Nightclubbing: House of God

Birmingham’s love affair with grubby, countercultural music has long provided a charismatic alternative to the dominant sounds of the UK’s other major cities. The influence of Black Sabbath looms large in the dirtiest of heavy metal, Napalm Death took thrash to an ear-shredding extreme, Godflesh pioneered industrial and the brutal constructions of Regis, Female, Surgeon and the affiliated Downwards crew set a new benchmark for techno. Like all geographically-centred music phenomena, though, the concept of “Birmingham techno” carries far less weight for those involved, and if there is a club that has defiantly shunned a single streamlined style and po-faced presentation in the Midlands techno scene, it is House of God.

In the spirit of all the best parties, House of God started with no agenda other than to act as a space for a group of friends to gather and enjoy an experience that wasn’t on offer anywhere else. The dress code restrictions and handbag house of Birmingham clubbing in the early ’90s positively repelled the likes of pseudonymous organizer Chris HOG and founding residents Paul “Damage” Bailey, Neil “Sir Real” Spragg and Anthony “Surgeon” Child, and so they created an event with a devilish love for the challenging, ferocious, daft and macabre in music, production and atmosphere.

From humble beginnings at the university, House of God has been on a freewheeling ride through Birmingham nightclubs big and small ever since, taking in the Dance Factory, the Institute, the Q Club, the Rainbow Rooms, Subway City and the aptly named Satan’s Paradise. Along the way they’ve created a cult following – undoubtedly helped by a love of sickly humourous flyers, a welcoming attitude towards those who didn’t fit the mould of mainstream clubbing, and, of course, a cutting-edge music policy.

It would be impossible to talk about techno clubs in Birmingham without mentioning Atomic Jam, but where that monolithic event strived to pack out its nights with elite lineups, HOG instead placed the emphasis on the residents, and it continues to do so. However, in 25 years of parties they’ve invited a staggering array of guests into their strange and savage world, from hard house legend Tony De Vit to revered reggae selector DJ Derek, by way of techno titans such as Dave Clarke, James Ruskin, Joey Beltram and scores more besides.

With second, third and even fourth rooms dealing in everything from jungle to easy listening, and the notorious compére MC Zit espousing the sacred and profane over the proceedings, there’s a lot of ground to cover with this veritable institution. As such, we’ve called upon a spread of those caught up in the melee to paint a picture of House of God from the inside-out.

Roots

Surgeon

Neil [Sir Real] and I attended the same audiovisual design course at Sandwell College. We had mutual interest in Hawkwind, space rock bands and stuff like that. That time was really interesting. We were living in the Moseley, Balsall Heath area of Birmingham and there were so many different bands. It wasn’t like we all liked techno. It was just a weird collision of different groups of people and different styles of music.

Chris HOG

It started with myself, and Tony, Neil, and Paul [Damage], initially. At the university I ended up running the Punk & New Wave Society. It had been handed on to me by a guy called Dave Grindi who ran Third Eye, which was a seminal part of the alternative dance scene in Birmingham.

Sir Real

The Punk & New Wave Society essentially turned into House of God and Third Eye, which we also played for. We suddenly decided that the most punk and new wave thing in 1992 was actually electronic music. I remember being round Chris’s house and he was trying to think of a name for our party. I think we talked about it and said, “Well, what’s your favorite record then?” He’s a huge fan of DHS, “The House of God.”

Chris HOG

I did a gig with Tony and Neil and Paul, and we played techno and early trance. We did a few gigs at the university as House of God in January ’93. I think we did two or three that spring and then we took House of God to a city center club which became the Dance Factory. That’s how we started doing it as a proper nightclub.

Sir Real

House of God took the tougher end of the dance music spectrum and Third Eye took the slightly fluffier, slightly trancier side, but there was always masses of crossover. Obviously, because we only had so many records.

Chris HOG

There wasn’t a clear idea, but we knew we wanted to put on stuff with no dress restrictions, which was a big deal then because it was a city center club. I’m pretty certain we were the only dance music night that had no dress restrictions in the city.

