Dave Lea and the Slinky success story
Author: Mark Burton
Thursday, June 10, 2004
"It's quite time-consuming but at the same time it's still quite rewarding. We've got a large team of staff down in Bournemouth. Obviously we're very busy globally with the various events we do and the festival in the UK and stuff so yeah it kind of means working 7 days a week."
This global approach has seen the Slinky brand going from strength to strength and seen Dave just finish an American tour. "We did South America, LA, Denver, Seattle, Calgary up in Canada, Sao Paulo down in Brazil. So just been over that side of the world, great gigs, really good crowds." In addition they have monthly residencies established at the Liquid Room in Singapore, which has been running for a couple of years, and in Jakarta.
With his business and music knowledge, Dave's better qualified than most to comment on the challenging times the UK's dance scene finds itself in, something he attributes to "saturation, there were too many clubs offering too much of the same thing."
So how has Slinky bucked this downward trend- "We're very in tune with what the customer wants to hear, we've adopted the music policy and we've chopped and changed. We're not afraid to try and do things, we're not afraid to get rid of the old DJs if we don't feel they're up to scratch any more." This up-front music policy includes running a Drum'n Bass night in tandem with the harder-edged trance that Slinky mailrooms have become synonymous with around the globe.
"Cocoshabeen, the drum and bass room, which is room 2, it's been running again along the same time as we've been running. Very successful, it's only a small room, about 400 capacity. It's full every week; it's great, got a great following!"
Dave's noticed a shift with clubbing in the UK returning to its roots. "I think it needs to as well so it can re-develop; I think for a while there it got slightly over-commercial. I think it needs to go back underground to help the industry as a whole and to let the scene effectively go back to stage one and re-develop, to re-generate itself.
"If something becomes too over-commercial kids don't like it, because the kids want to be cool at the end of the day! And if something is too over-commercial it's not cool. I believe it needs to go back to the underground, smaller cubs, to the smaller venues, just essentially get back to the grassroots clubbing where it all started from. The smaller gigs can sometimes be the better events; it's not always the huge gigs that are the best ones. Small can be good as well!"
Dave attributes his success behind the decks to the late Trade legend Tony de Vit and Italian Mauro Picotto, who recently had Two Tribes firing on all cylinders right up to the close. "Mauro's a great friend; Tony was a great friend, while he was alive. They just always helped me along the way and helped me stay focussed on what I was trying to achieve, so very much great inspirations and great people."
Musically Dave's "crossed over… there's a lot of good techno, tech-trance around, and we're pushing that at the moment, so it's still a very hard-edged, tough energetic sound…" He believes this cross-pollination of the two genres is down to "people looking for new stuff to play basically. It's people looking for new things; new sounds. If you take the positive elements out of both things, that's essentially where it's come from. It's fused them together which can only be good because it's essentially developed in a new genre that a lot of people seem to be jumping on in the UK."
Currently the hottest tracks in his box include "a track by Bas van Veen called Total Recall which is on Kompressor… there's a< Tags