“There was The Twisted Wheel in the sixties, The Electric Circus in the seventies, The Haçienda in the eighties and Bugged Out in the nineties.”
Anthony H. Wilson
To celebrate Bugged Out’s 30th anniversary, we put together a book dedicated to the legendary club night, one of the UK’s most formative and enduring.
Named after one of the club’s iconic slogans, It’s Just A Big Disco was edited by Bugged Out promoter Johnno Burgess and features new interviews with regular guest DJs including The Chemical Brothers, Erol Alkan, Tiga, Miss Kittin, Hot Chip, and 2manydjs. These sit alongside oral histories written by journalists including Jim Butler, Ralph Moore, Luke Bainbridge, and Johnno himself, charting the club’s pivotal periods: Manchester’s Sankeys Soap in the 1990s; Liverpool’s Nation in the 90s and 00s; The End in London during the 2000s, and the much-loved five-year run of Weekenders at Butlin’s in the 2010s.
It’s a story of the equal-part highs and lows of running a club night, from the exhilaration of watching an idea starting in a 600 capacity club in Manchester in 1994 and watching it grow into to a sold-out 12,000-capacity 30th-birthday party in London in 2024, through to the painful financial losses that came from significant failures.
And it’s a narrative punctuated with idiosyncratic anecdotes, like the time Daft Punk may or may not have played in Ibiza, or Miss Kittin tearing up the rule book one night in Heaven, or Erol Alkan making his first unforgettable appearance in what he called “a proper club”.
But this 256-page hardback book isn’t just a history of Bugged Out. It’s also a chronicle of UK club culture from the mid-1990s to the present day. Told era by era, it explores shifting fashions - from the utilitarian workwear of the 90s, to the flamboyant electroclash era, to the neon excess of new rave - as well as the growing dominance of photography, evolving from a handful of disposable “fun camera” shots to today’s flood of professional images in the Instagram age.
The book also features hundreds of flyers and lineups, alongside photography by acclaimed event photographers including Luke Dyson, Mark McNulty, Tom Horton and Alistair Allan, plus candid snaps from friends and clubbers and a portrait of Miss Kittin by Wolfgang Tillmans.
It’s Just A Big Disco is limited to 3,000 copies. Orders come with a Bugged Out sticker sheet, whilst stocks last.