Sir Real

You’d get crusties and punks and all these people coming out of the free party scene.

Surgeon

For us and the majority of the audience, it was an entry point to nightclubs, where previously they would have felt quite excluded. Of course there was a nightclub scene in Birmingham, but it wasn’t until Third Eye and House of God that a huge audience felt comfortable enough to come out clubbing. It was a lot edgier and wilder and freakier than stuff you generally hear in a nightclub. I think there were people who had a fantastic time even if they didn’t initially even like the music.

Residents

MC Zit

The whole scene that the residents came out of was from a very experimental underground music scene. The stuff they were playing wasn’t your basic techno. It’s got the word “techno” attached to it, but at the end of the day, it was experimental underground music. It was reminding me of bands I liked at the time, like Coil and Alien Sex Fiend.

Neil Landstrumm

It was the residents that made House of God. There was no doubt about it. The [guest] bookings were more just a peppering of something different on the night.

Terry Donovan

The guests are a part of the night but I don’t think they’re treated in the same way mentally by the club or the crowd. It would be very hard for a guest to come in and do a better job at House of God than Tony and Paul and Neil. They’re so different in the way that they play and they have their own followings within the crowd themselves.

Chris HOG

It’s primarily a residents-based club. I know techno clubs still do it, where they’ll put their guests on in order of who is the most famous, and they’ll play quite hard early on. We’ve always tried to have a warm-up, because it’s going to be so brutal later on. It just works better. Paul [Damage] especially played really tough stuff, putting out a huge collection of really hard-edge techno that nobody else had.

Paul Bailey

I used to go to Warp Records in Sheffield, and they had a great selection of imports. I’d go in and say, “Well, what’s the stuff that nobody likes?” Really hard, mind-bending stuff that they would sell. As well as R&S there were labels like Pod Communication and Industrial Strength.

Chris HOG

A few years ago I asked him [Paul] to play at the start, and I asked him what he was going to play, and he said he was going to play music that sounded like it’d been made by spiders. What are you going to do with that?

Elaine Edmundson

The nights are very well constructed at House of God. The lineup and the fact that it’s very often Paul Damage that finishes it off. He can get a crowd going at five in the morning. Neil Sir Real does some fantastic sets with some twisted stuff that’s very humorous.

Surgeon

I think there was really healthy competition between us. Not trying to outdo each other, but we really wanted to make House of God the best party and we’d really do everything we could to raise our game higher and higher. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s so residents-focused.

Paul Bailey

When Tony and I were both playing vinyl, there was quite a bit of crossover. The difference is probably that I chop things about a lot more than Tony does in terms of a DJing style, for sure, but his records are just as psychologically nasty as mine.

Nicky B

You can’t say any one House of God DJ only plays this, because you’re going to be in for a surprise. Yes, it’s based around techno, but it’s not always hard. It can be funky, it can be minimal. The residents all mix and match as to what room they’ll play in. Sir Real could be playing upstairs, Surgeon could be in the side room playing house.

Terry Donovan

A lot of House of God’s reputation is based on techno, but a lot of wonderful house music has been played earlier on in the night to make sure that by the time the techno gets played, it’s set in context and people aren’t numb to it. Nowadays Nicky B and Harvey [Lane] keep it really deep and dubby at the start of the night, and I generally take it from there and try and hand it off to whoever is going on after me, so it should be pretty firing by the time I’m finished if I’ve done a good job.

Chris HOG

Chris HOG

I program the main room. Always have done. I let the DJs get on with it. The most I’d be possibly saying is, “You’re playing too fast,” or “You’re playing too loud.”

Terry Donovan

I think Chris has been really good over the years about brutally managing the DJs to the point that the warm-up is treated so respectfully. If you go in early on in the evening and just try to bang it out, he wants nothing to do with you.

Paul Bailey

Chris treats everybody really well and he doesn’t take any nonsense. He can be a bit abrasive if you don’t know him, but he’s really a sweetheart. He just sees to it that things run properly. He doesn’t mince his words either. If he doesn’t like what you do, he’ll tell you, and that includes everybody. There’s no immunity from the wrath of Chris, even after 25 years of being a resident.

