Transcript (edited for ease of reading) 

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Rich Dyer is an amazing storyteller, to the point that this interview is double the length of the others in this series. So I'm releasing it as a part one and a part two.
As you hopefully know by now, I'm Ginny Koppenhol. I'm a portrait photographer and DJ from the Lancaster and Morecambe area and I want to shine a spotlight on those involved in the electronic music scene here at the moment. I want to discover what helps smaller scenes in the UK to thrive and also the challenges.
So, it was obviously really important to get Rich in the conversation.
Rich has bags of experience, in both setting up a business (he co-founded Skiddle with Ben Sebborn) and putting on some immense events in the Lancaster area and beyond.
Rich talks about a lot of the challenges and the opportunities that those events have brought and what drew him to putting on events.

We start in the same way that I start a lot of my interviews, which was talking about his early love of music. His whole career is based around music in one way or another, but he hasn't become a DJ like many of us. He opted to put on the parties and we're very glad he did because we need people who are determined and see opportunities where others might not, and to have the gumption (I don’t often use that word haha) to go for it even in very challenging circumstances, and in unusual venues as he did with A-Wing and at Williamson Park with Highest Point.
He talks about some of those experiences, and they're experiences that many of us will never encounter because most of us don't choose to put on parties in prisons! But as I say, we're very glad he and his team did.

Have a listen and part 2 will be out in due course.

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Hi, Rich.

Hi.

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Thanks for coming. You've been on my list to chat to for a while. Obviously, I've given you a brief about this project and Highest Point has come up in lots of conversations as well, so even more reason to have a chat with you. You've had a big impact on the Lancaster and Morecambe area.

I always start from a personal perspective and we're obviously focusing on electronic music. So what is your interest in electronic music and have you always loved it because you seem to have a strong focus on it?

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I mean, what an honour it is to be sat opposite the ‘Skiddle.com Resident DJ of the year 2010’ which is where our paths crossed.

 

Yeah, we didn't even mention how we know each other, did we haha?

Electronic music began for me when Baby D, ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’, was on Top of the Pops and I thought, “I quite like this”. This was around 1994, so I would have been, I don't know, 11. You can fact check that, but I feel it was around that period. I just thought, “you know what, I quite like that sound; I like the joy that's coming from that music.” It just intrigued me.

Then I went to school, and got moved around a lot as a kid. I never really found my feet, and then my parents moved me to Carlisle, which is an interesting place to live. I used to hang around with the music room crew, because effectively we were the alternative kids that had to escape everyone else at lunchtime. It was our little solace. There was a lot of Radiohead, there was a lot of Pulp that we listened to, but there was also Kraftwerk, and there was Air, which isn’t a classic dance sound, but it's an electronic music creation that was pretty cool. Then there was the drum & bass around the time. We were listening to Roni Size ‘Brown Paper Bag’, big record that I own on vinyl. I've still got it to this day.

I did the school thing and then there was this big rock club that we all managed to get into called the Twisted Wheel, and upstairs in the club was a place called Legends. That was your typical sticky-floored place, at the start of pop trance, all that sort of scene.
I went to college and started hanging around with a couple of guys that put on a drum & bass night up in Carlisle. They were the proper crate-digging crew with decks in the bedroom and parties every weekend. I was really just enjoying this scene.

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What did you enjoy about it?

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I mean, it's the madness in it.
There's the madness, but then there's the family of dance music. And let's be clear, we all went out and we all enjoyed ourselves. We all stayed up. Put two and two together there if you want. As part of that journey, there’s the start, the middle and the end of the evening and you’d have different people by your side. It has a very community feel. As I got more intertwined in Carlisle, I met people like Matt Tyson, who puts on the Uber nights. Through Matt, I met Ki Creighton and Ben Yates, who went on to big things in the DJ world.
It was always like a Thursday night vibe. You're like, “yeah, we're going to cause mischief this weekend.”
Listen, we had Concrete in Carlisle but also some clubs you won't go near, but at the time it was fun. There was a little three-story club called Jackson's that we all used to go to and they put this monthly club night on and you'd see all your friends, do you know what I mean? They were your dance floor friends. You didn't really know their names. They just came to every single one and you’d end up back at an after-party or whatever. It was just this mad sense of community.

