The London I wrote about doesn't exist anymore.

Somewhere around chapter ten I mention a venue called the Coronet. If you're reading this after 2018 you can't go and check it out, because it's not there. It's turned into another soulless block of flats now.

I wrote Inside the Mindset of a Shit Music Producer about London between roughly 2013 and 2024, and I've realised, a bit late, that I've accidentally written a period piece. Not on purpose. I just described the rooms I walked into, and then one by one a lot of those rooms stopped existing.

The fairytale years

2013 to 2016 felt like a fairytale, and I'm aware of how that sounds coming from a bloke who's now writing about it on his book blog.

Dubstep had just eaten itself and everyone was scrambling for the next thing. Grime was just about holding on. Drum and bass just carried on, as it always does. House was rising again. Nobody quite knew which scene was the right one to follow, which meant it could be anything, which meant every night felt like it might be the one where something new was happening.

I caught the tail end of the old Elephant and Castle. Concrete, walkways and a whole other city sitting next to the Coronet. Then it was gone and the Coronet followed and now I couldn't point at the exact spot with any confidence.

I played Pacha in Victoria. Not for long. It became Qube Project, and I'm not sure anyone under 30 knows it was ever called anything else. I had a handful of excellent nights out at the Pickle Factory and a few more at Printworks.

None of that felt important at the time.

Then Brexit lol

Yeah I hear it, the guy at the afters nobody wants to talk to is butting into our convo. It's a bit weird to put a national referendum at the end of a section about nightclubs, but that's genuinely how it felt in real time. 2016 came, the vote happened, and the fairytale was over. Beyond the tension that lingered the morning after, there was something else underneath it all that shifted. There used to be a sense that London was the place where important creative things were about to happen. That quietly went somewhere else.

The years after had their moments. But it was a different city. Venues started to shut down. Rents did what rents do. The scene didn't die, it just got thinner, and then a pandemic came and finished the job for a lot of places.

What does this have to do with the book?

I didn't set out to write a love letter to any of it. The book is set out to just be about being not very good at something creative and refusing to stop doing it. But you can't write about that decade in London without the world it was set in being a prominent feature, and now a lot of that world is gone.

The scenes aren't real. The venues were. If you were there, some of it will land differently. If you weren't, it's the closest I can get you to that time.

The bit where I'm not bitter

I'm not writing this as the old bloke who thinks nothing good has happened since. It has. There are plenty of places right now where a 22-year-old is having their version of my 2014, and they'll write a book about it in ten years and I'll probably read it going "ahh shit, I got that blog post wrong then."

That's the point. It never feels like a fairytale from the inside. It just feels like your life, until you look up and the building's gone.omewhere around chapter ten there's a night at the Coronet. If you're reading this after 2018 you can't go and check it out, because it's not there. Unless you've cracked time travel, that's you. It's another soulless block of flats now.

I wrote Inside the Mindset of a Shit Music Producer about London between roughly 2013 and 2024, and I've realised, I reckon I've accidentally written a period piece. I just described the rooms I once walked into, and how they then one by one stopped existing.