Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [116]
Then, in 1998, the first signs of trouble started to appear. Darren Hughes left the company to set up his own super club, Home, in London’s Leicester Square. The year after the first ‘Creamfields’ festival, Hughes started his own ‘Homelands’ event. The club’s former director was now the competition.
Another problem was the cost of putting on Cream events at the Liverpool club. Ironically, for a club which helped to establish the cult of the ‘superstar DJ’, the fees charged by big names such as Fatboy Slim, Sasha, Paul Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox were becoming the major weekly cost. However, without paying for the DJs, Cream would have risked losing its market altogether. ‘It’s the performers who make the real money, though they used to draw in enough custom to make it worth the club’s while,’ says Mixmag editor Viv Craske. ‘Big clubs still rely on the same old DJs, despite no longer drawing the crowds.’ With big names typically charging four or five figure sums for two hours’ work, the costs could clearly be crippling for a club such as Cream, which always advertised its events on the strength of its DJ line-ups.
Another factor, and one beyond Cream’s immediate control, was the fact that its original customer was now getting too old to be on the dance floor at three in the morning every Saturday night. For many 18-year-olds, the idea of ‘super clubs’ and ‘superstar DJs’ was starting to be wholly unattractive. As Jacques Peretti wrote in a July 2002 article in the Guardian, this generational shift took place at the end of the 1990s:
These teenagers were more interested in rebelling against their siblings and joining a band. Instead of going to clubs, it became cool to follow American nu-metal bands such as Slipknot and Papa Roach – bands that preach hate and pain in ludicrous gothic garb, not peace and love, as ageing house DJs might. [...] Even to their natural constituency, super clubs epitomised everything that had gone wrong with club culture [...] The cutting edge of this culture now is not Cream or Ministry of Sound, but tiny venues with a word-of-mouth following.
As Cream became ever more commercial, it was seen to lose its point. What did it have to offer which couldn’t be provided by mass-market pub, club and restaurant corporations such as Luminar and First Leisure (which began to borrow the super clubs’ music policy for their own venues but without having to fork out for the high profile DJ)? Cream, and the other super clubs, had suddenly seemed to lose their sense of creativity and personality. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that in 2002, the year Cream shut its Liverpool club, the biggest nightclub event in the UK was School Disco – which completely rejected the dance music ethos in favour of unpretentious good fun, with clubbers dressing in school uniforms and dancing to Duran Duran and Dexy’s Midnight Runners).
Some people have also questioned the competence of Cream’s management team. The owners certainly had no formal training, as with most people in the clubbing industry. As Oxford graduate, former merchant banker, chairman and co-founder of Ministry of Sound, James Palumbo, once put it: ‘The world of nightclubs is so populated by incompetent people that you only have to be a bit better to make a success of it.’
This accusation is at least partly unfair though. In many ways Cream has been too ‘business-like’, at least ostentatiously. In an interview with the Liverpool Echo, James Barton was asked about the decision to