My Clubby Valentine

Back in November, the indie tribe of Belfast reacted to news that Skibunny was calling time on its decade-long association with Auntie Annies much like traumatised navvies discovering that Samson and Goliath were taking off from H&W’s docks. Recent weeks, though, have shown that far from departing the scene for good, the rug-cutting brainchild of Mark Gordon and Tanya Mellotte was merely departing the stage for some welcome reinvention.
The first of what promises to be an on-going series of events at the revitalised Menagerie, recently showed the pair had lost none of their enthusiasm for rustling up a top-notch night. While a new album will soon emerge carrying a Skibunny sticker.
Busy times, then. And an ideal moment to stick our head around Mark and Tanya’s door for a natter about all that’s gone on, and everything that’s coming up.

The club’s over 10 years old now – look back to when you first started it up: what were your intentions?
"When we started the club in January 1998, our intentions were only to have a place where we, our friends, and like-minded people could hang out, that played music from different genres side by side, like Stereolab, Public Enemy, Pavement, Huggy Bear, Aphex Twin and Aretha Franklin. We always say this, but it is very hard now to imagine a time when clubs like that didn’t exist."
Lots of people will associate the club with Auntie Annies, but of course it started off in Vico’s. What are your memories of those days?
"Vicos was great. We had Skibunny on the ground floor and there were hip-hop and techno clubs on the other floors. People from the upper floors would come down for a drink and you’d get this amazing mix of people. There weren’t many clubs in Belfast at that time that had an eclectic, underground atmosphere, and whilst sometimes that meant that we had to wing it in terms of everything from our sound system to projectors, the flip side was that it made for a really fresh atmosphere. And that will never happen again, everything these days is very homogenised, and when people try and recreate something like Vicos it can feel quite contrived.
It’s strange to think that when you made the move to Auntie Annie’s that the venue had only just been built. It was an exciting time."
In Belfast back then – looking back, what did you do right/wrong when establishing the club?
It’s hard to say, because even at that time we had no game plan for the club whatsoever. Everything we did, every band or DJ we booked was done on instinct. As such there were just these... amazing nights where we’d booked someone like Man Or Astroman to play at Annies, and people would just come out blown away. It wasn’t about establishing the club, or the name, it was just about reacting to what we played at home, and either playing it out as DJs, or of possible booking it to come and play."
Commercially speaking, Saturday night is fairly dog-eat-dog – was it difficult keeping true to your original intentions while also ensuring you had enough punters coming through the door?
"As the club got more successful we would be offered opportunities to move to other venues, but always with the price of adapting the style of music we played to draw in more people. We simply didn’t think it was worth that kind of compromise, and in situations like this, we do believe that the lure of money can make for a really crappy kind of club and music – money was nowhere near our original agenda when we started the club, and neither of us were ever interested in cashing in on the name, tweaking what we played to suit a bigger venue, and taking home a big pay cheque."
Why did you call time on the residency?
"Skibunny has been DJing a lot outside NI over the last year or so, we’ve been to Japan twice, we’ve played at festivals like Glastonbury (East Dance stage) and Rockness, as well as gigs in Oslo, Moscow and Siberia. On top of this we’re pretty busy with remix work (we’ve already remixed Tilly and The Wall, Forward Russia, Oppenheimer, Robots In Disguise etc) and recording our album. The whole emphasis of what Skibunny is about has totally changed. So we decided to bring the weekly club nights to an end, and we had the ‘Last Day of Magic’ in November 2008.
"Now we are free to concentrate on our music which is great, but we always said that what we wanted to do next in Belfast, was put together one-off party nights where we brought brand-new, exciting bands and DJs to come together and play. The Menagerie is a great venue for this kind of event. We used to run gigs their about 8 or 9 years ago, the most memorable was DC band the Make Up Vs David Holmes, that was a brilliant night. It’s good to see the venue up and running again, and it has a great feel to it now."
What can we expect over the next few months?
"We’re working on our album. We’ve provided vocals on tracks for Japanese artist Handsomeboy Technique’s album which will be released in February on Second Royal. We’re working on remixes for And So I Watch You From Afar and Swedish group Dag For Dag (Saddle Creek). In March we go off to play at Canadian Music Week in Toronto and SXSW in Austin, Texas, with some shows in New York in between. Our 3rd single ‘Up Down’ will be released at that time too. After that, well it’s almost festival season again, yay!"