Surgeon

Chris deals with all the stress, that’s the deal. We just wander in at the last minute and play the records and take all the credit. It’s a great arrangement. He also brings his Black Sabbath album and, under pain of death, forces whoever’s playing to play that at the end of the night. We’re quite happy to do that.

Neil Landstrumm

I always remember the first time I went back to Chris’s house after the gig and he was just playing Black Sabbath all night.

Jerome Hill

I’ve got a lot of love and a lot of respect for Chris. He’s a proper punk with it, and I think it’s lacking a lot these days.

Paul Bailey

The only problem with Chris is when he’s trying to grab your arse every time you’re in the DJ booth. You’re going to get goosed at some point while you’re playing. It’s a sign of approval. If he likes you, he’ll do that to you. The guests won’t escape either.

Jerome Hill

I remember standing in the corner of the dancefloor to the left of the DJ booth and I could smell cigarettes. I thought, “God, that’s cheeky, someone’s having a fag inside and the bouncers are going to be all in there with their torches trying to find out who’s smoking.” I looked around and I just saw Chris standing against the wall with his hands behind his back, looking really covert, and then he took one of his hands out, took a quick pull and then put it back behind his back. I was like, “You naughty boy, in your own club.”

The Imagery

Surgeon

I maintain the whole of House of God is based around Chris’s Catholic guilt.

Sir Real

Subconsciously, that would have to come out somewhere. We had a flyer of a priest blessing a small child, shall we say, which had unfortunate connotations in the way that it looked. It got pulled up by the local Birmingham newspaper as sick and tawdry promotion. They got local religious figures speaking out against it.

Chris HOG

The flyers all stem from a love of horror artwork. We’re fans of the Butthole Surfers. Bands like the Dead Kennedys. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The night’s called House of God. I might have named it after a record, but once it’s called House of God, you go down that route and it’s there for you, isn’t it? All the Jesus references.

Surgeon

I think it’s the dark, absurd Midlands sense of humor. You can trace that in a lot of Black Sabbath. People from outside might go, “Oh, that’s really dark.” Really what lies behind it is a ridiculous, self-deprecating sense of humor.

Chris HOG

Some of the flyers we did were pretty horrendous, but they made me laugh when I did them.

Sir Real

Religious iconography and abuse of such will be insulting to some people. It’s almost trying to subvert that and say, from our opinion, actually there shouldn’t be any holy cows, musically as well as visually.

Neil Landstrumm

At that point, you’ve got to remember, it was the years of super clubs and that quite glitzy end of dance music. HOG was very scuzzy and dirty and homemade. The decorations are distorted baby’s heads. It gets slightly crusty-ish, but there’s a metal element, and the one thing you’ve got to stress is that everybody was welcome. That is so at odds with say, your Berghains of today, where if you don’t look right, you’re not getting in.

Chris HOG

We had no dress restrictions, we didn’t have anybody controlling the door, but if you’re given a flyer and you think it’s really disgusting, then it’s not really going to be your place, is it? It’s an automatic filter.

The Dance Factory

Surgeon

The Digbeth Institute had a basement called the Dance Factory, which could open separately and had an entrance at the rear.

Sir Real

Appropriately enough.

Surgeon

I think the security at the Dance Factory liked doing stuff at our events because they didn’t have to deal with any violence. They could just stand on the door and let us carry on. I remember there was a night when we saw a guy in there with a bucket bong. We were like, “What the hell are you doing? How did you get that in here?” He said, “Oh, I brought it in a backpack.”

Chris HOG

It was a basement box room, with a steel balcony around it. It was extremely basic. It was derelict, really. It was one room, and had a tiny thin room at the back where they used to sell microwave chips and burgers which nobody would ever eat.

Surgeon

Our first year, it went okay. It was relatively sparse.

Chris HOG

The first one at the university had a few hundred people, but at university people would turn up for it ’cause it was early ’90s. When we started doing the Dance Factory, I remember there being, like, 50 people there. I think we did it fortnightly through that autumn.

