For many of the students, creatives and musical misfits bounding around London from 1997 to 2007, life revolved around Monday night. Each week a bash called Trash was a siren call for the indie glitterati (or just anyone who read the Face), a disco that defined the era’s promiscuous relationship with guitar and dance music. Its transgressive mix spanned angular indie to electro and post-punk, no wave to art-school garage-rock and practically any band boasting a bowl cut. LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs played their first UK shows on its tiny stage. Amy Winehouse was a regular. For a decade, London’s HR departments must have wondered why they had so many sick notes on Tuesday mornings.

“People still come up to me and talk about how special a time it was for them, and how nothing filled that gap that it left,” says Erol Alkan, Trash’s linchpin and now a successful DJ, producer and remixer. He started the club as an antidote to the capital’s staid post-Britpop parties – nights that were, according to Bloc Party guitarist and Trash devotee Russell Lissack, “strictly guitar music and often fairly retro, quite generic”.

Lissack, who met his wife on its dancefloor, says Trash’s rallying cry against indie tribalism is what made it magical. “If you went to an indie club in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d hear the same music everywhere, whereas at Trash you’d hear cool guitar music but also a lot of electronic and bootleg mash-ups. The DJs would be actually mixing, which most traditional indie DJs weren’t doing at the time. You could hear anything there and it didn’t sound out of place.”



Trash quickly became renowned for Alkan’s “mash-up” style, where Death from Above 1979 might follow David Bowie or Daft Punk. He found kindred spirits in Belgian producers 2ManyDJs, AKA the Dewaele brothers, who played at the club more times than any other act. “To me, having the Stooges and Salt-N-Pepa on at the same time, that was Trash,” says David Dewaele. That kind of musical dilettantism, he believes, “became a terrible sport afterwards” – too crude and perhaps too popular – but at the time it was groundbreaking, a maverick approach to uniting music by vibe rather than genre. It feels a million miles away from the DJ sets of today.

“Everything is slightly segregated again,” says Dewaele. “Pop music has become this thing, house music has become that thing, even though people listen to music very differently to the way they would have in 1997. What Trash musically meant to me was: the perfect celebration of eclectic taste.”

Trash was also where you could dance to new alternative anthems before anyone else. “I heard House of Jealous Lovers by the Rapture for the first time. It was messy!” says Peaches, excitedly emailing her Trash memories . Band managers would often hand-deliver fresh pressings to Alkan on the night – the Verve gave him the first play of Bittersweet Symphony – as Trash became a tastemaker ahead of any music mag or radio station. “I remember being on guestlist duties the night the Strokes came down, just after their debut single came out,” says Jodie Banaszkiewicz, a music PR who used to work the door. “It was the first time they’d ever heard their music in a club.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Erol Alkan, Stephen Dewaele and David Dewaele at Razzmatazz, Barcelona, in 2014. Photograph: Xavi Torrent/Redferns via Getty Images

Another New York band who’d barely experienced anything like it before was LCD Soundsystem. They played Trash in 2002, the second of two London gigs, as Losing My Edge’s punk-funk blitz was capturing clubgoers’ hearts. “The first [UK] show we did was in a hotel and it was packed, but I got the feeling that there were a lot of people there for reasons besides us,” says LCD’s Nancy Whang. “But at Trash, everybody knew who we were. It felt like a punk show, a little bit feral. There were no barricades, people were right up the front in our faces. We were impressed by how excited people were. And also, because of what Trash was, it was exciting to meet people like us.”

Trash was unique. “Coming from Belgium, indie clubs were a weird concept – clubs were where people danced to techno or house or drum’n’bass,” says Dewaele. “We had student nights but people wouldn’t go there to dance, it wasn’t like what we saw Erol was doing.” And it wasn’t only that Trash was playing scruffy beats – at its original home of Plastic People on New Oxford Street, then the Annexe in Soho and finally at world-class electronic music club the End, it was playing them on a pristine Thunder Ridge sound system. “It was completely, completely unheard of to have that kind of music played in a club like the End,” says Alkan. “It had never happened before.”

Like any fashionable party, Trash had its fair share of celebrity attendees, with A-listers mingling with whichever band had been on NME’s cover that week. The first time 2ManyDJs stepped up to Trash’s turntables, they had a surprise visitor. “We played Ace of Spades by Motörhead – a 12in that both Erol and us had in our bags, which was quite unusual,” recalls Dewaele. “Then Lemmy turned up to the DJ booth and gave us the horns hand sign, and left. We didn’t even know he was there, neither did Erol!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clubbers at Trash at the End in 2001. Photograph: Dave Swindells

Grace Jones, ever the arbiter of superb party taste, also made it to one – “perhaps the only person who’d been to Studio54, Paradise Garage and Trash,” says Rory Phillips, one of Trash’s resident DJ squad alongside Alkan, James Dickie, the Lovely Jonjo and the late Mavs. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to mention those clubs in the same breath: Trash may not be as internationally renowned or incessantly eulogised as its 1970s New York equivalents but it had a similar DNA of progressive dance music sewn together by resident DJs – and people who made a proper effort to dress for it.