I was always intrigued into how it all came together. What made it different to Legends? Legends had the same resident DJ week in week out, who didn't really look that happy to be there and was doing it for the girls. Whereas at the club nights, it was all about the build; bringing in the bigger sound system, getting the guy to do the lighting. Then you'd have Matt booking people like X-press 2 or Riva (Starr) - big house names. Steve Lawler came to Carlisle and most of Carlisle doesn't know who Steve Lawler is, but to me I'm like, “yeah man, this is it!”

Then somebody said, do you want to come to Ibiza? And you're like, “yeah, let's do that”. And I was always intrigued by the delivery of it. I love the night, love being part of it, love doing whatever, but if I could be there at the end to help sweep up, I would as well, because it was cool.

Did you ever fancy DJing?

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Oh, everyone always fancies DJing, don't we? I mean, I've got DJ controllers at home, but I just like to mess around but I've never really found the willpower to stand in one spot for 90 minutes! I think that's always going to be my biggest thing with it. I could throw a couple of tunes together and have a bit of fun, but ultimately people are just stood looking at you. I've not got it in me to James Hype it or you know, just wave your hands around. And obviously I know loads of DJs now and I admire them for being able to stand in one place. There aren’t many jobs that you do that, is it? You’re like a musical bus driver or something.
I've always been behind the scenes, and I think I've become pretty good at that over the years. So yeah, I'm going to mess around at home when the kids are trying to watch telly. It's probably the extent of my DJing.
In fact, over COVID I did DJ to my kids' primary school on Google Meet, so that was pretty fun. Yeah that's the biggest gig I've ever had.

So it sounds like you've always been intrigued by the production, the behind the scenes…

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Yeah, back in 2001 we started our Skiddle journey, and along the way we got to meet various people doing events at various levels. We'd all go to Gatecrasher back in the day and you go to the Republic, and be absolutely amazed by these lasers everywhere and mirror balls that lifted themselves up and down so the lasers bounced off them. Going from 10 at night till 6 in the morning and 90% of the people still being there was just phenomenal.
Then through Skiddle I met people like Ryan (Stanger) who had an equal love for Gatecrasher at the time.  He was recreating it by putting his own night on because Ryan's brother at the time, Luke, he was DJing a lot and so was Ryan. He wanted to create this night for Luke to DJ in Braithwaite Village Hall, from 7pm till 1 in the morning, because the village hall wasn't licensed past 1. People put the same amount of effort into dressing up and being the ‘crasher kids’ or whatever, and we'd made these big ‘Insomnia’ letters out of polystyrene that we hung up in the in the hall. It was like your own fanboy version of Gatecrasher, and it was just as good.

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I think I went to one.

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Yeah, you're in the hall and you come out and you're like, “ Oh my God, there's mountains! What?! Oh, and there's Keswick.” Just as much madness was there. 200 - 300 people dragged themselves out to this village hall and it was just as fun to do it on a completely different budget to Gatecrasher.

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You mentioned meeting people along the way that informed your knowledge of how to do things and a lot of that's through Skiddle. Do you want to give Skiddle a little brief synopsis as well?

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Skiddle is a ticketing platform that myself and Ben (Sebborn) created back in 2001. We celebrate 25 years next year. It was never a plan, and it worked. I've always been inspired by the events side, but we created a platform for people to promote events and sell tickets on it. We've had a lot of fun along the way doing it and you get to meet a lot of people and I'm very honoured, but I've always been involved in the events world alongside it. Some things have worked, some things haven't. Skiddle's always been the solid in the background. Doing the back room at Goodgreef in 2006 was just a bit of fun that only happened because of Skiddle. We did the after parties for both the Preston (BBC) One Big Weekend and the Carlisle One Big Weekend, mainly for Skiddle.
Listen, this industry is a personality game. It's as simple as that. Event promoters have no special skills whatsoever, other than they're the best sales people in the world. They work on different levels of either blagging it, or working really hard and bringing it all together. A lot of the time the customer doesn't know which version of the event they've had because as long as they have a good night out, the event’s succeeded. That's the world we live in but there's a lot of personalities that I've met that you get on really well with and actually they want to celebrate and push your success. Talking about Goodgreef, Barry's been really kind to us for a long time. He's really stuck by us, and he's supported us. He's involved us and he's one of the original promoters who used Skiddle, so that's 20 / 25 years of working with that brand and I'll always give back to that.
Whereas there are other promoters, Simon Rayner of Gatecrasher being one of them, that didn't really like looking after his customers. There are a lot of sharks in the game as well, that have got away with stuff for a long time. Skiddle’s always been the advocate for the customer whilst trying to keep the promoter happy, which is a really difficult place to be in this game, and it's the same with DJing.