Surgeon

Then we had our first birthday and we booked Lewis Keogh, who was the Orb’s DJ. I remember being sat in the back of the Dance Factory eating a terrible burger with him early on in the night. Then we went out to the main room and it was packed. It had never been so full. We just were like, “What do we do? Oh no!”

Terry Donovan

I was at college in Birmingham in the early ’90s, and ended up playing a rave with Paul Damage, and he then convinced Chris to invite me to be a guest at the first birthday. They had a white muslin screen around the stage which limited the visibility both ways between the DJ and the crowd, and it made for this weird kind of optical effect. It was a strange decision, but it worked amazingly and neither side could really see too much of each other. I remember it being blisteringly good.

Paul Bailey

Terry was just blown away by the sheer madness of it. Behind the mesh screen it was an island of calm, and all you could see was shadows. Out there, it was absolute chaos.

Terry Donovan

There was so much humidity in there, by the end of it the whole place was like one giant puddle. I remember thinking, if you let any of your clothing touch the ground you can write that off, but it had this energy. I don’t think I’ve ever played anywhere where the crowd was so close to you.

Paul Bailey

There was no hiding place in there. You were in the club, there was nowhere to go and relax, that was it.

Surgeon

The first ever live guest was Hot Germ Meat, which was Tim Wright, and he had this weird band set-up. It involved a trombone.

Tim Wright

The first thing I saw when I arrived in Birmingham for my first time playing at House of God were some posters that an ex-girlfriend had put on various bus stops and the door of the club saying what a wanker I was. That put me on edge. I had some synths, we had a guitar player and we were running some of the backing tracks on eight-track reel-to-reel tape. There was always an experimental edge to what they did at House of God, so it fitted in really well with the ex-hippies or the more experimental parts of the audience.

Terry Donovan

I remember the first time I saw Karl [O’Connor], Regis, play at the Institute. You could just tell there was a special bloke in the room. He had a weird kind of energy to him that people just loved. He had wonderful posture while he was DJing and the sound was just so looped but evil, and behind him was an enormous church organ. It couldn’t have been more Biblical imagery. It was mind-blowing.

MC Zit

Chris HOG

I think the first time Zit got on the mic was that Christmas party.

MC Zit

Christmas Eve, 1990-whatever. The clock struck 12. Up I popped, underlit in glorious red, dressed as the devil and wearing just a pair of Rupert the Bear trousers, my whole body painted red with a pair of horns, and sang “Happy Birthday” to Jesus.

Chris HOG

He used to do fire breathing inside the fucking club. There’s a photograph of him doing fire breathing inside the Dance Factory, straight up towards a massive paper light fitting. It’s just terrifying, a public liability nightmare. I can’t believe we used to do Christmas Eve raves. Jesus, they were proper mayhem.

Elaine Edmundson

Normally MCs can be a bit of a pain but certainly not Zitty. He’s a real part of the whole atmosphere. He’s been a constant feature extolling people to blasphemous acts.

MC Zit

Never afraid to open my mouth, me. I used to stand at the back and shout “Not weird enough!” at the DJs, just to gee them up. There’s a culture in Birmingham of ribbing each other.

Surgeon

At the beginning, he wasn’t directly involved with the organization. He would just come and shout and be obnoxious, goading us and pushing us further. He was just an abusive customer really, wasn’t he?

Sir Real

Not much has changed, to be fair.

Surgeon

He’s just moved into the DJ booth instead of outside the DJ booth. He essentially does the same thing.

Sir Real

MC Cunty Bollocks I think is his original title, actually.

Surgeon

That’s his pedigree name.

MC Zit

I was in various bands around Birmingham at the time, such as Bagman, and I was part of the Punk & New Wave Society before. I think I came along to the second House of God. Then by the third or fourth one, I got to the Dance Factory, and…I was the frontman from the band, so I became the natural person to hold the mic and say, “Good evening, House of God sinners.”