As with those legendary parties across the Atlantic, the real stars of the show were the partygoers themselves. The regulars were dubbed Trash Kids, who dressed up to get past the guardians of the guestlist. (Recently, a club night sprung up in Camden called Turned Away from Trash – a testament to its infamous entry policy.) As the NME journalist Leonie Cooper wrote in a 2007 appreciation, “Work suits and casual clothes were turned away, while vintage fashion was in”. Outfits ranged from neckerchief and 70s band T-shirts in the early days to, later, those gold lamé leggings that no one except lead singers could actually pull off. But often the best outfits were purposefully anti-effort. “If you stood out, that helped the most,” says Nova Dando, a creative director who has worked with many a Trash-era musician. “I once went in my pyjamas, and we’d wear clothes we’d just made while getting ready to go out.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peaches Performs at Trash at the End, in 2001. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

At the turn of the millennium, a new sound dovetailed with Trash’s aesthetic: electroclash. As a young girl growing up in the Hampshire suburbs, I had read about Trash in Glamour magazine, of all places, in an article about the genre’s definitive artists: Peaches, Chicks on Speed and Fisherspooner. They were clashing punk and pubic hair and deadpan vocals with brash electronic beats. For Alkan and co it had a lot of decks appeal – and one track in particular changed everything. “Trash was predominantly guitar music up until around 2000. But when we first heard Felix Da Housecat’s Silver Screen (Shower Scene), it ticked all of the boxes,” Alkan says. “It was powerful, imaginative, mysterious … All of a sudden there was a record that I felt completely embodied the spirit of Trash.”

“Electroclash made a lot of sense to us,” agrees Phillips. “As a club that played indie, glam rock, pop and dance records it seemed like the centre of a Venn diagram. I remember Erol playing Silver Screen to me and pointing out that, lyrically, it could have been a Suede song.”

By the time I made it to Trash, it was for its finale party. It was also the tail end of perhaps the last notable mash-up sound to be ushered through its doors: the shonky, punky botch of prog, dubstep, electro and rock that was new rave. I’ll never forget seeing the coils of people that wound back to Tottenham Court Road that night, and queuing behind the genre’s hairsprayed captains, Klaxons, who were about to release their mega-hit Golden Skans.

“You’d go to the club and see people in bands and you were like, ‘OK, we need to up our game and be a part of this,’” says former Klaxons bassist Jamie Reynolds. He credits the club with inspiring him to give their scrappy rock/dance crossover its tongue-in-cheek name. “Could [new rave] have existed without Trash? It was definitely part of the runup to it. If we hadn’t been going to clubs in London every night of the week and [Trash] being the biggest one, then we wouldn’t have wanted to own that thing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest New rave’s hairsprayed captains … Klaxons in 2006. Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns

In a way, Trash continued for the next two years, without Erol’s weekly DJ sets and at the same spot but under a different name, Durrr, until the End itself shut for good in 2009. Since then, no weeknight party has taken its place, though countless alternative dance parties – Nag Nag Nag, Adventures Close to Home, AfterSkool, Kill Em All and, the only survivor of that era, White Heat – have tried to carry the torch.

It’s hard to imagine that a club night like Trash would be able to exist in 2017. That’s not to say that young people aren’t still looking for a place to share the same music and subvert culture. But what with club closures and the sharp rise in living costs, a venue that could afford to take risks on a Monday night and a young clientele that could afford to go there every week seems an unlikely combination. “It did feel like lightning in a bottle,” says Whang. Alkan agrees: “Clubbing has changed dramatically in the years since it closed. The fact that Trash ran weekly for that length of time is quite a feat.” He ponders his party’s specific appeal. “For me, clubbing had that Cheers factor to it – you’d go somewhere and everyone would know you. Something [we] tried to cultivate was to make the people who came week in, week out feel like they had a home.”

For now, that home is a new Trash Facebook page, a place for people to share memories or get back in touch, while also helping to build a better picture of a bleary night that is an important part of UK clubbing history. As with all the best nights, what is missed most of all – and is the hardest to encapsulate – is the attitude. “It really came down to losing yourself in music,” says Alkan. “Everything else was about creating the right environment to do that. There’s one line that we had on the front of our first website in about 1999, from [Madonna’s] Into the Groove, which said, ‘Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free.’ Trash was just about that sense of escapism.”