Interview: Dave Parry

The holy grail for any club creator is to achieve a state of synaesthesia - using whatever alchemy and weird science is at his disposal.
Here’s how it works. Get all the instruments in place, take all the sensory stimuli (in this case sound, colour and visual movement) and jumble them up to create disorder. After blocks of these effects have been whizzed and juxtaposed spatially through 360° the confusion sets in whereby you think you are hearing the colour, while the sound is assaulting your eyes. This is total immersion. This is true synaesthesia.
Dave Parry is the guiding hand behind matter, which represents the biggest tectonic shift in providing total kinetic immersion. The designer refers to it as the Kandinsky principle - the expressionist artist described the fusion music, lights and colour, movement and vibrations as creating a trance-like state. Think of diving into a crucible.
For Dave Parry’s company, Most Technical, the challenge at matter - the latest arrival at London’s O2 Arena - had simply been to create the most technically advanced venue in the universe.
He had been acutely aware of the possibilities since walking into the proto-industrial Powerhouse in Birmingham - arguably Britain’s first superclub - and taking his position behind the vast lighting console. This was 25 years ago, when Dave was still in his late teens
For the uninitiated, the Powerhouse was a massive slab of German proto-industrial/fascist architecture with one of the first giant mechanical lighting rigs; the fact that Dave Parry never returned to his apprenticeship as a tool-maker after that is no surprise.
The experience of piloting that rig also probably taught him that to become a Formula 1 champion you don’t necessarily need to start off in a go-kart.
Entering a generation that spawned the greatest nightclubs that have ever been built (before he was out of his teens he also visited the legendary Paradise Garage in New York’s Greenwich Village) and operated the lighting at Camden Palace in its heyday, when Colin Faver and Eddie Richards were working their rotational gymnastics at the turnables.
But Dave Parry really started to appear on the clubbing radar during the party idiom at the Ministry of Sound in the 1990’s before heading across town to build fabric London for owners Keith Reilly and Cameron Leslie - just before the turn of the millennium. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
He reflects fondly on his early influences as a lighting operator. “The biggest buzz was seeing Marc Brickman’s design for Pink Floyd’s Pulse tour at Earl’s Court - no-one has come close to what he did there, it was stunning. To see all these Vari-Lites going at once … and the sensation when the mirrorball opened up and all the lights whacked onto it … that’s never left me!
“It’s always been concerts that have done it for me and I remember the same sensation seeing Genesis when Vari-Lite first came out.”
After the Powerhouse Dave progressed through the ranks of the multiples which was no bad thing at a time when Mecca Leisure and First Leisure were largely shaping the style and direction of macro clubbing in the mid-to-late ‘80s.
When a friend of his, Hector Dewar, went to run the Ministry of Sound, he was taken on as the lighting operator but then helped to redesign the sound system under his newly-formed company Most Technical. At the same time he was also introduced to Outboard Electronics’ Dave Hayden, who has subsequently been a major influence on his work.
But by the early ‘90s club technology was entering a kind of cultural dystopia. “All the moving yoke lighting started to come out and it became a bit boring - you couldn’t get Vari-Lite unless you were some lighting god but then [the Clay Paky] Golden Scan came out, and that was something everyone could use.” It also heralded the birth of the unlicensed raves.
“The Rave scene was made for Golden Scan and it really pushed the boundaries. During that period it was always a question of what could we grab from SpotCo for those weekend parties? And they too had a huge influence on British lighting during that time of experimentation.”
But as all the ideas so fondly nurtured in the club world, slowly started to migrate to other, more durable sectors of entertainment and industry Dave Parry entered the next chapter in his career.
Nicky Smith, with whom he had worked at the Colosseum in Vauxhall, introduced him to Keith Reilly and by the end of 1999 the new club was ready to blast into action (more of which later).
With fabric purring like a well-oiled machine, Dave Parry headed off to Leeds in 2002 to design Rehab for Chris Edwards - providing a kinetic Aladdin’s cave for the city’s über-popular Back to Basics night, run by Dave Beer, David Elliott and Antony Georgallis’. Within six months he was in Glasgow, working with Mike Grieve and Paul Crawford (to create the Sub Club).
But by this time, Manpreet ‘Monty” Chadha, an Indian businessman, had visited fabric, and overwhelmed by the power of the Martin Audio sound system, hired Dave Parry to replicate the effect and create the best nightclub in India. The result was Elevate in New Delhi which opened in 2004 … and for a while it looked as though the UK industry might have seen the last of Dave Parry’s creative spirit as all kinds of possibilities unfurled in the sub-continent and the Parry family moved out to join him.
“Clubbing is all about becoming immersed and disconnected from the outside world - and I was fortunate to work with all these people, who shared the same belief.”
Although he duly returned to the UK, working freelance before taking up a permanent position with Avolites in April 2007, the legacy of India remained.
It was while in Delhi that he had received a phone call from fellow Brummie (and creative head) Dave Green - one of the visual artists who would shape Dave Parry’s thinking when it came to constructing matter.