Terry Donovan

Zit is one of those characters that has multi-layers to him. He has a very important production role, but his ability to make people uncomfortable both in the crowd and in the DJ booth just keeps everybody on their edge. I’ve always liked it. I know people that absolutely fucking hate it from a DJ perspective, but I won’t tell you who they are.

MC Zit

A couple of the DJs will look at me like, “Will you please shut up just now? I’m doing this really complex mix.” One or two guests are a bit taken aback, because they’re expecting…I don’t know what they’re expecting. Chuck D? It’s not happening.

I’ve got nothing to say. I’m just shouting at people. A bit of wit here and there. There’s nights where I say nothing on the mic. There’s nights where I just introduce people. There are the nights when you can’t get the mic off me.

Paul Bailey

He’s just fantastic. He’s a real larger than life person, and he knits the whole thing together. He’s there doing the lights, and then he just goes on the microphone. I’ve got a tape of him singing “Fly Me To The Moon” over some Jeff Mills thing that Tony’s playing. It’s absolutely nuts.

Chris HOG

Fairly recently, there was a time where Tony was playing, and Zit was singing “Children Of The Grave” by Sabbath over the top of the set. Beautiful moment.

Beyond the Main Room

Chris HOG

When we first started, we only had a tiny second room, and we had these guys called Peacekeeper Soundsystem run that for years. It had this stinking kitchen at the one end of it, so rather than a chill-out room we called it a grill-out room. They’d also play industrial stuff. They’d play Meat Beat Manifesto and Front 242, and bits like that.

Surgeon

Reggae, hip-hop, industrial and early drum & bass stuff. There was as much emphasis on that in the night. It wasn’t just a back room that was stuck away out of the way somewhere.

Nik Wells

I would play in the back room for Peacekeeper. Then when jungle first came around, it was just a natural progression to start sorting out the second room for Chris. We had a good rotation of people. They would always get in their lot, Scampi and Bigfoot and others.

Sir Real

It was an important part of the whole thing and brought the whole audience.

Nik Wells

When we started having jungle and drum & bass in the second room, it was what a lot of people were after. It was a bit difficult for some people to go to the more dedicated jungle nights up here because they were quite moody. One of the things that people liked was the relaxed atmosphere at House of God, without having to look over their shoulders.

Nick Sales

There was always interesting stuff going on in the side rooms. Crusty punk and metal bands playing live.

Chris HOG

We’ve got another room that’s run by Joe Robertson and Steve O. Every now and then I might say, “Can you put so and so in there?” Tony’s played house sets in there before.

Nick Sales

In another room there’d be sometimes the guys from Klub Katusi playing fucked-up easy listening.

Nik Wells

People used to come just for the easy listening room. If you weren’t into the breakbeat or the drum & bass, then you had this room that was set up like somebody’s gran’s living room, with cheesy painting on the wall and oil projectors, playing this nice easy listening ’60s vibe.

The Visuals

Terry Donovan

I’ve never played at a place where the lighting guys are held in such a high regard. They definitely felt like part of a crew and part of the reason why it works. They’re strangely humble and they’re not as explored, but their ability to change the vibe in the room is without question for me.

Chris HOG

A big influence for lighting was Catweasel. He was all about color. Just the basics. Coloured strobes. Nothing flashy, but stuff that works. It matters. It adds to the sound. We’ve had some really good lighting set-ups over the years. Also trying to put horrible backdrops in, but getting people to do nice stuff for us as well.

MC Zit

We put massive lighting rigs in. I know our lighting rigs were bigger than anybody else. I saw the Cream set up. You know, the biggies. We had far more lights. We just spent all of the budgets on the most current lights.

Sir Real

I think we were trying to put an angle on it that was not stereotypical rave. It was very easy to fill a club with lasers and lights and blah, blah, blah. We’d always have a good light rig at the Q Club, but then it was also trying to make something happen there which people wouldn’t expect.

Surgeon

The baby head with the moving jaw was very Spinal Tap, wasn’t it?

