As he announces a new book and gears up to play a huge London anniversary show, Erol Alkan has spoken to NME about his memories of legendary clubnights Bugged Out and Trash, and how the rush of the ‘00s electroclash scene is still having an impact today.
DJ and producer Alkan has just emerged from two years dedicated to writing Trash: A Club, A Sound, A Home – an oral history of the scene-setting clubnight compiled of 70 hours of interviews with 39 figures from those who got on behind the decks and on stage there back in the ‘00s, combined with his own thoughts and memories of the era.
Trash was best known for its connections to the 2000s scenes like the garage-rock revival, electroclash and new rave. Bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Peaches, Scissor Sisters, Bloc Party and Klaxons all performed there early on in their careers.
It was first located in Soho, before moving to the West End. NME once described Trash as “the greatest indie crossover disco of all time”, writing: “The very definition of eclectic, DJ and founder Erol Alkan’s playlist – who ran the club from 1997 until 2007 – would skip around gleefully from punk to pop via rock and disco, and the club also became one of the first places to worship at the asymmetric fringe of electroclash.”
This also comes as Alkan heads up a line-up at London’s Drumsheds this weekend alongside 2ManyDJs, The Avalanches, Kittin & The Hacker, Felix Da Housecat, Friendly Fires and New Young Pony Club for Bugged Out’s ‘2001&On…’ special day rave, celebrating the turn of the century’s game-changing and scene-setting moment.
A scholar of alternative music, Alkan said he still uses his stacks of vintage copies of NME as a “cheat code” and index as a DJ to find “less obvious things” that may not have charted from the era for his sets.
“The run-up to 2000 was when I was very much confused by what alternative culture was, so I became really invested in dance music,” Alkan told NME. “I very much lived my life in parallel to alternative culture and dance music culture co-existing on my record shelves and in my Walkman. I never, ever lost enthusiasm for music because there was always something that I was excited by; it just so happened that in the run-up to the new millennium it was mainly innovative dance music coming out of places like France and the UK capturing my imagination. That was fuelled by going to nights like Bugged Out at Fabric.”
He continued: “I had to really dig deep to find a lot of alternative music that I was really excited by. At the same time you had electroclash brewing, which you could kind of hear in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, but it didn’t have a name and wasn’t a scene yet. It was just a collection of artists and labels doing something very much in the spirit of alternative culture.
“It wasn’t until The Strokes and The White Stripes came along with everything that I experienced through Trash that refocused it all.”
Check out the rest of our interview below, where Alkan also told us about what made that moment in time so unique, his thoughts on it being remembered as “indie sleaze” and how new generations are still carrying the torch despite suffering at the hands of the digital age.
NME: Hello, Erol. What was it like at that point in time when alternative culture had people back on the dancefloor again?
Erol Alkan: “Music seemed lost post-Britpop. The intention of indie and what it stood for was completely gone. What you had instead was this sanitised concept of alternative culture, which was very much in the hands of major labels.