The bigger you get, the more difficult it's it is to enjoy what you do, I guess. The world's changed, like social media and with everything, and there's this whole ‘do you allow phones on the dance floor?’ conversation going on. But a lot of the clips you see where everyone's stood holding the phone up is because a DJ’s getting lowered out of the ceiling in a nightclub. Nobody uploads clips of the rest of the night because they're too busy having fun. It's like with the stage shows at Elrow nights. Of course people are going to film it because they've got this device to do it, but you go to Elrow at 3 in the morning at Amnesia, and there's no phones out. It's utter carnage. It’s absolutely brilliant. People uploading videos of people on phones is ironic really, isn't it?

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There's lots of questions I've got all at once in my head.

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Yeah, I think I just answered something that I didn't get asked then haha.

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No, that's great. That's what I love about these conversations.

We were talking about Skiddle and how opportunities have come up, and that it's all about community.
Did you always know that you wanted to continue doing the events alongside the business? Did you feel it was important to promote Skiddle through these events, or was it just because of your love of doing events?

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It's love. It's pure and simple love.  

Skiddle sells tickets for other people's events. My business partner and co-founder Ben is very technical. He's got the dev team who understands all that side. In the past 25 years we've gone from renting a server off a guy in Bolton where we could drive across and go “the website's gone down”, to now being fully integrated into Amazon Web Services, and I would have absolutely no idea how our website is on the internet. I don't know how that works anymore because it's huge.  But from my side of things, I look after stuff operationally around finance, the marketing, and I've got a lot of managers that look after them, and I sit on top of all of them all and go, “right, this is where we're at”. With the events, apart from a promotor social or an exhibition or something where we're promoting the brands, Skiddle doesn't need to do events. I don't really think it impacts Skiddle that much, when for example, we do an event at the Town Hall in Lancaster. It doesn't move the needle at all because Skiddle's promoted by loads of other events and by paid marketing. It's its own brands now.

I don't go on TikTok because I'm 44, wait 42. How old am I? I don't care. You don't need to edit that because that's where I'm at in life. I’m 42, I'm not designed to be on TikTok apart from to spy on my 13-year-old son, right? But then I go on TikTok and if you search for Skiddle, you see how important we are to people's 20-year-old life. It's absolute madness. People make little memes and they're like “ Just been paid” and then they flash up Skiddle ticket after Skiddle ticket. So somebody's making a reel to show that they've spent all the money on going out with us and I'm humbled by that. But those events aren't ours that they're going to - it’s the big ones, the little ones. It's all the stuff that they're growing up with. So for us to put events on, it's purely a passion project for me and for Jamie (Scahill). We like doing this because all those years ago when we were stood on the stage at the Wickman together.
We used to run the dance village at the Wickman Festival up in Scotland. For some mad reason, we were allowed to go till 6 in the morning. What was brilliant about that is that Skiddle wasn't the product that it is today. So we were running the dance village until 6 in the morning, going to bed for 2 hours and then running the gates to get everyone in the next day. I didn't know what's going on haha. Everyone was so happy. On Thursday night we used to do the little outdoor stage and everyone would arrive. My willpower has got better over the years, but certainly back then it's like, “Oh, everyone's here, let's have a party!” Then I’m like, “Oh, man, I've got to get up.” You get up, and then we do the ticketing side, and then we'd carry on through.
So you go from the outdoor stage and Jamie would be DJing on that, building up and it would end up with these 2 pretty reasonably sized big tops to look after. At peak, especially on the Saturday nights, they’d burn the Wickerman as part of the festival and then we were the only thing open after that. So 20,000 people were either going to bed or they were coming to us.
We would never have any budget. The Wickerman team gave us what they could, but it was never enough. So we'd go for headliners, they'd provide the tent, and then there'd be some deal on the sound and lighting. But we'd be like, “I’d really like to get an inflatable astronaut and hang him from the ceiling ‘cause I think it'd look cool”. You'd be onto the inflatable company saying “so I've not got any money, right? But maybe we could send some e-flyers to our promoters on Skiddle” and every year we used to be able to blag something. Once we got a sweet maker up in North Scotland somewhere to drop off a lorry with 300 pallets in it for free because he wanted rid of them and we needed something to build a stage out of. It's all the little creator moments.

