Millennium New Years Eve Parties ….The World’s biggest New Years Eve parties or biggest let down..?
For nightclubs New Year’s Eve has always been a huge money-making event but on Millennium New Years Eve, this was ridiculous! During the 90’s dance music had changed from being played largely on pirate radio stations into a multi-million pound global industry. DJs were now becoming celebrities in their own right. Clubs were becoming bigger, bolder, louder and more expensive. So how much were these DJs going to get paid for the Millennium New Years Eve? Absolute fortunes!
Sonique got £5,000 at Gatecrasher. Jon Carter earned £5,000 playing on Bondi Beach. Jon of the Pleased Wimmin came out of retirement, and pocketed between £8-12,000 playing three events in Scotland. Nick Warren played Home in Sydney for £20,000. Dave Seaman made £30,000 for two Renaissance shows. Danny Rampling took home £50,000 playing to a crowd of 30,000 at the River Club in Cape Town, South Africa.
It was one last payday of the superstar DJ era, and it didn’t stop there!
Jeremy Healy, the future Mr Patsy Kensit, flew around the UK in a private plane earning around £80,000. Judge Jules netted £100,000 playing for Gatecrasher, the most he had ever charged. Pete Tong took £125,000. Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, got £140,000 playing four gigs; one in Brixton, one in Cardiff and two in Liverpool. Sasha still won’t say how much he earned but claims it was more than anyone else. If this is to be believed it would make his wages for the evening a staggering £150,000+. It was the ultimate of everyone being ripped off all the DJs were making lots of money where their agents had bullied promoters into paying over the odds. Average wages had gone from £500 a night to £100,000+ in just eight years!
The wage war began in early 1999 when Gatecrasher faxed the DJs’ managers with the prices they were willing to pay per set. The offer would only be valid for 48 hours, to hurry things up. Gatecrasher then invited a prospective DJ to Sheffield’s Don Valley stadium, the site of its party. They left him in the middle of the stadium, turned on the floodlights and said, “Now tell us you don’t want to play for 25,000 people”. It worked like a dream.
The clubs were also set to make a killing, charging around £100 a ticket. Double-page glossy adverts in all the magazines promised New Years Eve parties of a lifetime. Gatecrasher’s tagline concluded, “ You’re at Gatecrasher 2000GC and parties don’t get bigger or better than this.”
Cream also had big plans, hosting five events. An outdoor show at Liverpool’s Pier Head, at £75 a ticket, this included big live acts such as the Stereophonics and Orbital. Cream’s club, Nation was £99 on the night. Also at £99 were shows in Cardiff and at the Brixton Academy in London. DJs Pete Tong, Fatboy Slim and Sasha were all racing around the country to play at all of these events.
However, rumours began to surface that Cream had only sold 30 tickets. The club was being filmed for a programme on Sky TV and tensions were running high. They had invested half a million pounds for one night and no tickets had sold! Boss James Barton thought that if they could just hold in there the other shows would start dropping off and they would pick up the ticket sales. It was a brave move and eventually tickets began to sell, albeit slowly. Cream’s Liverpool shows sold out and were judged a success but financially, it was a disaster. Their event at the Brixton Academy nightclub in London was half empty and Cream ended up losing £400,000 which nearly wiped them out.
The DJs playing at Cream’s half-empty events in Brixton and Cardiff also had their share of disasters. Pete Tong’s son was ill and he was unable to make the Brixton gig which ended up becoming a long-running dispute with the club over money. He never got his full fee.
Sasha had a brand new Audi A8 and wanted to push it. He was with four others hurtling down the M1 at 100mph+. He got a puncture and ended up shredding the back tyre, luckily it was the back tyre and he was still able to drive - had been the front tyre he never would have made it to the gig.
Norman Cook and Zoë Ball were travelling in a party bus with all their friends. The bus was going too slow so the couple had to switch mid-journey to a Mercedes so that they could get to the event. "It wasn't a happy New Years for us as we ended up spending New Years Eve by ourselves on the motorway" Norman recalls.
Things were even worse at Renaissance. Geoff Oakes had spent £250,000 on a huge spectacular at Nottingham’s Trent Park. 2,500 tickets needed to be sold at £110 per ticket. They sold only 500 tickets. They also still had to pay their superstar DJs – people such as Frankie Knuckles who would be getting around £30,000. The event was cancelled last minute due to poor ticket sales, and everything was moved to their new Nottingham club Media. DJ John Digweed gave some of his fee back. Renaissance ended up being down £200,000 for that one night and nearly went under.
Finally New Years Eve 1999 arrived, in Sheffield the temperature was freezing. Gatecrasher opened late. Parking was a nightmare at a cost of £5. The venue was freezing and they were unable to use the special heating equipment as it did not meet the required standards. Funfair rides were cancelled by health and safety officers due to the arctic temperatures, which during December in Sheffield probably wasn’t expected? Queuing for the bar was a nightmare, and the ladies’ toilets overflowed. Just before midnight a clubber shimmied the ‘king pole’ of the tent and began flashing his buttocks. The music was cut and for the next five minutes Judge Jules was trying to persuade the reveller over the microphone to come down. Judge Jules was then interrupted by a Yorkshire Police Officer who finally managed to get the clubber to descend. By this time midnight had been and gone and German DJ Paul van Dyk, who had created a track especially for the occasion, was so annoyed he ended up punching the guy.
In Scotland, promoter Ricky Magowan had been working for a year on his most ambitious New Year’s Eve ever with a five-arena show in a huge industrial unit between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He had been running parties since 1989 when he started his Streetrave nights. The venue had a capacity of 20,000 at £70 a ticket. Magowan had to install two fire escapes at a cost of £90,000. He also had to hire security, normally costing around £25,000 for a similar event, but for New Years Eve it totalled £90,000.
It was a complete disaster. The venue was half empty. Live link-ups with other big club events worldwide failed – the only one that worked was Brandon Block live from Watford. The cloakroom, being run by inexperienced staff, was chaos. Sticky tape had been used to fix numbers on to coats, these had fallen off in the humidity of the rave. Coats with no tickets ended up piled up on the floor at the end of the night! Ricky ended up losing £250,000 and had to remortgage his house just to stay in business.
What was to be the world’s biggest party had in fact become, in many places, the world’s biggest let down. The promoters blamed everything but themselves, Gatecrasher blamed health and safety for not letting them put up their fairground. Cream apologised for the half-empty Brixton Academy.
The damage had already been done....
Luckilly many people learned a lesson from that night and now promoters, nightclubs are much more aware of the pitfalls and more importantly consumers expectations and requirements.
This year London Groove has 4 New Years Eve parties for 2011 happening at The Anthologist, Abbey Bar, Mustard Bar and The Refinery. More details can be found on our New Years Eve parties page or through the home page.
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