The Ghetto
“Oh, Marilyn Manson to the skies!” Simon Hobart is saying down the phone and he releases his dirty cackle of a laugh. He’s sitting in his office chaining Silk Cuts and dressed, as usual, in a combination of blue, red, white and black with a razor blade strung around his neck. He’s like his Popstarz logo animated.
Sitting there, holding forth about music and infamy, with his jokey award for the ‘Drunkest Club Manager”
behind him, Hobart almost seems to be the gay big brother that you never had. The one with the great record collection that he would play for you. He wants to talk - almost obsessively - about his clubs and his companies. I don’t think it’s nerves on his part, exactly, that makes him talk so much but he does only seem comfortable with the situation provided he’s in control. But he’s got to finish his phone call…
“Tom and Netty are coming in to repair the bed…” he says down the receiver, discussing the predicament of one of the padded platforms in the corner of his fabulously successful, year-old Ghetto club into which a gash has been ripped by over-zealous loungers.
“They need to cover the whole thing. We should stick with white. The silver won’t look like silver. It’ll look …. I think we need the white to keep the venue looking clean … Oh my, god! [Dirty laugh.] Fantastic! No, no, no fantastic.”
Hobart will tells me that the main reason he thought of re-covering the bed in holographic silver was so that people would realize that he spends money and time on the venue instead of his just having painted it red. He’s not asking for much. Hobart works so hard on keeping his punters and his DJs happy, that he is always either working or he is sleeping. Sometimes both:
“I am enthusiastic, but tired,” he tells me. “I’m always tired. I’m tired now. I sleep until the very last minute.”
He’s out every night and he loves it. He once tried to take Tuesday off, but Dusty O (who spins ‘Don’t Call me Babe’) was wondering why he wasn’t around.
He’s off the phone. “We’re on the music, aren’t we?”
Well, Hobart certainly is. Since he was last fully awake at the age of 17, he has played genial host to dancing fools moving to the rhythms of, amongst other styles, Goth, electroclash, baggy, happy hardcore, jungle, trash, disco, rock, pop and, of course, Britpop. And up until the age of 25, it was his diverse interest in music that kept Hobart out of the gay clubs. He took the limited scope offered to him as a personal affront to his sense of identity.
“I hated the mentality of the people,” he says. “I hated the music that was being offered, and found that it was insulting to your intelligence and tastes. We don’t all want to act like teenage girls,” he says with sarcastic disgust. “ We don’t all want to go to a nightclub just to take drugs or to have sex.”
Some of us want to go there and drink vast quantities of Red Stripe and snog. Like normal people. It made him angry and depressed and ashamed:
“I used to tell my boyfriend not to bring back copies of Boyz. The whole thing really did my head in.”
Thankfully for us, Hobart was not content to leave the scene to the girly, pretentious or the drugfucked that he so hated. Not for him running off in despair and joining the Radical Faeries. So in 1996 Hobart changed the scene; our world and his forever …
But Popstarz wasn’t Hobart’s first taste of fame and by no means was it his first success. Back in 1984, his photo was splashed across the front page of the Sun, above the caption, ‘Godfather of Goth.’ Hobart took the fall for the first club raid on London’s first all-night club, the Kit Kat in Westbourne Grove and nearly ended up behind in the clink. Police dressed as Goths, watching the soon-to-be infamous venue, saw no club managers or owners at the place: just the 17-year old DJ. 200 police (dressed, also, as Goths?) descended upon the premises. Hobart got away with community service.
As Hobart’s record as a promoter – with Bedrock and Fusion - began to outstrip his deejaying, he found he no longer had connection to the music he was promoting. He was looking in from edge of his own dance floors. He didn’t want to be just a businessman and the state of affairs began to irk him.
And perhaps it was time for him to try his luck with the fags. There was something about Britpop, he reckoned, its humour and its showiness that gave Hobart an inkling that he might be able to carve out a niche for himself and the similar minded.
He feared that the club would be his first flop but adds:
“If Popstarz had failed, I wouldn’t have embarrassed myself, because I didn’t know anyone in the gay community.”
Of course it was no such a thing, but a dramatic success. Two hundred people turned up for the first night. Over a thousand still attend Friday after Friday. It remains, eight years on, the biggest Indie night in London. And he never looked back. People wrote letters and came up to him in pubs to thank him.
“The feeling was that gay people had been liberated from the hell that they’d been in for most of their teen to adult lives. So many people said to me it was like coming out of the closet for the second time.”
This support convinced Hobart that he could get away with some fairly aggressive advertising tactics for the new club.
“Once I’d realized I had the support of people within the gay community and that people on the outskirts, felt equally angry and were equally isolated … it gave me the chance to be angry at the gay scene.”
The – then-eye popping flyers and full-page adverts in the gay press carried slogans like: ‘Popstarz don’t need to take their shirts off to stay cool,’ and ‘We’re into boozing, not cruising.’
Hobart claims not to be angry any more, but there’s no doubt that he still resents the notion that young gay people are being brainwashed by the scene.
“I don’t like what [G-A-Y’s] Jeremy Joseph does at all. I think he manufactures sad young guys in a uniform. He factory-farms stereotyped, mindless, blinkered gay people.”
“I don’t like to name clubs,” Hobart had said earlier before he let his annoyance run away with him. “It’s not … good.”
But perhaps it was with a bit more leisure that Hobart returned to his anger to launch a direct assault on the ground zero of homosexuality: Soho and the Ghetto. For Hobart, the nightclub, once the down-at-heel Tube, is the ghetto in the gay ghetto. Having founded an army, he searched for territory to liberate. He is delighted with the taste-making The Face’s articles about ‘The Soho backlash.’
“Soho was meant to be the safe haven, but I hated it … Overpriced drinks, over inflated egos, over the top attitude,” he says with more than a little pride at the slogan he’d made up on the spot. There are some people who are so without sense that they go to the Shadow Lounge and get robbed blind,” he says, pityingly, referring to the now-shut Sweet Suite, “And there are not enough thick Soho queens to support two bars like that.”
And what of Popstarz? Can it still exist as an alternative night eight years on with Britpop dead and buried and the Brit-Indie scene hanging on by it’s fingernails? Is it anything more than 90’s nostalgia? Is it – God-forbid! – mainstream?
Yes, says Hobart: “The politics are still there. I’m still not getting silly queens, I’m not getting stereotypes, cos Popstarz still looks like a pub all shapes and sizes. The other clubs just have No individual people.”
Hobart’s creations often seem to be victims of their own success. Back in ’98, there was much uproar and discontent about the number of straight guys wandering around Popstarz.
Nag Nag Nag, the Ghetto’s runaway, runway Wednesday success also has to deal with its popularity. Old-timers (of a year ago) walk around that it’s not the same place since The Face ran its article and that there are too many heteros in the club.
But when the alternative becomes the mainstream, the alternative boys and girls are move to the less-rammed Friday night party,
-Michael Willoughby-