Then back to my point; that when you’re stood on that stage and you're watching those heads bob up and down and that moment is absolutely perfect to me. We didn't have the phones to film it, and I found some old click cameras where the flash has been on, and I wished the photos weren’t so bright. There's the odd video around, but not a lot.
To me, it's always, always about that moment. It’s like when the head teacher’s put on the best nativity they've ever done, right? And they're so proud. It's that same feeling. I think that's in a lot of promoters to, and a lot of DJs. They've created that moment. Electronic music definitely just seems to lend itself to being able to just capture that minute where everyone goes, “oh my God, that was good!”.

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Yeah, a DJ comes in and does a part of it. I can imagine for a promoter that feeling’s magnified. But I had that feeling, particularly warming up for Steve Lawler at Wickerman.

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Oh mate, do you remember that?

 

That was one of my absolute DJing highlights.

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I don't think Ginny's ever told the Steve Lawler story properly, but Steve Lawler was, shall we say, a difficult person. We won't tell the full story on here, but we booked him and were all dead proud. We booked him because two years prior, Steve's set pretty much saved me in Ibiza because I was not in the best place. We went to see Steve Lawler in the car park at Space and I was like, “ Everything's okay again. I'm here, I'm all right.” Splash a bit of water on my face, off we go.
So we booked him for Wickerman had to fly him over. The Wickerman was up in a place called Kirkcudbright. Your nearest airport is Prestwick. It's not an easy place to get to, and Steve wanted to have his tea in Ibiza with his friends. So he got on the late flight and we flew him over and my dear friend Matt Tyson went to pick him up. Then Matt rings us on the way, and he's like, “Yeah, Steve's not eaten and wants a margarita pizza ready for him when he gets there”. Luckily we had a pizza van on site, so we chatted to them, and they weren't keen on just selling us a pizza. They were like, “Well, there's a queue.” They just didn’t understand that I needed a certain pizza at a certain moment, so I just joined the queue. We got in there and you were DJing beforehand and I think you were only supposed to have an hour or something and you were dead nervous. And this was a post-Wickerman burning set and everyone knew Steve Lawler was coming on. The tent was full and it was about 40 rows deep on the outside and I was trying to sort this pizza out. Security then wouldn't let me into the tent because it was too full. I'm like, “buddy!” They said “well, you haven't got a pass.” I'm like, “Where's my pass? I haven't got a pass”. Then I had to sneak down the side of my own tent to get around the backstage area. Then this other doorman starts following me. I'm like, “mate, it's my tent.” Then luckily, a doorman recognised me and he went, “no, he's fine”. But that in itself just slows the process down.
I just got on stage and said, “Just keep DJing”. You were like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Because we haven't got another DJ yet”. And Steve Lawler arrives about half an hour late. “You're like, I don't know if I've got enough records.”
So Steve arrived and then I'm thinking he's going to want his pizza side of stage. No, he wanted to eat his pizza before he went on stage. I'm like, “but you're already late”. Anyway, then Steve finally got on and a drink had leaked in his bag onto the headphone jack and he plugged it into the mixer and everything cut out.

 

I remember that bit.

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And he was fuming at us but we learned a long time ago that whilst it's an expensive thing to do,  you have to have the identical set up twice. No two ways about it - rent it in, do whatever. If you've got something that people depend on, having one mixer is not an option. Because Matt (Tyson), God love him, has a DJ shop, he literally just pulls out this mixer still all wrapped up in the packaging. “We'll use this one, and we'll just tell everyone it's been returned” he says. We plugged it in, and you'd built and built and built the tent and it was amazing. There's people trying to get in and it was absolute nuts and I'm getting radio calls, “it's too busy” and all these things. Steve comes in, kills the music. He then goes, “yeah, it's too bright in here”. He wants all the lights turned down, right? And then he just played this dead minimal house sound and I'm like, “ This isn't what I heard in the car park two years ago, dude.”  I've never seen so many people go to bed so quickly. I was just like, “oh, well, sound”. But we had A-Skillz on in the tent next door, so that just got too busy in the end. So yeah, that's one of my favourite Ginny stories.

