A joint venture between Leeds’s socialising godfather Stephen Hawkins and Back to Basics residents, Iain ‘Frenchy’ French and Tristan da Cunha, are two of the most exciting arrivals on the Leeds clubbing and music scene.
The Garage, inspired by the legendary Paradise Garage, is a raw underground club offering a wide array of quality promotions, whilst Waxwerks is a brand new record shop which doubles up as a back room for the main club.
In the opening months, they’ve already hosted packed in-store sets from DJs like Andres and Jordan Peak, Willie Graff and Last Magpie, with events ranging from underground house to techno to bass to disco. And there are many more planned over the coming months, including part two of a Back to Basics’ 21st Birthday in November and a special set from Greg Wilson tomorrow.
You seem to have plugged a hole in Leeds, do you agree?
We like to think we’ve plugged more than one hole. With The Garage we’ve created a truly unique small venue as an alternative to the city’s bigger clubs with and we’ve brought the record shop back to Leeds with the Waxwerks store. This is what we had in mind when we started out, but we never quite knew if it would work in practice. Fortunately people seemed to have really taken to the place. The reaction has been quite overwhelming to be honest.
How have things gone so far?
We’ve had a really great first six months. We opened just before the start of the summer, which is a tough time to launch. The summer months are usually quieter due to over 35,000 students leaving the city. But we’ve learnt a lot about what makes it work best over the summer. Nothing was fundamentally wrong, but we’ve used the quieter months to make those little tweaks, the details that can take a venue from good to great.
What’s the outlook in the record shop; what sort of stock do you look to buy in?
The outlook for Waxwerks is to transcend the record store and become a cultural hub for music lovers in Leeds and beyond. Although we are primarily a record store we don’t want to be seen as somewhere that people would go only to buy music. We’ve got really nice, cosy surroundings with a well-stocked bar and really friendly staff. We want to be seen as much as a place to come and hang out in as well as somewhere to buy records. Our regular in-store DJ sets every Saturday, and Thursday night live broadcasts, Vic53 and Throwing Shapes, have helped us to open up to a wider audience. Our stock is predominantly underground house, disco and funk music, but we don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves too much. If it’s good and we think people need to hear it then we’ll represent it.
Tell us about your boutique interior and your thinking behind the whole project?
We wanted the Waxwerks half of the club to be a real visual treat. The theory was that every available space that could be used creatively would be. For this we brought in super-talented artist Victoria Topping to join us in designing the interior of Waxwerks. All the artwork you see in the club from the paintings, to the wallpaper, to the mosaic, is done by Victoria.
What have you got coming up?
November is packed. On Saturdays we have Lowbrow with Prosumer, and Virginia on the 3rd which is going to be massive. The guys from the supercool Salon De Renate club in Berlin are doing a takeover on the 17th, and there’s Basics 21st birthday, part two, on the 23rd. On Fridays we have the mighty Selective Hearing on the 9th, In:Vision with Anthea and DJ W!LD on the 16th and Hush House with Skudge on the 23rd. We also have our brand new mid-weekers ‘nu disco’ night Set One Twenty and nostalgic 90’s Hip Hop and R n B night Moschinoe Hoe and Versace Hottie on the 7th and 8th respectively. The thinking behind the nights we bring in is simple: they have to represent great music and attract great people. We wouldn’t put anything on that we wouldn’t want to go to ourselves – if the vibe isn’t right then it’s a ‘No’.
Tomorrow, Disco till I Die with Greg Wilson, The Garage, 9 East Parade, Leeds, 11pm, Tel. 0113 234 2225
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