Chances are, if you've been clubbing in the London area, and you have a modicum of taste, you will have heard of Serious. Their nights at the Cross are renowned for being the very definition of cool, and are regularly sell out events. At the last Serious, we managed to grab some time with promoter Dan de Saumarez, to pick his brain about a few issues.
Bit of a mouthful of a name isn't it?
Dan for short, as my surname is a bit of a mouthful, even for myself. My DJ name is 2Funky, as that's nice and short.
How did you first get involved with serious?
I got involved with Serious because the other partners in the company were all old school friends. I never really thought we'd end up working together, it just happened really. We were all doing different things. Sam, one of the original partners, the founder in a way, along with his brother Judge Jules. He started the company and I came onboard about three of four months after. We were all doing different things. Sam was looking after Jules' bookings and it went from there. Jules knows a lot of DJ's, so we just started off managing them. The whole promoting clubnights thing came about 6 months after that. We'd always been putting on parties for our birthdays, as the DJ's on our books would play for free so we'd be doing nights on a shoestring budget. We'd get the DJ's in, invite all our friends down and they were such good parties that we thought we should do them a lot more regularly.
When you started putting the club nights on properly so to speak, did you have a set manifesto, with regards to marketing and music policy?
Well, first and foremost we love the Cross. It's where all our parties started, and it's a home from home for us. We started really just to attract our friends to our monthly parties. The main emphasis was really on trying to break new talent, like some of the new DJ's we were managing. Guys like Jules and Norman Jay were already well established, but Sonique was a nobody when we started managing her, and we took her from there to where she has been. It was always really about showcasing our talent roster on the label. It was never really about making money, we just set out to put on a great party.
You mentioned new talent breaking. Who, in your eyes has been the most exciting talent prospect in the last 18 months of so, or indeed the history of Serious?
I'd say Sonique definitely so, if only for the fact that she was unknown when we first started looking after her. She was very raw, very fresh and we always knew she'd do very well as a DJ. She took clubland by storm within 12-18 months of her starting to DJ, which is great for us. I think that now it's very difficult to break new talent so to speak, as it is realistically now more about DJing/producing rather than just DJing. You've got to be multi-talented, and whilst a great producer doesn't make a great DJ, you can still feed off the fact that if you're a well known producer people will book you as a DJ regardless. The most talented DJ we've probably got at the moment is Eddie Halliwell, who's sort of broken into the scene over the last 18months. Even though Eddie's been DJing a while, he's only really broken through recently, so I guess he's kinda the freshest of the fresh.
How would you describe Serious as a brand?
To be quite honest, we've turned away from the direction taken by some of the bigger clubs, such as MOS, GK and GC. We don't consider ourselves a big brand name. We've tried to teeter on the edge somewhat, as the majority of us believe that once you become a brand you become commercial, and once you become commercial it's kind of like you're not setting any longevity as far as your name goes, personally speaking. Ministry of Sound for example, although it's very well known, the cooler end of the market, people who go out don't generally want to go to MOS. As far as we're concerned, we needed to step a fine line with building our name without going commercial. But saying that, the record label part of the company has gone in that direction, but that's slightly to do with market forces. At the end of the day, it's all very well being cool, but you need to sell records to make money.
How do you want to appear to the public then?
At the end of the day, I guess we just want to be known as people who throw a really good party. We're not the new this, or the new that. We just make sure that people have a good time.