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Haha – well it’s one of mine now too! You have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, you just do it. But I'm glad I was well clear of the decks when all the power went down. I'm glad it was nothing to do with me!

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You've got to understand these people. The fees that these DJs get paid, they have zeros in them and they have quite a few. I'm not going to disclose what anyone gets paid, but it's not cheap. I think people on the dance floor don't always understand that. What you'll find is that sometimes you get a lot better set from people without any zeros in the fee or maybe just a couple. Do you know what I mean? That Wickerman moment to me was you owning the tent. You saw what was coming, and people didn't come in and go, “ oh, they've just got Ginny warming up,” they went, “We're having a party!” and they went for it.

About 18 months after that night, I was very lucky to meet Danielle from Crazy P, and we were sat on a curb in Preston outside a club night, chatting. I told her this story about meeting your heroes and Danielle was always one of my heroes. When we got to this story and she just gave me a little hug at the end and she went, “We're not all like that”. It's just really funny. She was always just such a warm, lovely person. I was just like, “I don't even know why I've told you this story.” Steve must have put a club night on. Danielle was there and we just, we were sat on a curb outside whilst I don't know, just chatting. It was really lovely and I was really sad when she died, but not because I knew her, but because I knew what she brought to the scene. I know she'd had that same moment with lots and lots of other people. So, yeah, always meet your heroes. Just don't always expect anything from them.

It's a hard balance, isn't it? Because they're your heroes for a reason, aren't they? And they've given you something special, whether it's an interaction or a night out or a moment.

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Joel, my little lad, is 10 and he's a big Lando Norris fan. Two years ago, we were at the Dutch Grand Prix and we were around the paddock area and he touched base with Lando maybe three or four times over the weekend. Lando was so lovely to him, and I've got a really lovely photo of them. During the drivers parade, Joel shouts, “ Oi Lando!” and Lando waves right at him which was lovely. But you've got to respect these people, they've been absolutely launched into fame.

 

I guess one of the big questions I have is ‘why Lancaster’? Why did you want to bring big, exciting events like you've done at A-Wing and Highest Point, to Lancaster?

 

Yeah, so Lancaster’s close to my heart. I was born in Lancaster. I moved around a bit. I didn't ever live in Lancaster but close by in in Bolton-le-Sands for a little bit, but I was a squidge, so I don't really remember much of that. But my grandparents were here, so I have very fond memories of going to the butterfly house, going to Williamson park, walking around the edge of the castle. Back when I was a kid, the castle was a prison and I’d think, “what's behind those walls?” And then when the prison service vacated, the castle were looking to do Ghost Tours, and they wanted to use Skiddle for ticketing. Basically they showed us around the A-wing, and I was like, “Yeah, I'm putting a party on in there.”

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That's always my first thought often and I’m not a promotor. haha

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Ah well, everyone's a promoter. People forget that. You have ideas. You just need people to put it together.
Anyway, they were like, “Nah, nah, no, you're not”. And I was like, “Well, I’ll take that as a yes then”.
There's a really long story around a lot of that, but we were eventually given permission by a girl that was working as the events person at the castle at the time, and we booked in, Rob Da Bank, we booked in James Zabiela, and we had Derrick Carter.

So that was the first weekend and we had them in, and we got quite a lot of traction on it. Although Lancaster has this wonderful thing of somebody saying, “well, that's not actually real”. And then other people believe in it, you know.

How do you mean?

