Subculture & Riot History

The story of the night goes way back to 1985 when Dave Juste, a Birmingham DJ whose personal tastes were rock music of all types, and John Nevin, a local scene-ster, decided to do something about the fact that there was no decent rock nights in Birmingham.

Dave & John started to put on rock nights at the Three Horseshoes in Stirchley, Birmingham once every two-three months. They also ran coaches to Rock City in Nottingham, which at the time was the only decent rock club in the country. The nights at the Three Horseshoes were fantastically successful and the nights soon escalated to being on once a month.

After doing this until mid-86, Dave took it upon himself to try and find a ‘proper’ club to hold nights on a regular weekly basis.

He approached all the clubs then in Birmingham without any luck until the owner of Edwards No 8, a Mr Edward Fewtrell, agreed to let them put a night on starting on Saturday April 18th 1987. Dave and John roped in a few close friends including Steve Webb to assist in DJ-ing and promoting the event. After nearly 4 months of promoting the club the opening night came along and at 8.55pm, five minutes before doors were due to open, there was over 1300 people queuing outside!

The night went from strength to strength and soon Edwards No 8 was holding rock nights on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Three months later, Edwards No 8 became a seven days a week rock club under the guidance of Dave Juste.
John Nevin had since decided to emigrate to Canada to further his engineering career. It stayed like this until 1989 when Mr Fewtrell decided to sell all of his clubs which included Edwards No 8 to Ansells Leisure. Ansells Leisure kept Dave on as licensee and manager (and DJ and promoter!) and at this point in time Edwards Rock Complex (as it then became) had what is recognised as it’s heyday.

There were different types of rock clubs throughout the week and Dave turned Edwards Rock Complex into Ansells’ biggest profit making venue in the UK through great entertainment at great value. In 1991, Edwards No 7, the venue below Edwards Rock Complex was having a refit overseen by Dave’s area manager Clive Consterdine. Edwards Rock Complex was still open whilst this was going on and Dave went on a working holiday to Los Angeles to arrange some more events for the club.

Whilst he was away the builders managed to knock through the wrong wall compromising the safety of Edwards Rock Complex. (A main fire escape had had all of it’s fire-protection destroyed by the wrong wall being knocked down). For some reason, Clive Consterdine tried to blame Dave for what happened even though he was 10,000 miles away at the time.

At this point Dave and Ansells Leisure parted company.

In May 1991, Dave, along with Steve Webb and Chris Jones (who was Dave’s assistant at the end of his employment with Ansells), started a new night at XL’s Nightclub in Five Ways called The Xposure Rock Club, a name inspired by The Xposeur Club in Los Angeles. XL’s was at the time owned by Leading Leisure who were in receivership.

Within three months XL’s had gone from zero to over 1000 regular customers for the rock night. Dave, Steve & Chris also started up rock nights at Tressines and The Institute in Birmingham, The Point in Milton Keynes and occasional other ventures in London, Shrewsbury and other towns and cities with varying degrees of success.

After about 18 months at XL’s, their old friend Edward Fewtrell decided to come out of retirement and bought XL’s. He agreed to keep on Dave and Steve but Chris decided to emigrate to Kenya where his brother owned a security firm.

Dave and Steve then persuaded Edward to buy a public house on Paradise Circus which became the Xposure Rock Café in 1993.
Dave and Steve thought that this allowed rock fans to have a permanent home in Birmingham seven days a week and a big night out on Saturdays once a week. The Café was a huge success and Edward asked Dave and Steve to get involved with another Xposure Rock Café in Merry Hill. This too had a lot of success for a couple of years until Edward decided he wanted to build a huge ‘trendy’ club (Millennium) next door. It was a recipe for disaster as rock fans and trendies just don’t mix. There’s a constant mickey take from the trendies who see rockers as some kind of sub-normal species. There were a number of confrontations outside the Merry Hill Café and attendances dropped off significantly. It soon closed and was then swallowed up as part of Club Millennium.

Over in Birmingham, the Xposure Rock Café was still going strong until Edward installed a new licensee. The new licensee made it clear that he was not happy with the fact that Dave and Steve were pretty much in charge of entertainment and promotional activities and he done his best to disrupt things at the pub.

Once again this caused attendances to drop and the pub was closed to become a lap dancing establishment. XL’s was still doing fantastic business and continued to thrive right up until recently.

On January 24th 2003, there was an article in the Birmingham Evening Mail which stated that the Five Ways Shopping Centre where XL’s was situated was to be knocked down and redeveloped, possibly within months. Dave and Steve, along with their current DJ associates Andy Hinton, Simon Clarke and Jim Booth, were extremely alarmed by this and tried to seek some indications from the XL’s management when the closure was likely.

The management were not very forthcoming with any answers and indicated that they wanted to continue the night until it was closed without any care for where their customers would go after the venue was closed. At this point in time Darryl Robinson of The Academy asked Steve to get involved with a new rock night at The Academy.

Steve quickly involved Andy, Simon and Jim and informed Dave that they all wanted to leave XL’s and go to The Academy as it secured the future of the night for Birmingham rock fans and gave them a better club with better facilities to put on more of a show.

Dave at first didn’t want to get involved too heavily but after a meeting with Darryl it became obvious that with some of the things they had planned the new night at The Academy would be immensely successful and also have a great vibe to it. Dave went back to XL’s and told the management that it would be best to alter what XL’s was doing or they risked losing most of the customers to The Academy. He offered to stay and oversee any changes and wanted to leave in good stead to do other things in the near future.

The XL’s management responded by promptly sacking all the DJ’s, Dave included, with no notice and no compensation in a bid to silence the DJ’s and keep Xposure’s customers ignorant to what was happening with XL’s.

All of the team felt that the way XL’s management had acted was disgraceful and within 24 hours had started to promote the new night at The Academy.

So Subculture and Sorted was now born.

Subculture is the name for the club in the main room of The Academy and Sorted was the name that Steve had been using for his room at XL’s for a number of years.

Opening on Saturday April 5th 2003, Subculture and Sorted started as they meant to go on, with great ‘standard’ drinks and admission prices, loads of guest DJ’s from bands, magazines and radio, after show parties, special live appearances from top bands and more.

The first few months saw guests including Reef, [spunge], Kerrang editor Ashley Bird, Starting Line, Cooper Temple Clause, Movielife, Big Cheese editors Eugene Butcher & Miles Hackett, Turbo Negro and more all party at the club in a variety of roles, with further events lined up featuring A, Hundred Reasons, Thunder and more.

After just four months the night was regularly attracting over 1000 rock fans and on August 2nd the first annual Subculture beach party attracted over 1350 customers.

Since the inception the club has gone from strength to strength and is now established as the UK’s top rock club attracting more regular customers than any other UK club week in, week out. More special guests have visited the club in 2004 & 2005 including Less Than Jake, New Found Glory, Funeral For A Friend and Millencolin amongst others, and Page Three Girl of the Year Michelle Marsh is both a return guest and huge fan of Subculture. Theme nights have been a regular attraction of Subculture with events like St Trinians Night and the Annual Beach Party proving exceptionally popular. Nothing, however could prepare anybody for what has so far proved to be the busiest night in UK rock clubs for years on October 30th 2004 when the Subculture Halloween Party attracted in excess of 2350 customers!

The club is continuing it’s steady growth and regular special attractions. Check out the forthcoming events area of the site and watch out for an altogether new section coming soon which will blow regular Subbers away!

Subculture and Riot, the first rock club in Birmingham truly organised, ran and promoted by rock fans for rock fans. Go check it out.