The Q Club

Chris HOG

The Q Club had some really big all-nighters. Atomic Jam was the big techno gig in the Midlands. To go and compete with them booking three or four international names every gig, I would have to drop residents who are my friends, and I wasn’t willing to do it. We did a residents-only night at the Q Club, and that’s probably one of the things I was happiest with. I didn’t know if it would work. Most of the big nights at the Q Club were guest fests. We sold out. Tony was a name, but he wasn’t the name he is now.

Paul Bailey

I didn’t like the Q Club as much as the Institute and the Dance Factory. Mainly you were DJing up in the gods and you were quite detached. You had the lights on your face so you couldn’t really see what’s going on.

MC Zit

Our friends were a hundred yards away on the dancefloor.

Neil Landstrumm

I remember playing the Q Club. After I played, somebody nicked my TR-606 from the stage, which is the only time that’s ever happened to me in 22 years. Back at Chris’s house afterwards, we were just hanging out. Neil and somebody else came back from a party and said that some guy had been trying to sell this TR-606 round some of the afterparties and the House of God mafia had retrieved it for me, for which I was eternally grateful.

Terry Donovan

I remember a night in the Q Club we had Claude Young coming to play, who was renowned for his turntable skills. Paul Damage just sat in the corner like a boxer waiting to go and fight. It was very clear that he just wanted to just blow Claude Young off the decks, technically, and later in the night, he just went for it. It was a fantastic moment, I’ll never forget it. It was like, “Nah mate, I’m the resident here.” It was superb, watching two really talented dudes go at it.

Nik Wells

For me, I think the Q Club nights were some of the best ones, just because we had the space and the free reign to really go to town on it and exercise our stupid ideas. The sheer size of the place really gave the opportunity to push the boat out in terms of production.

Chris HOG

My experience of running stuff there wasn’t good. They were really difficult to deal with, and I saw the people who owned it and the security treat the crowd too badly too many times for me to want to do stuff there. We also weren’t overselling it. A lot of the other nights who did stuff there would just ram it. People who went there definitely will remember it being too full, and that’s because of the promoters. I hate it. It’s greedy, and we didn’t do that.

Surgeon

I feel that House of God transferred really well to larger events. Chris would largely leave the music up to us, but he would be overseeing the lights and the production. There was this performance art group called Bliss Body and they did a lot of performance at the Q Club.

Bliss Body

Nick Sales

Bliss Body were a free-floating collective of lots of different people with different niche interests. I was into noisy music and pyrotechnics. The Q Club was a grimy, gothic labyrinth and it lent itself to having lots of different interesting things in little rooms. We’d put sound and light installations in here, there and everywhere. I think what people remember most was the nihilist assault group interventions that we used to do when people were at their most fragile in the wee small hours of the morning.

Chris HOG

The brains behind Bliss Body was a guy called Mark Anderson who was an amazing performance artist. Nick Sales was involved in the fireworks. We used to burn teddy bears and melt dolls, and make stuff out of them for really shit decorations, but the Bliss Body guys fired them at the crowd…on fucking fire.

Nick Sales

I’d made a load of cannons out of old propane cylinders. We put them along the front of the stage in front of the DJ box and a guy with a flaming torch came on and touched off these cannons to fire slightly charred, smouldering teddy bears into the audience.

Chris HOG

At one point Nick decided he was going to fire rockets across the venue, but he hadn’t glued them on properly. We had Tony De Vit on, who was a lovely man. He gets brought up to the decks with Terry carrying his records, and he stands by the decks, and this one rocket came off and hit this woman who had a fur bikini on right in the chest, then exploded. She was alright. The other one fucking banged off the decks. The poor bloke then had to play. [Bliss Body] were brilliant, but they were completely unhinged.

Nick Sales

We had a piece which we used to call speaker heads. You were clad head to toe in a black drape, and we repurposed these old horn PA speakers that you wore on a backpack rig that became your head. You could wander around projecting horrible sound at people with these mobile walking speakers. You had to have a minder with you to help you get through doorways because you were about eight feet tall when you were wearing them. Nearly as tall as Neil Sir Real, but not quite.

Chris HOG

I loved that night when they flooded the dancefloor with dry ice, up to about eye height, then they appeared from the four corners of the dancefloor with giant galleons on the top of their heads.