Literally people said, “no, they won't be allowed to do an event in there”. So it got round that we were making it up, that it's a scam. And we're like, “Really?” Now, James Zabiela at the time was a little bit more Mixmag. Mixmag was still printing magazines at the time. So that sold out really quickly because he's a travelling artist. You want to go see James Zabela and it's in a castle. It's in a prison in a castle! We sold that out so quickly. The Rob da Bank one was a bit more of the student crowd booking tickets.
Then one day I get a phone call. I was on the platform at Lancaster railway station, just about to go on like a bit of a booze cruise with mates. I answer and it's Chris Adcock. He was like the finance officer or something like. He said “I’m very important to the Duchy Lancaster, and I just want to know what this is about?” I told him that Francesca at the castle, has given us permission.”  “Oh, it's never happening in there, nobody's talked to us about it” he said.
And we were like, “Chris, appreciate your concerns, but I've paid for all these artists and you know, I've bought this in and bought this. So I'm literally 50 grand deep into this. So if you want, I'm at Lancaster Railway Station, I can get on the train and come see you instead if you want and talk about it.” He says “No, there's no need for that because the events aren't happening.”
I'm like, “I'll catch up with you lads because I'm in the middle of a conversation. I don't know where it's going.”

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So how long before the event was this?

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Oh, good question. I mean, posters were out, deposits were paid, let's say a month. A month, six weeks. Yeah, because Zabiela had sold out. So it was definitely happening.

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So I chatted it through and said, “ Look, can I come and see you next week? Let's talk it through.”  Every credit to Chris, he said that he needed to go away and talk to some people about it. Then I said, “ Well, I'll come down” and I got the train to London. Their offices are beautiful - big corner office, overlooks the Thames, next to, I want to say London Bridge. I just went and met him and said, “ Look, this is where we're at.” Out comes this big 110-page agreement between us, and he's like, “You've got to understand that this is the Queen's castle”, and then he says, “Would you mind if I came up to the first event?” I was like, “No problem”. It turns out his daughter was a big fan of Rob da Bank, and he says, “Well, come on, we'll all go out for dinner”.
So, we went to1725, the tapas bar. Rob was there because I knew Rob from previous engagements, and then Chris from the Duchy and a few of us all having tapas and drinking wine. I was like “we're okay here, done”.

The first night was okay because it was 300 - 400 because nobody really thought we were going to do it and we pulled it off. We made a load of changes overnight before the Zabiela night because we had to put in this one-way system because it was on the two floors. And then Zabiela came on, and by this point, the Derrick Carter night hadn't really sold the tickets we wanted it to. It was a bank holiday weekend and we were probably going to break even because Zabiela had done so well. But we’d got 15 second footage of Zabiela and everyone was all down the walkways, bouncing up and down, hands in the air, the music and lights in sync. It was  again, one of those moments where you're like, “oh my God, I want to be there! Oh hand on, I AM there!”. Do you know what I mean?
So we uploaded that to our Facebook and we sold the Derrick Carter tickets within 67 minutes. A-wing lasted 2 ½ years. There was always an internal battle between the Duchy committee. There's some people that didn't think it should ever be there, and there's some people that didn't mind it and a lot of people that were in support of it.

Along the way, the Queen came to visit Lancaster. So we got invited along to meet the Queen on the day of Jamie’s Stag do. So I was supposed to get a mini-bus from Manchester to Newcastle. We were getting the boat across to Amsterdam. I was like, “Jamie, I've been invited to meet the Queen. What can I do?” And he was like, “Oh, obviously you've got to do it”. I was his best man so I was like, “Mate, if you don't want me to meet the Queen…” and he said “I want you to meet the Queen”. Ross drove us up there, and they let us park in the courts. Everything was super high security. I bought a really nice suit, and then we went in and everything's done by the minute. Yeah, there's no winging it with the Queen, with the Royals or anything. So once the car's in there, it's not coming out. I'm like, “we'll get in the train anyway, don't worry, mate”.
When I met the Queen she said “You're the noisy one, are you?” And I'm like, this is the maddest moment of my life! “Thank you for bringing so many young people to see the castle.” You shake hands and all that nonsense and you're just like, “what have I done to deserve this?”
And they let us carry on and it was great because we would speak to agents and we'd go, do you want to play in Lancaster? And they'd go, “no”, then we’d say “It's in a prison”. And they'd go, “oh, okay.” And then they put an offer sheet in. Because you're allowed 500 people in on what’s called a temporary rent notice, that's what we operated on. So the space would have taken more, but we weren't allowed more people in, which meant the fees had to reflect that.
So again, coming back to the number of zeros, we were offering most DJs like 50%, what they would normally go out for on a Friday or Saturday night. But for example with Pete Tong, he was  like, “I've never DJed in a prison before.” It's just your one time to do it, Pete!”

