect on the young Malice.
At the time all the clubs in the UK shut at 3am and because we d been hanging out in New York I thought it would be good to have an after-hours club.
Laurence s first move was to run a club called Pyramid at respected London gay venue Heaven.
It was the first place in England to play house music. I employed Mark Moore [of S Express fame] and Colin Faver. After that I was involved with a club called FF (Fist Fuck, fact fans) which used to run on Sundays at Turnmills but then I fell out with them, and because I still wanted to keep in with Turnmills I came up with the idea for Trade.
The original DJs were Trevor Rockliffe, Daz Saund, Smokin Jo, Martin Confusion and Malcolm Duffy and the club found immediate success with London s gay fraternity, whose ethos was and is work hard but party even harder . After about six months it started getting a great reputation for its obscure music policy a blend of Belgian nu-beat and Detroit techno but within a couple of years Laurence found the style getting too monotonous and far too dark. Around this time Tony de Vit s friends were bombarding Laurence with tapes of their hero in action.
Tony s background was in hi-nrg, so what he did was take the style of music we were playing at Trade and mix them with his own influences in a really camp fashion. After listening to his tapes at home and thinking they were brilliant, I was still really nervous about changing things at the club so one day I took my sound system down to the coffee shop at Turnmills and people really responded and I decided to go for it. So all of a sudden we parted company with Daz, Trevor and Smokin Jo. I had always wanted the club to be about a musical journey and that remained the same. It couldn t be just bang-bang all night, especially as people were coming to our club after all the others had closed, so it had to be something special, a proper journey through music. Trade was about the punters and not one genre of music. We started off with Malcolm s American house and Steve Thomas bridged the gap between Malcolm and Tony s harder, more European style. Ian, Alan and Pete joined later.
While it was a long way from being christened, the musical monster they now call hard house had been born.

As Trade is a club for people who like to party hard, it s no surprise to learn its owner has a reputation for partying the hardest of them all. His reputation for astonishing alcohol consumption and benders that can last for a week precedes him. Some of the stories which came this way include how he went to Ibiza last year for a couple of weeks and stayed for the whole summer; how on a previous Trade trip to Dublin he stayed for four days and ended up dancing naked around the living room of one of the clubbers he met; and how he went to the Miami Winter Music Conference this year for five days and didn t come home for three weeks.
Tonight, however, he s drinking Spritzer and the only stimulant he requests is a joint. Sitting comfortably on his hotel bed, Laurence claims that he no longer indulges in refreshments of the chemical kind, and says these days he takes things at a much more considered pace.
I used to live an extravagant lifestyle but I don t now. I don t agree with it. I think it s offensive when people who earn loads of money feel they have to flaunt it. I still love getting pissed though, it must be the Irish blood in me.
He is warm and charming, adorably camp and eccentric and a born star. Yet he seems a little uncomfortable being thrust into the spotlight, whether in the interview scenario or on stage later.
All I do on stage is act like (adopts bad Paddy accent) a complete eejit. I am a performer though. I was in a band. I was a songwriter. But I never did any of this for fame, it s not about me.
He is reluctant to discuss his personal life in any great detail, saying only that he s been in a couple of long-term relationships he d rather remain tight-lipped about. There are no tales of wild orgies or excessive casual encounters, and he says the most outrageous place he ever had sex was in a hotel service area, much to the horror of the innocent old couple who walked in.
These days his social life revolves around a small circle of loyal friends, and his biggest passion outside Trade is travelling something he ll get the opportunity to do much more of now that Trade advances across the continents.
I never wanted Trade to be as big as it is today. It s really nice that people say this is the year of hard house when you know that your club is ultimately responsible for that. It s an accolade for me that after so many years doing what I m doing people recognise me for bringing them new music and new sounds. That s what I want to be remembered for, not as some mad party animal who just went around getting smashed all the time.
Although he rarely gets enough credit for the music, one feels that the current wave of hysteria about hard house means that Laurence eventually will be remembered for more than just his partying.
Trade Eire featuring Steve Thomas and Alan Thompson runs at Club Space 2nd Birthday, Camolin, September 23rd, 8pm-3am.

Trade s 10th birthday party is at Turnmills in London on October 29th. Trade: Past, Present & Future (mixed by Gonzalo and The Sharp Boys) is released on October 30th on Beechwood Music.

No Malice Intended

Malice On:

The state of clubland
I really hope that with the advent of the Internet people start listening to music properly and realise that there s a lot of great DJs out there and that there s much more going on than all these big-name radio DJs they are having thrust down their throats.

Superstar DJs
I really can t stand the ethos of DJs, and the way it s all about big names and hype. 99% of the time most of these big name DJs are a crock of shit. I think the fees they are paid are ridiculous and outrageous. The club owners don t make as much money as the DJs these days. My DJs aren t overpaid at all, but they are all really loyal to the club and they come back each week for love not money and I think that shows when they are playing.

Clubs
To be quite honest, the only clubs that I enjoy are Trade and Factor 25 (a Sunday club in London run by Laurence s house-mate).

The hard house hype
I think next year is actually going to be the year of hard house, not this one. Yes, I am very proud of the fact that all of the leaders in hard house either work at my club or go down there all the time. Hard house is a very unique sound that a bunch of friends have developed over the years basically, and people like yourself and Ben Keen are part of it through what you do.

Fergie
Basically, he was Tony s apprentice. There was no way he could have played Trade while Tony was alive because he played exactly the same music in the same way. He does have a talent, but he s only a young boy who was nurtured down at Turnmills, and he is not the leader of hard house. And he doesn t go down to the club enough now to keep on top of what s happening.

Decriminalisation
I think, from my own experiences throughout the years, that it s fair to say that drink and drugs are as bad as each other. So if drugs are to be illegal there s a case for saying that drink should be illegal as well.

The future
I think I m at that stage of my life where it s time for me to go on and own my own venue. I need four and a half million pounds though. Are there any Paddies out there with four and a half million quid? I think Trade will still be here in ten years time, but not necessarily in the form that it s in now. It s so hard to predict the future. In five years time I could be a priest I m serious!

Tony De Vit
Laurence Malice worked very closely with legendary Trade DJ Tony de Vit, the hard house leader responsible for breaking the gay underground s music into the mainstream. De Vit died in July 1998 from bone marrow failure, and were he alive today there is no doubt he would be the biggest DJ in the world. Laurence remembers him with great affection: Because Tony was a gay man he had to work harder than any of the other DJs out there to prove himself; he wasn t part of the old boys network. But he did it and it s such a pity his success came so late in his life and that he couldn t be around to really reap the benefits of his work. The sound he developed is the sound of today, and the huge success that hard house is currently enjoying is his epitaph. The whole situation with Tony still affects me very badly today. It s very sad. When he died I seriously thought about closing the club. We were very close, and while we didn t get to spend an awful lot of time together we confided in each other a lot. I think this world has lost one of the most talented DJs of all-time.

Ten infamous Trade patrons

1. Madonna
2. Rupert Everett
3. Alex from Blur
4. Michael Ball
5. Kate Moss
6. Alexander McQueen
7. John Galliano
8. Xena, Princess Warrior
9. Marc Almond
10. Su Pollard

The most famous celeb to be refused entry was Axl Rose.