Inside London's Ministry Of Sound - Classic Pop Magazine

Rave culture may have been dead at the hands of the Tory government in the early 90s, but a series of superclubs, spearheaded by the mighty Ministry Of Sound, were about to give dance music a new lease of life… By Sam Willis

The death knell for rave culture and the twilight of a joyous and halcyon era in British music came in the form of a particularly resentful and draconian piece of legislature, enacted by Her Majesty’s Government in 1994.

The Criminal Justice Act curtailed raves by giving police the powers to shut down events that were identified by “‘music’ [which] includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” The inverted commas surrounding ‘music’ are a particularly revealing window into the government’s umbrage and disdain for the culture.

This friction between the government and groups of people utilising space for the large-scale celebration of music began with the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 – a high-profile clash between hippies and the police at Stonehenge – which was followed by the Public Order Act of 1986.

This enmity continued throughout the 80s and early 90s until the situation reached breaking point after the infamous 20,000-strong rave at Castlemorton Common in 1992, which was the catalyst for the impending Criminal Justice Act.

However, eight months previous to the rave at Castlemorton, an old bus depot located near the Elephant & Castle in South London was about to transform into a haven that would reclaim and distil the enthusiasm of rave and usher in the ensuing clubland phenomenon. Inspired by one of New York’s most iconic house clubs, it was to provide a legitimised sanctum for the counterculture to continue. This was the wryly-named Ministry Of Sound.

“When the Ministry opened,” says Tall Paul, a Ministry and Turnmills DJ who helped to mix a number of The Ministry Of Sound’s The Annual compilation series, “we were jumping around warehouses that they’d taken all of the product out of for one night. We were desperate to go somewhere and hear the DJs and hear the sound systems.

“As the culture exploded, clubs were trying to play catch-up. Until then it was all Stringfellows and glitz and glamour and carpets. Ministry was purpose-built. It was like, ‘This is for dance music only, it’s not your Sharon and Tracey sort of vibe, and we’re going to run with it.’”

This purist vision for what a dance music club should be came from Justin Berkmann, co-founder of Ministry, through his experiences of living in New York during the era of the city’s legendary Paradise Garage club and a growing disillusionment with the recurring violence at raves towards the end of the 80s.

Ministry Of Sound

Inspired by what he had seen and heard in New York via DJs such as Larry Levan and Todd Terry, Berkmann sought to reimagine that spirit in London. Significantly, when the Ministry’s doors opened on 21 September 1991, late-night licencing laws were beginning to relax at a time that coincided with a cracking down on raves. None of the enthusiasm for all-night partying had dissipated, but the spaces in which these could take place were beginning to slowly diminish.

“At the end of the 80s, when I was getting into electronic music,” remembers Lohan Presencer, the Ministry Of Sound’s Chairman, “the parties that we could go to were in fields around the M25 and along the south coast. Then the government tried to close those things down with the Criminal Justice Bill… They didn’t understand the culture that we were a part of. What Ministry did was that it legitimised that culture. We were able to get a licence, the first-ever licence, for an all-night club in the UK.”

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“It was a transformational moment,” says Lohan. “Up until that point, it was still a nightclub based in a warehouse in south east London… what we were trying to do was to recreate that experience in the main room in the club and take that out to the world. The first compilation album sold 20,000 copies. The next one, Sessions Vol 2, was mixed by Paul Oakenfold and that sold twice the amount.”

After its initial incarnations as Sessions, the Ministry-branded compilation CDs turned into The Annual series in 1995. The first of those would sell more than 100,000 copies and the second would sell one million. “I think it put us on the map,” continues Lohan. “We were creating packages that would travel the world and that people could buy in music shops in New York, in Singapore, in Thailand or in Australia. All of a sudden there was a global audience that was being exposed to what we were doing back in London.”

This business masterstroke would pave the way for other clubs to follow suit. In a pre-streaming age in which the power of CD sales and radio reigned supreme, the significance of those compilation CDs cannot be underestimated. It was the vehicle for the Ministry brand to grow and set a financial and cultural bedrock for other innovations including their own radio show and magazine.

If the innovation of a purpose-built space for dancing was how Ministry captured the spirit of the New York scene and the children of rave, then the compilation CDs were the way in which they captured a global following… and startling amounts of revenue. “We were born from a cultural movement which manifested itself initially in the form of the club, but then transitioned into us being the trusted curation voice of dance music through our compilation albums,” says Lohan.

“It’s easy to forget what life was like before high-speed internet,” adds Judge Jules. “The internet has been around for a while, but high-speed internet which can facilitate streaming is a relatively recent phenomenon. Therefore, mix CDs were the kind of shop window for dance music culture for many, many people, especially for those people who were too young to go out to clubs or who lived in countries where there wasn’t really a club culture.”

This growth of clubs such as Ministry Of Sound and Liverpool’s Cream grappled with US dominance and made the UK the newfound hub of dance music. Once again, British artists continued the tradition of taking music born in the US, repackaging it and making it our own.

“Although house music was born in America,” says Lohan, “the Brits wrapped their arms around it and took it on. I think we’ve always been at the sharp end of dance music and we’ve always evolved the genre from house, into trance, into drum’n’bass, into dubstep.

“There are multiple different strands and genres of electronic music, and the UK has always been at the forefront of that. A lot of talent was European and this was the second largest music market in the world, so there was the opportunity for that music to get heard here.”

Along with the compilation CDs, the embracing of dance music from the radio in this country – as starkly opposed to the US at the time – helped to fuel the fire and get us where we are today. By the mid-late 90s, the Top 10 was being invaded by tracks from the likes of The Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim. If you investigate the timeline, there are markedly more dance tracks in the top bracket of sales in the years directly following the Ministry Of Sound’s record-breaking The Annual II, which is recognised as the ‘Best-Selling Club Dance Compilation’.