The Saturday-night room the Bureau holds as the principal goth-and-industrial venue in the English-speaking world for thirty-three years, and the founder whose death closed its structure.
The club opened on New Year's Eve 1987 in a late-Victorian steel-works warehouse at 7 Torrens Street, behind Angel tube station in Islington, north London. The building had been a squat for several years previously; it had no licensing, no heating to speak of, no fire-safety apparatus that would satisfy any subsequent decade's regulators, and, for the first several years of operation, no bar (drinks were brought in by attendees, who paid £3 at the door and bought from each other inside). The founder, Mayuan Mak (known universally as Mak), had been a leading figure in the London squatting scene through the mid-1980s and ran, alongside with the venue, a scrap-metal business out of the same building. The conjunction of those two businesses meant that the club's furniture, for most of the first decade of its operation, was whatever Mak's metal yard happened to have surplus to: military hardware, dismantled industrial plant, salvaged stage rigging from defunct West End theatre productions.
The name is a parody. In the summer of 1987, before the move to Electrowerkz, the night ran for a brief period in a disused church on High Holborn. The contemporaneous Limelight club, in Shaftesbury Avenue, was also held in a disused church and was the goth-and-industrial scene's first-choice venue at the time. Slimelight is the joke at Limelight's expense; the joke turned out to outlast its target by about three decades. The Limelight closed in 2003. Slimelight, in the same week, marked its sixteenth anniversary by adding a third dancefloor.
The structure of the night is, with minor variations, unchanged since about 1990. Doors at ten, last entry at three, kick-out at half-past seven in the morning when the London Underground starts running and the attendees can get home. Three floors (sometimes two, sometimes for special editions four): a goth-and-post-punk floor playing the canonical Sisters of Mercy / Bauhaus / Joy Division register; an industrial-and-EBM floor running the harder side of the catalogue including the canonical Front 242 / Skinny Puppy / Nitzer Ebb material into the contemporary aggrotech and dark-techno register; and a middle floor that has historically hosted dark synthpop, occasional noise-and-power-electronics takeovers and the periodic Wax Trax!-themed nights that the resident DJ network insisted on running. The membership system was, until about 2010, the venue's principal admissions network: prospective members required nomination from two existing members and a brief interview at the door. The Bureau holds that this system, more than any other single factor, kept the venue's particular character intact for as long as it did.
The club's role across thirty-three years is substantial. The Bureau holds that any reasonable account of the post-1987 anglophone goth-and-industrial scene must reckon with Slimelight as its principal Saturday-night room, in the same sense that the Hacienda is reckoned with for Manchester acid house, the Mudd Club for late-1970s New York no-wave or the Batschkapp for Frankfurt's mid-1980s EBM. The venue's particular gravity was a function of continuity rather than novelty: the same room, the same founder, the same broadly-defined editorial position on what the night should sound like, weekly, for over three decades. Visiting goths and industrial musicians on the European touring circuit treated a Saturday-night appearance at Slimelight as a fixed point in their London week.
That gravity ended with Mak's death on 9 December 2020. He was 55. The venue was already closed for COVID-related restrictions and would not properly reopen for nearly two years. The night resumed under different management in 2022 and continues to operate on the same Saturday-night calendar at the same address. The Bureau holds, without judgment of the current management or the community that continues to attend, that what made Slimelight weighty was Mak and that what remains is the apparatus of a club night, rather than the institution that the apparatus once housed.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Regency era · last revised c. the Reformation