The New Niche, 4am Opening Night. Club Vibe is now official Club Niche

Entering Niche is, if nothing else, a thorough experience. You will be familiar with the usual club experience of large bouncers whose main power is the denial of all logic. You have also probably experienced the painfully bureaucratic systems employed at airports where you must prove yourself incapable of carrying out dubious threats. Niche combines these into one procedure and declares itself the safest club in Sheffield as a result. 

Let’s start by trying to get inside. As you enter from the street, you must manoeuvre around a police van with a camera monitoring the entrance of the club. Then you are separated from your date as men must queue on the left of the entrance, and women on the right. There’s a bouncer of each sex on the door who frisks each customer and searches through their clothes, pockets and bags. Next you must pass through a metal detector, and as a final measure look into a camera that is linked directly to the police. Everyone is seen, recorded and noted. At this point, still having not entered the club, you will be in a metal barred cell that can be quickly secured should anything turn bad. 

At its opening event, the police effectively shut down the area surrounding the club, halting traffic on the roads and sweeping the streets in cars and on foot, as well as searching people on the street. The atmosphere outside felt hazy and ominous with a decided feeling of impending incident. A deranged mid-night carnival, between a music festival and local football derby, where men in t shirts and women in scant dresses move oblivious of the cold, amongst police officers in high visibility yellow jackets, their bobby hats sticking out above the throngs of punters. 

Does visible security make you feel safer, or more on edge? With great security comes a increase in implicit risk, whilst also assuring a level of enjoyment. So, what control do you have to cede in order to retain a good experience? If you imagine a graph of pleasure against control, clubbing is usually high pleasure, low to medium in security. In contrast, Niche has created, and sustains, a particularly warped version of this equation.

The logic is sound. Safety is assured. With this level of security, you’d surely never think of bringing guns or knives inside. It’s all a very visible pillow of protection, but it’s not entirely clear what is being protected. Whilst Niche is by no means an illegal or criminal establishment, it’s not a neutral social space such as a school or airport. It is, in fact, an underground club which operates within strict confines. One of the most unusual and innovative music scenes in the UK is also, it seems, one of the most tightly controlled. Independent but extremely pragmatic.

The cage and alarm system at the Niche entrance.

One of a few cameras at the entrance.

Niche on Charter Square, Sheffield opened in November 2009 as the reincarnation of its former premises on Sidney Street. Opened in 1995 as a house club, by 1997 Niche had moved with the times and was known for its speed garage. Over the next few years, this sub-genre developed into Bassline - house/garage with heavy 4/4 beat underneath. Bassline and Niche became interchangeable terms, a fact that has lead to both success and problems.

During this period, Niche gained a certain degree of notoriety. There was at least one murder outside the club, and a reported shooting, not to mention the usual allegations of drug dealing. Officially, the police were frustrated with what they saw as the openly criminal atmosphere of the club. Bassline was described as the only music scene in Sheffield that attracted serious violent crime, and it was stated that organised criminal gangs were travelling from other cities because of Niche.

On November 27 2005 Niche on Sidney Street was raided by 300 police officers in the middle of a club night. 12 people were arrested for a range of drug related offences. The operation, which was described by Its owner, Steve Baxendale as a ‘military’ procedure was less than sensitively named “Operation Repatriation.” No charges were brought against anyone involved in the running of the club.

After its closure, Niche became the club that must not be named. Steve Baxendale was told by the police not to use the name Niche, book the same DJs, or even play the same music. It’s clear that in the mind of the police, there was an explicit association between the music itself - apparently down to its audible characteristics - and criminal activity. And so, South Yorkshire police began a battle not against people or particular establishments, but a genre of music. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. This raises the interesting proposition that someone somewhere in the police had a definition of bassline and was prepared to enforce it, reminiscent of the deliberately non-repetitive Anti EP by Autechre, which advised DJs to “have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such theoretical or ontological depths were never plumbed by either side. When Club Vibe opened in 2006, owned by Baxendale, the old Niche DJs were brought back under fake names. JR, a Resident DJ and promoter at Niche, remembers - “When we first opened, Jamie Duggan was headlining, so they just named him something different, like Jamie Smith and the police didn’t catch on to it and I really don’t know how. All the punters knew who they were.” Officially, the music being played at that time was not Bassline, though whether this is true very much depends on who you ask. The club’s relaunch is described as a full return to the Niche of old, following the lean years in which proper 4×4 Bassline was prohibited, although in reality this return has been a slow, pragmatic process. The Niche name first returned to Sheffield in 2008, and has been used every month for a night at Vibe. “Steve’s rapport with the police has built and built, and now they can use the name again” says JR. It seems that underlying the progress of Niche, and Bassline music itself, is a shrewd business mind.