“He called me out of the blue and I still don’t know how he got my number. I just remember skateboarding through the streets of Delhi with him.” He also remembers the ideas that began to foment - as Green went off to work first for UVA (best remembered for their mindblowing pixel mapping work on Massive Attack’s 2003 100th Window tour) before setting up Pixel Addicts whose role in the success of matter cannot be overstated.
The two men entered into feverish discussion and in April this year Green was able to present a prototype of the new Pixel Addict server to both Dave Parry and Avolites’ Steve Warren. Three months later he came up with the finished device. “It was designed with matter in mind and does exactly what I need it to do in terms of tiling and texture mapping of the image. It required a lot of complicated maths but gives us six outputs and full HD from one server.”
The truth is that matter … or the idea for matter … had been germinating for some time. “Keith [Reilly]had originally said he was looking at another venue about 18 months ago,” remembers Dave Parry. It would be a new-build - 33,000 sq ft of solid concrete - providing O2 Arena owners AEG with a third performance space, more edgy than the main arena and its progeny, Indigo2, but essentially still a live venue.
But was the man who has had his fair share of Jonathan Ross-style ‘lapses’ a bankable bet for this major project? Famously red-carded by owner James Palumbo at the Ministry of Sound at the height of the party boom, and prior to that, getting right up the noses of First Leisure supremos Mike Paine and Tony Spragg back in the days when he was wreaking havoc at Paradise Lost in Watford, he was probably considered a high-risk strategy. “After all, no-one wearing a 4ft pink Mohican is likely to get taken very seriously,” he rationalises.
It had taken a giant leap of faith by Keith Reilly to give him the job of building fabric (let alone matter). Dave Parry - who remembers turning up for the first meeting on a skateboard - jokes that the only space more famous than the club itself was his tiny office ‘loft’ precariously accessed via vertical ladder. “That’s what really changed the face of night clubs,” he chuckles … and few privileged to have poked their heads through that hallowed hatch-way on Dave’s metaphorical rope ladder to the moon will disagree.
“It is mainly Keith Reilly I owe for both opportunities,” he concedes. “I’ll always have the utmost respect because he gave me the chance, and I had never received much recognition at Camden Palace or Ministry of Sound. Keith just said ‘Do it!’ He backed me up all the way despite a lot of people telling him to fire me.
“He also said the only reason you are doing [matter] is because we have complete trust. He’s very inspirational and single-minded and has invested a lot of trust to pull this together.”
So let’s cut to the chase. How much wedge had the owners stumped up to plug this pleasuredome with so much technology?
“When I first spoke to Keith I thought the space would actually be different than what it was. I thought it would be five storeys, with one floor- to-ceiling projection space.” But instead a ‘Sky Bridge’ appeared at the top of the concrete building, designed by Pentagram’s Will Russell and Sarah Adams, forcing him to rethink the detail, if not the basic concept.
“We got really blitzed one night - myself, Keith Reilly and Dave Green. In my head I knew I could run everything off MIDI and I knew what Dave was capable of from his time with UVA. When it came to the budget I asked for a million pounds and they gave it to me with no questions. In fact they were great about it. But then I thought ‘Oh my God, now I have to do it.’”
Dave Parry knew he wanted to major on visuals. “Twenty years ago we were running video you could fly - a laser rocket through a video screen - but video seems to have skipped a generation. At the same time Dave Hayden and I had been trying to move sound around at Club Colosseum in Vauxhall with TiMax - something we we were able to do to a degree in fabric.”
But such has been the evolution in technology -and the influence of the gamer generation - that he now believed he could integrate all the elements into a single package by merging MIDI datastreams - all controllable from the lighting desk. MIDI (the de facto music industry interface) would allow him to manipulate a left/right stereo images from TiMax to create a truly immersive sound, in conjunction with the Martin Audio Longbow and hugely-important BodyKinetic vibrating dancefloor - using low-frequency transducers to enable the music to be experienced viscerally, right up through the body.
“I wanted the whole club to be part of the experience, not just the dancefloor. Putting control of all the elements into the hands of the lighting operator gives him the ability to control the whole mood of the club at the flick of a switch.”
His key building blocks have been The Addict Server, triggered through ArtNet, and the Timax Outboard processor, which allows mapping of the sound system in three dimensions, and likewise triggers MIDI signals to the Avolities Diamond 4.
Once this was accomplished, the possibilities of an immersive, 360° image shifting environment became a reality. By using advanced texture mapping techniques onto the unfinished (or grey-painted) concrete surfaces, graphic projection images could be scattered via mirrors and audio blocks spatialised.
This state of euphoria would be enhanced by the muscularity of the 75 x 1,000 watt transducers vibrating up through the hugely beefed-up BodyKinetic floor - and complementing the mighty Martin Audio Longbow system superbly.
