For journalist and critic Emma Warren, cultures can only thrive through physical interaction. As much as the internet has facilitated the rise of new digital mediums – everything from performing AI bots such as Lil Miquela to the spread of electronic subcultures through streaming platform Boiler Room – Warren believes “dancing in the dark is a human need… it sustains us”.
So goes the thesis of her first book, Make Some Space, a cultural history-cum-manifesto for creating musical communities in the 21st century, told through the story of one east London building and its development of a new jazz scene.
This former warehouse in Foulden Road, Hackney started life in 1904 as a chocolate factory. In the 1990s, it became home to reggae, dub and dancehall collective Mellow Mix, who, argues Warren, performed a kind of cultural salvage operation, turning the derelict factory into a Caribbean community centre and venue and spawning performers such as toaster Glamma Kid (who had two Top 10 hits in 1999). The collective’s demise in 2010, after its relationship with Hackney council soured, left the building empty for two years before French DJ Lexus Blondin set up Total Refreshment Centre (TRC), a jazz club and recording studio complex.
The wiry, animated figure of Blondin, who arrived in Paris from London in 2005, is central to Warren’s analysis of the creation of the club and the ensuing fame of the musicians who used it, among them saxophonists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings (leader of the Mercury prize-shortlisted jazz act Sons of Kemet) and drummer Yussef Dayes.
But the real strength of Make Some Space lies in Warren’s movement from the venue’s history to her experiences in the TRC, which closed last year when complaints from neighbours about noise led to the council revoking its late licence. Interspersing her account with quotes from formative figures at the club, she strikes a deft balance between reportage and memoir, often addressing the reader in the second person in terse and direct prose. “You’re standing at the bottom of a flight of stone stairs and you can hear a muffled drum beat, piano, footsteps, voices,” she writes in her introduction to Mellow Mix.
For his part, Blondin, with his roots elsewhere, symbolises a utopian connection between Britain and Europe in the midst of Brexit. “This was an outward-looking reimagining of London, where the city was still a place of possibility and boundless creativity,” Warren writes, “where you could create culture if you applied enough resourceful energy. TRC was the cosmopolitan myth made real through the medium of space.”
While this vision is enticing, Warren shies away from examining the club’s negative aspects. She does make fleeting reference to the lack of proper building work, which could have led to disaster, and also notes that the majority of Blondin’s colleagues were middle class, leaving them open to the charge that they were as guilty of gentrification as those moving into the area’s new flats. “I’m going into this building and it didn’t feel like it was connected to everything else around it,” says musician Henry Wu.
Still, Warren makes a strong argument for the preservation of cultural spaces that foster “genuine connections” in a city where individualism and isolation are on the increase. “If you can create space do it,” she writes. In this way, Make Some Space fulfils its own remit – creating an enduring legacy for the TRC and encouraging other creators to live out their own dream.
• Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre by Emma Warren is published by Sweet Machine (£12)
