New York hipster, electroclasher and party starter Larry Tee tells Lowri Clarke why Shabba Dabba Da is just what London has been waiting for.
Larry Tee is an NYC hipster: a Jack of all trades who moves in big circles and helped to launch the careers of Ru Paul, Fischerspooner, Scissor Sisters and Peaches. He’s also a DJ, producer, club promoter and party machine. New to London – he moved here in search of freshness – he’s quickly teamed up with clubland’s answer to Willy Wonker, Buster Bennett, and “London’s most outrageous dresser” Daniel Lismore to ruffle feathers with his new approach to clubbing: Shabba Dabba Da. “No, it’s NOT just 'another club night' and that’s the starting point for Shabba Dabba Da. Maybe in the old days you could 'open the doors and they will come’ but London now needs some NEW parties with NEW London feeling.”
Larry Tee sees himself as a casting agent, the “social co-ordinator of the zodiac”: “Expect me to 'cast' this party like a photo shoot or movie as opposed to just DJ...” He aims to “bring the high-brow fashion bottle-service private club crowd together with the underground tastemakers and club kids”, and give it a damn good shake presumably.
Shabba Dabba Da will be held at Avalon – the latest addition to Shoreditch’s clubbing menu – and Larry promises that the ingredients will be fresh (“you can make a fresh omelette if you use fresh ingredients....”) and upfront. “Hell yeah there’ll be club bangers...and plenty of them. I am looking forward to this semi-regular event as a chance to get people hyped up on the new brands of music like tropical, friggit (fidget with rap on it), jingo (stuff that highjacks fun, old historic tunes), and pieces of pop heaven. The Avalon space doest really suggest you should bang heads with techno all night and a fun crowd deserves a break from educational DJing so they can run to the bar, meet new people and, hopefully, find a partner and get laid....”
Larry Tee became famous when he coined the term electroclash: a genre which opened the door to a wave of new artists, a variety of styles and of course – his electroclash festival: “Yeah, I did coin the term electroclash for my festival in 2001, but really most kids I talk to these days haven’t even heard of it, which is fine by me. But I DO love the fact that electroclash did give us back our cool culture after a couple years of nothing but trance/techno/minimalism....that was boring me to death. And it gave us the permission to NOT be carbon copy clones...and to be able to do our own thing.”
So that’s what you can expect from this new clubbing excursion: freshness. “New fun, trashy, celebratory music, new fun hosts and DJs and new performers and artists meeting NEW designers and freaks, and that’s what's going to separate this Shabba Dabba Da-style night from just 'another' clubnight!”
Start planning your look NOW.
Shabba Dabba Da is at Avalon on Saturday 12th June.
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