Also central to matter’s success was the working relationship Dave Parry established with concrete specialist, Will Russell. “I got on really well with him and Sarah was a conduit between us both,” he acknowledges. “Working alongside the architect allowed me to overcome a lot of inherent problems at the design stage. It was good to work with someone who would design around me rather than the other way around - it allowed me to put speakers where I wanted rather than having to yield to some design feature. For example, Pentagram agreed to angle the balustrading in order to keep the audio reflections down.”
Everyone was senstive to the fact that the audio could have been a potential problem in the highly-reverberant concrete building, but the Martin Audio software helping to cancel the reflections from the reflective surfaces and acoustic baffles, an acoustic void and soundproofing to 155db all helping to mitigate the effect.
Once the venue was opened, its designer characteristically went off-piste. No-one would have been surprised to discover that his wanderlust had sucked him back to India with the force of a Dyson turbine. But no! During the course of his peregrinations Dave’s marriage had hit the rocks, and now - with his new French girlfriend - he had headed off to her parents’ chateau for some much needed r’n’r - probably mindless of the growing number of people anxious for his time in the wake of the opening.
This new relationship has infused him with a new creative energy and the adulation he received in the quality broadsheets and Sunday papers has brought its own rewards. He acknowledges, “There won’t be too many clubs built like matter … and now I see this as an opportunity to start pushing Most Technical.”
From Moscow he received an email asking if he could look at a space for a potential BodyKinetic floor and he is also undertaking a full Bollywood wedding in India for 3,000 people, as well as exploring opportunities in the US.
 How long matter can retain Dave Parry’s interest remains to be seen. Somewhat paradoxically, he admits to not yet having the same emotional attachment as he had to fabric.
“I think that will come later. The truth is that I’m absolutely exhausted from it. I took on a lot more than I thought I could - but at least I proved to myself that I could do something from start to finish.”
This was partly because that working with the general electricians, he undertook the installation as well as the design. “I figured that if I could save £30K or £40K in this way then it was more money available for the club FX.”
Aside from his exploits as a club designer and party planner overseas, Dave Parry now owns a 50% stake in Luke Pepper’s Djenerate - manufacturers of the BodyKinetic dancefloor (all four systems in the world to date have been specified and incorporated by Parry).
“The floor is now in its third iteration and we have made it more powerful - with the 12K amps now available we can run 12 transducers from a single amp. The bigger we make them the lower we can take the bass - we are way below 18Hz now.”
Parry and Pepper are currently experimenting with a full-range system and sending voices through the floor.” In other words it is working bidirectionally - which opens up its application potential way beyond music venues.
What had the experience of building matter taught Dave Parry? “I learnt that I need a PA!” he smiled - clearly not referring to the sound system! “I have learnt a lot about project management. I have learnt a lot about what I can personally achieve. There was always a worry of whether I was biting off more than I could chew because I didn’t have anyone to fall back on - it would just be me.”
But he acknowledges that the project had been a co-ordinated team effort, and responding to Cameron Leslie’s timetable and schedule of work, the site had been relatively relaxed (until last minute problems siting the plasmas in the VIP Room). “Building frames to hold up almost a ton and a half of tellys was not a lot of fun - but we overcame it.”
It is rare to find a designer today who is given the independence to create something as groundbreaking as matter without abusing that privilege.
“I like having freedom - I’m not really a sit-behind-the-desk type of person,” he says. “During the two years I was at Avolites Steve [Warren] and Koy [Neminathan] were great to me - I met a lot of people through them around the world. But I started realising after a year that I wanted to get back to using the product rather than selling it. In the last six months it was really starting to affect me.”
He started appearing at a number of festivals, lighting bands like Hybrid in the summer 2007 and during fabric days had always continued migrated to Camden Palace on their Tuesday rock nights
It is also worth mentioning that as part of a consortium Dave Parry had come within a gnat’s whisker of acquiring Camden Palace from Luminar Leisure before The Mint Group won out, and converted it into KOKO. “The old lighting rig was possibly one of the best I have worked at - straight out of Studio 54 - while the influence of Stephen Court’s sound system was massive,” he says.
But with the opening of matter the landscape of entertainment is changing again. For Dave Green and his resident vid-team Inside-Us-All the ability to control complex AV performances from simple patch triggers overlaying their 3D visualiser must have seemed Heaven-sent. On the audio front a DJ can no longer turn up with a box of records - he needs to put on a show.
“I have been working with Sasha for a couple of years getting him involved through TiMax,” qualifies Dave Parry. “We’ve sent him MIDI files so we can now plan his set around TiMax. John Digweed is also seeing the potential of being able to move sound, and with the potential of Pioneer’s SVM-1000 [4-channel video and audio mixer] everything is there. The kids today are far more tech savvy and it’s time for DJ’s to step up to the plate.”
The club jockey today is limited only by his own imagination. To emphasise his point when Paris Hilton made a recent visit to the venue out came that famous video (yes, the one you’ve all seen on the internet). “Well, it would have been rude not to,” laughs Parry, knowing it would be worth the inevitable bollocking to see that stuff whizzing through space.

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