“When we started Chibuku, we were young, we were bang into what we were into, and nothing could stop us from getting more and more involved.”
So says Belfast born Rich McGinnis who, as promoter of Chibuku, is one of the most important figures in the Liverpool dance scene. Since it was founded in 2000, Rich has been largely responsible for growing the night from a event put on by a bunch of students to entertain themselves, to one of the world’s most respected club brands.
2008 has been another stellar year for the club, and we’ve been spoiled this week with two Chibuku sessions in 8 days. Last week’s Felix Da Housecat headlined event also acted as the closing party for music industry event Sound City, and Rich was pleased with the results:
“It was a good contrast, because pretty much everything else was guitar based, so it was just good to do something dance orientated that was representative of Liverpool. It was in Nation for a start, which is obviously a famous venue for the city, and we also had Futurebound on. He’s a big international DJ now, and he doesn’t play that much in Liverpool.”
This Saturday meanwhile, we have what is unfortunately the last Chibuku of the season. Rich gives us some details of the event: “We’re doing a sort of end of season, end of term event. It’s a cheap price ticket with a decent headliner. We’ve got Boys Noize on who played with us in Liverpool a couple of years ago, but he’s massive now. If you look at his MySpace, he’s literary got two dates left between now and January, and we’ve also got Mary-Ann Hobbs, who a year ago helped us break the dubstep thing in Liverpool.”
It will however be possible to get a bit of a Chibuku fix over the summer, as Rich explains: “Now we’re just getting ready for Creamfields,” he says. “We’ve got the second biggest tent on the site and we’ve got Ian Brown, Erol Alkan, Annie Mac, 2ManyDJs, Luciano, Adam Beyer, it’s just really solid all the way through. It’s a two day event now and people are really getting onto the boutique camping and stuff.”
With Chibuku line ups often filled with some of the most important names in dance music, we have to ask, which has been the one Rich has been proudest to land?
“I think it would be John Peel. We stumbled into it, and we were lucky to get it and we never knew the kind of importance of it until we saw there was three pages on it in his autobiography. It begins with the sentence ‘The highlight of my DJing career was playing at Chibuku.’ And we were like ‘Woah.'”
Quite.
By Kenn Taylor
Saturday 7th June,
Chibuku,
Barfly,
90 Seel Street,
Liverpool,
10pm-3am,
£10 ADV, £8 NUS
Kenn Taylor 