Nick Sales

The boats were just about large enough so you could hold them above your head, so they could kind of sail in through the crowd like the crowd were the waves. Everybody thought it was really beautiful, but the boats were actually full of rolls of firecrackers that we then let off in the middle of the dancefloor. It was a mix of pretty moments and rampant pyrotechnic abuse, really.

Surgeon

My absolute favorite one was when they had these huge inflated white wedding dresses on stage, but with no hands and no head. They would be lit up from inside, dancing around and everyone’s like, “Oh, isn’t this nice.” Then they started spraying this fake blood inside. I will never forget the collective feeling of “eugh” from the crowd.

Nick Sales

It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, because people are pretty fragile if you catch them at the right time, but it was intended to be done with fairly black Brummie humor rather than anything particularly malicious. It did freak a lot of the people out.

Satan’s Paradise

Elaine Edmundson

One of the strangest venues was Satan’s Paradise, which would have been about 1998 to 1999, and that was a very dingy club. It was very comical. There were quite a few regulars in there. I remember a few old crones who were like witches. We didn’t know if we were hallucinating or not.

Chris HOG

We ran out of venues. It was a horrible place. It was in Balsall Heath. I think we did four or five gigs there. It was a little dirty shithole social club. Really dodgy people in there. Imagine a caravan site clubhouse, mid-’60s, but the back room is painted black. That was Satan’s Paradise.

MC Zit

It worked wonderfully for HOG, because it was such a miserable place that you could get away with murder. You could probably actually get away with murder.

Tim Wright

Satan’s Paradise was mayhem. I remember feeling very uneasy. It was probably the most intense House of God I played. It felt like crowd control or something. People just going apeshit to the point of it being a bit worrying. I just remember it being very dark and very intense and huge waves of energy coming from the crowd.

Chris HOG

We moved to the Custard Factory for a bit. We’ve done most venues in Birmingham.

Neil Landstrumm

Subway City was the venue that I liked the most because it was quite a seedy sort of venue underneath the arches, and it was a gay club.

Chris HOG

The gay clubs just didn’t want straight nights in, full stop. They were like, “Why would we rent it to you?” We paid through the nose. At that time we were playing very hard stuff. I thought the crowd at House of God was getting quite laddy, and I just saw moving to Subway as a way of addressing that. We had a chill out room which was a dark room. I loved that room. It was a maze, with glory holes and whipping horses in shipping containers. In the bar, they had this video of firemen fisting each other. I’m more than happy with that. We were playing a lovely chill-out cocktail, made by me, which was Coil, Black Sabbath and Johnny Cash.

Surgeon

These confused ravers would be in the dark room going, “This room’s really weird.” We went there in the day before the club was open and Chris found a real prosthetic ear. It wasn’t a fake comedy ear – it had an ear piercing. Someone literally lost their ear in that dark room.

Terry Donovan

I think for some people, Subway City is the epicenter of the madness. I’m nostalgic for the Dance Factory but I love playing there now.

Paula Temple

House of God had a reputation as this raw, unapologetic kind of space. Then when I played there at Subway City, it was more raw than I imagined, in a really fun way. You just felt really free and you could go to the extreme and they loved it. It was one of the best nights I’ve had in England in terms of the atmosphere of a night, but also how they treated me, how they took care of me. My girlfriend at the time got so excited with the energy while I was playing, she took her top off. She’s bouncing around topless and then a bunch of other people started taking their tops off.

HOG in the Modern Day

Tim Wright

Chris has said that there were times when he wanted to chuck the towel in, because there was no new blood in the audience or whatever.

MC Zit

We’ve been going for what, 23 years now? You gee each other up, don’t you? Not all of you are going to hit a low at the same time, so at the most half of you, maybe, are going, “Can we be bothered?” The other half will go, “Come on, it’ll be sound. Look at the one we did last time.” It has come close to being all packed in and thrown away a couple of times, but it never has, because we just pull it back.

Neil Landstrumm

Life gets in the way and people have careers and children and want to do other things.

