Photo by DJElroy
Ravers hit Facebook for 1990s club revivals
Veteran ravers of Cream, Venus, Haçienda, Vague and Shelley’s are reliving the 1990s club scene through social networking
words by Chris Cottingham~
It began as a bit of common-or-garden nostalgia. Two years ago, Ian Squire was spending Friday night at home with his wife, Stacey, in Nottingham. They were listening to classic club tracks from the early 1990s, songs such as Too Blind to See It, by Kym Sims, Don’t You Wanna Be Mine, by Denise Lopez, and Rhythm Is a Mystery, by K-Klass. They started reminiscing about Venus, the early-1990s club night in Nottingham where they’d both been regulars. “If I’m honest, I’d had a couple of beers,” says Squire, now a 37-year-old lab supervisor and father of four. “I decided to start a Facebook group called Let’s Have a Venus, the UK’s First Super Club Revival in Nottingham. We just wanted to see if there was any interest from people who used to go to Venus, but for various reasons had lost touch, and if they felt the same way we did.”
The next day, Squire had forgotten about it — but he had struck a chord. The Venus Facebook group snowballed and now has nearly 800 members. It’s just one of numerous Facebook groups dedicated to clubs from the 1980s and 1990s. Think of a club from that era and the chances are that there’s an online community of ex-ravers in their thirties and forties, swapping stories, meeting old friends and organising reunions. There are groups celebrating the original incarnation of Cream, the Liverpool night that defined the term “superclub” from 1992 to 2002; Vague, in Leeds, which championed “handbag house” in the mid-1990s; and Shelley’s Laserdome, in Stoke-on-Trent, a pivotal venue on the early-1990s rave scene. By far the largest is Fac 51, dedicated to Manchester’s Haçienda, which has more than 6,000 members.
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