2Klub - sample newsletter

Sample 2Klub newsletter, September 2003

Sudissential: Is this the Endgame?

After I started my own club in Manchester along with a mate of mine, I became aware of the very public break-up of the partnership which had been behind a very successful club in Leeds. The net effect of that break-up was that each partner set up their own club and thereby polarised the clubbing community in Leeds, forcing people to choose between them and leading to all sorts of acrimony between clubbers.

Paul Madan and Danny Kirk have been the most well-known and arguably one of the most successful partnerships in clubland, the partnership behind the seven year success story that has been Sundissential. Anyone observing the two of them out clubbing would not have been able to put a cigarette paper between them, so in tune with each other did they seem.

However, all has not been well with "the maddest club in the world" since the death of clubber Robert Lowe at Pulse, Birmingham in January 2000, and more deaths later that year in Birmingham and Leeds, and Sundissential has struggled against all kinds of obstacles to get back on its' feet. I have chronicled these on the 2Klub website. Over the past three years the club has run monthly in Birmingham at Que Club, then weekly at DNA, it's supposed new home - until that was abruptly turned into a lapdancing club - then at The Academy, and most recently at The Sanctuary. Even that last move did not seem to solve the club's problems as attendances over the past year seem to have been suffering, especially when the club was targeted by the police for drug testing with sniffer dogs.

Now with the start of a new season and the expansion of God's Kitchen's club Air to include hard dance music, comes a stunning public statement seemingly by Paul Madan, (the self-styled "Uncle Madders"), the public face of Sundissential the club, today, published on both the Sundissential website:

http://www.sundissential.com/interact/forum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=6129 as well as Gurn.net: http://www.gurn.net/forums/showthread.php?s=21f2b805b83c468eecf6d88b5d8af9be&threadid=170729

in which the break up of this legendary partnership is made excruciatingly public.

Clubbers, both Sundissentialers and others, seem to see this as the end of Sundissential, and this may be the case in some sense, though if what Paul Madan says is true the club has been doing poorly for some time now and this, along with the opening of Air, may simply be the last straw. Clearly were that to be the case there are many other new contenders waiting in the wings to step into any vacancy which Sundissential might leave in either Birmingham or Leeds.

One can presume that this will not be the last word in this now very public slanging match, (though anyone advising either party would be doing them a service if they told them both to keep their mouths firmly shut! - no one except the prurient was ever served by making such disputes public), but if this is the end, who in a couple of years will be left to mourn the passing of Sundissential? Who now mourns Tin Tins, or Gatecrasher? It does seem clearly to be the end of a partnership and it might well be the end of the club, for, though I have consistently marvelled at the ability of this club to overcome obstacles, that was when the partnership was intact. The French say "Plus ca change, plus ce'est la meme chose" - the more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe though, it's the other way 'round - the more things seem to stay the same, the more they're really changing?

Whatever, it seems that the Sundissential story is moving into the endgame, a sad day for all clubbers in Birmingham and Leeds, though I am sure that most, if not all, will get over it eventually. More sadly, the same cannot be said for Robert Lowe, who this year would have been twenty-four years old.