We got to do cool stuff like that, and it was good. Then one day, after Pete Tong played, the Mail on Sunday ran an article. They got hold of the accounts for the Duchy. Because it's the Queen's money, it's all public money effectively. They somehow pieced together that the prison service had left the castle early (that was the one fact in it), but that's because they had a new facility and we're talking two years earlier, right? They then had to pay effectively a penalty for leaving early and I think that penalty was about a pound. It's a ‘peppercorn rent’ or whatever. So they've taken the Queen's visit and that Pete Tong had recently been given an MBE, and they put it all together in the Mail on Sunday. The Queen boots out prison service to turn prison into nightclub for Pete Tong MBE. Full page in the Mail on Sunday, I've still got it. I literally got a phone call off the Duchy. She just like, “It's done” because they don't want that attention. And that was it.

So we had some really good stuff lined up and we just went, it's over. So we'd already booked the Hacienda Classical to do the courtyard in the castle. Now nobody had seen Hacienda Classical at that point. But we've been working with the guys across there like Graham (Park) and Paul Fletcher who was pulling it all together. They’d said about this classical thing that they wanted to do because they'd been inspired by Pete Tong, but putting their own Manchester take on it. We said we could do it in the castle courtyard and we started pulling it together and we paid a deposit, then we'd been booted out the castle effectively.

On top of that, Chris (Glaba) who was around at the time who I got to know through other events, had come to work for us at Skiddle and then doing A-wing together. It was me, Chris and Jamie on the A-wing thing, and Chris had got diagnosed with cancer. So we'd used to go for these big nights out in December. We still do. Chris was always the last one to bed. On this night he was the first one to bed saying he'd got a bad stomach. He later went to the doctors and then the doctor was like, “we think you're celiac”. But then they did some more tests and sadly we found out it was cancer and two weeks later we found out it was terminal.

So we had the Hacienda booked for May without a venue and a third of us, you know, was terminally ill. So we spoke to Will (Griffith), who was the Williamson Park manager at the time, and asked “can we do this here?” Will went, “yeah”.
The A-Wing events carried a lot of weight because we've been working with the Duchy and all the local authorities and we always, I hope people see this in the events that we've done, have a care and consideration for the customer. It’s always number 1 for us, and we'd always looked after people at A-wing, and we're always well respected. Andy, at Police Licencing, he'd always stick his head in and he'd always be happy. We employed professional doormen, and when people weren't so well, we'd take them out, sit them on the wall and chat to them. People take drugs at dance music events. There's no two ways about it, right? You can't stop that because that's people's decisions. You can educate people not to do it. We know people that do do it, you know. We can educate, we can try and stop them getting into events, but you literally can't stop them getting into prisons. So then when people take them, there was a mad stage around 15 years ago when people were unwell on drugs, we used to punish those people. I used to see it. They’d get taken out and they'd be left to their own devices. It's like, “no, we need to give these people care.” If you're a paramedic picking somebody up in the street, they don't care how you got there. They want to know how to get you not there, and that's one of the things we used to have to do, that sometimes there would be people that got a little bit carried away. So we'll just take them outside, sit them on the wall and have a chat, you know, because that's the best thing you can do is give them 20 minutes to cool down, make sure they've got water. You've obviously got first aiders on site, they're perfectly trained to deal with it. But 9 out of 10 people then went back inside, because they just found that chill out and they've done it. It's very good to see that there's been a big movement towards that now, but at the time, it was quite a novel approach for us. I think the authorities know that what we do, regardless of the scale, will always put the customer first.

We did that and we went up to the park and we spoke to Will. He was like, “oh yeah, and I've heard about you”.

Two weeks before we did the first one, we realised that Hacienda weren't going to fit on the stage, so we moved the whole park round. That was the last show we did with Chris. We were going to do 2 days, but we just got it to the Sunday night. It was a little bit habdashery, and the bar was chaos. We were sick of the jokes (about the bar), we've heard them all.

But we got there and we had a footprint.

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