There is a worldwide misconception that ‘clubbing’ means going down to the nearest grotty disco on a Saturday night, getting blind drunk, or taking drugs while listening to weird music and playing a part in the weekly local cattle market. This type of establishment may be called a nightclub, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it hosts quality clubbing events.
The promoters of a ‘club night’ can take weeks and sometimes months of planning, investing, negotiating and marketing for an event. Similar to putting on a concert, this is a properly organised evening and large, sometimes vast, amounts of money have been spent on visual imagery, crystal clear surround sound systems, light and laser shows and world famous DJs. Like very concert, opera or festival, every club night is special in its own way.
Good honest people with a love of dancing got rapidly bored of the dodgy, dark underground clubs that were rife in the nineties, with illegal substances in every corner and rude, obnoxious security to boot. This forced the industry to clean itself up rapidly and fast-evolving self-regulation is making a clubber’s experience safer all the time.
The head of one of the top security firms in Malta, Joseph Attard, from Euro Security, tells us “I train my staff to spot potential conflicts and to avoid violence erupting in the first place. Polite and friendly security staff control and nip in the bud any potential volatile behaviour in an organised and polite fashion, whilst keeping arguments inconspicuous of other revellers.”
DJ Ruby, one of Malta’s leading DJ’s: “The clubbing scene has changed dramatically in Malta over the past five years. Whereas before all we needed was a sound system and a bar, today we try to emulate, and in some cases better, what European clubbers are experiencing in Ibiza. As a nation, we are very capable of organising such events, and if it has my name on it, then I do not deem it right to offer anything less than a perfect night out for our clubbers.”
Though we might be just a little speck on any map, Malta can hold its own in this field more ways than one. Every year, most of the top 50 DJ’s worldwide will play at an event in Malta at least once. Greats like Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold and Tiesto have all passed through, often returning a second time, such is the positive vibe of the local scene.
It’s still early days for our dance music producers, through some of their material is already being appreciated and played by the world top DJ’s. We have several local DJ’s who are now being invited to play abroad at larger and better paid events. No doubt we’ll have one in the top 100 before long, but the crème de la crème of the Maltese clubbing industry are the clubbers themselves. A whopping 12,000 people hit the clubs on a weekend in Malta. That’s more than three per cent of our population while the United Kingdom only achieves half of that and it’s considered to be a key player on the clubbing world stage.
We’re pretty darn good it, yet Malta is practically unknown as a clubbing destination. One of our rival Mediterranean tourist destinations, Ibiza, was an unknown destination too and indeed Malta was considered to be ahead of Ibiza in the clubbing scene until the late eighties. Since 1990 Ibiza has established itself as the clubbing capital of the world. Clubbers contribute to more than half of Ibiza’s annual tourist expenditure which last year topped 800 million Euro. South Africa is the most recent tourist destination that has embarked on a radical scheme to promote the clubbing industry and all the big industry promoters will be taking high-spend tourists there this year.
Malta is obviously better positioned geographically to attract this tourism. With a warm climate and plenty of fantastic outdoor venues such as Numero Uno, Gianpula (http://www.gianpula.com/) , Buskett Roadhouse, Grotta (in Gozo), Malta easily offers a wealth of clubbing events that can hold their own in the international scene.
By David Galea. Source: Sky life, March 2007.