Chris HOG

When we came back from a little break, Subway had reopened as the Tunnel Club. Finding the right venue is always the problem, and Subway works for us, but we only do two gigs a year.

There’s people involved who really know their shit in techno, and I’m not that. I’m not keyed into the scene. I program it, and if I listen to stuff, I’ll know whether I think it works. Five or six years ago one of the residents, Harvey Lane, who runs Veto Records, was saying we should book people like Perc and Truss. The kind of stuff they’re playing works exactly for us. Industrial hard stuff is what we do.

MC Zit

Jamie Blawan gets it. He just slotted straight in. He was loving it. He DJed, and then went out on the dancefloor and he partied and everyone just welcomed him.

Paul Bailey

The last two or three years there are loads of obviously much younger people coming to the House, so it’s not just a nostalgia night. They seem like the same sort of people as well, which is brilliant because it means it’s still working.

Elaine Edmundson

The last one we went to at Halloween [2016], we got there about half 11 and it was the most packed that we’d seen it for some time. Lots of younger people joining in and absolutely going for it right from the start. It reminded us very much of the vibe you got in the ’90s because it was packed and a lot of younger people were joining in as well. Whole families came along!

Chris HOG

Loads of the people involved have got kids. Their kids have turned up. That just started happening in the last couple of years. That’s just fucking weird. I don’t know what to say about that. It’s going to happen though, isn’t it?

Terry Donovan

The last time I played there in October [2016] was one of the best atmospheres I could remember. I sat in the booth while Nicky played and the energy in the room was amazing by 11 PM. The fact that you’re still capable of getting nights like that after however many years just tells you everything you need to know. People are discovering it all the time.

Sir Real

Doing it every week, now it would be Thursday before I’d be ready to go out again, really. Obviously we were younger and all that, but it’s like we entered some kind of bubble and just stayed there for years. Then you kind of come out the other side and realize you’ve spent half your life doing this thing.

Paul Bailey

The energy the crowd has is absolutely fantastic at House of God. I’ve been in some perfectly good events where people don’t get that enthusiastic, they don’t feel like it’s theirs, whereas people think the House of God is theirs. They’ve grown up with it.

Chris HOG

The crowd are massively important to what we do. I think people who have come really want to come to it. Most people will know somebody. There were tons of people at the last House of God who had never been there before, and I know that by the end of the night, most of them will have met somebody who they don’t know. There’s a real feeling of people looking after each other, and that’s just built up over the years.

Terry Donovan

There’s always been a desire to make the night much more varied than you would expect at a traditional techno night. It’s definitely the techno club where you can take the most risks. I think one of the things that philosophically Chris and everybody’s bought off on is an equal value between the DJs, the lighting and production people and the crowd. If you can view all of those people involved in that equally, you get a much better understanding of why the night works well.

Surgeon

It’s never been a pure techno club. It’s always been a weird collision of styles. I think that’s one of the fundamentally important parts of the club that’s often overlooked. People mistakenly think it’s a pure techno club and it couldn’t be further from that, really.

Terry Donovan

Why would you come to House of God and play a bunch of records made by Tony and Karl if they’re already playing? It’s never been the case where you’d walk in and hear Downwards, Dynamic Tension, etc…for eight hours straight, but when you would hear it, it would be done beautifully.

Jerome Hill

You always build up preconceptions about a night, and when you get there, if it’s a good gig, it’s always just a big party that everyone’s having loads of fun at and you just play what you want to play, which of course it was. I remember playing “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen at some point during my set, and Chris told me later he asked me back because he was so happy that I played that record.

Nik Wells

We’re very much into celebrating Birmingham and its heritage of heavy music, and it’s one of them where you just don’t take yourself so seriously. That’s the downfall of far too many clubs, being all po-faced and serious.

MC Zit

It’s a punk attitude, in a way. It seems almost antisocial, but actually it’s extremely social. It’s extremely caring. There’s no misogyny, there’s no bullshit.

Sir Real

I say freaks flock together, and I think this is definitely true of what happened with House of God.