Niche before it was Niche

The Original Niche

The infamous Niche#mce_temp_url#

The new club is vast, containing three large rooms with a capacity of around 1500. At its centre is a small DJ booth which is completely caged in. This was originally put in place as the result of flying bottles, but is now firmly part of the atmosphere. DJs are appreciated with relentless banging on the cage from the crowd. The interior is a mix of vaguely classy furniture at one side, and all the utilitarian fittings required to accommodate so many people. The desired look, according to JR, is “urban,” and when we look around the finishing touches are being put to the fake ducts suspended from the ceiling of the new extension. On top of all this are all the brand embellishments around the club - an inexplicable Roman motif, which has apparently been toned down in comparison to the old club, which featured a whole variety of marble effect classical columns, mouldings, tiles and wall reliefs of various emperors. “Steve’s idea” according to JR.

In addition to its security staff, the club employs a team of spotters at strategic points inside the club. These staff work to alert other security members of possible trouble through a visible warning system throughout the club. Buttons are connected to a set of lights displayed all around the club. This refreshingly analogue system alerts bouncers in the club that there is trouble brewing, and where it is. 

But for a club with such high security and door charges upwards of £10, the place is packed at least two nights a week. With an average bar spend near £40 per punter and a capacity of 1,400, it only takes a little bit of maths to see that this place rakes it in. When I asked about the clientele JR explained: “It attracts the same clientele as Sidney street, but they’re better behaved now. The bigger the chain, the bigger the person. You can see why a lot of people don’t like coming here.” The most popular drinks are whisky, brandy and champagne. “We sell load of bottles of champagne a night, and it’s only cheap horrible stuff. If they’ve got a chain on, a bottle of Moet in their hand they think they’re great.” 

When asked about the security and safety, JR never seemed to flinch. “The atmosphere in the club is strange if you’ve never been, there’s a lot of different cultures and a lot of them don’t mix, but they’re all all right with each other… It’s weird how they find their own place. There is the odd incident that we don’t enjoy of course. But there’s hardly any trouble, we get maybe one fight a week, like a normal club.” JR was keen to deliver the message that Niche had moved on and that its dubious reputation should be left to history. “It’s the safest club in Sheffield. It’s still got a big stigma attached to it, a lot of young people won’t touch it.” Despite this reputation, he boasts that “people travel to come here, it’s the centre for bassline music. Probably the second biggest crowd is people from the Midlands, Birmingham, Wolverhampton.” He concludes, “It’s got its own followers, its own scene. If you walk in here on a Friday or Saturday night, you won’t see anybody pissed or stumbling about. You’ll get the odd one at 4am whose had to much, but that is it. If you go to Embrace, ninety percent of people will be pissed, they go there to get drunk and pull. They come here because it’s a community. They come to Niche because it’s Niche. They wanna be seen in this place, here.”

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What is perhaps most interesting about Niche and Bassline is its economics. It’s easy to link the underlying circumstances of production to the surface appearance of the product; a cheap Marxist analogy about the industrial, productive city. We could talk about the spaces, the violence, the city itself and intractable elements of the character of Bassline. But this isn’t really the case. Niche is an amazing amalgamation of bedroom and boardroom, a huge local corporate beast that turns over millions of pounds. Whilst happily described as an underground club, Niche is acutely aware of its status as a national brand.

In the past two years, Bassline has gained widespread appreciated through its releases on Ministry of Sound, and other acts making popular records. The Niche compilations sell over 100,000 copies, further linking the name of the club to the music itself. In addition to this, the club has in effect a monopoly on the music through the way that it controls the main DJs. All are contracted to the club, and rarely play anywhere else in the area. As Bassline has a particularly localised following, Niche remains the centre of gravity.