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Music

The Story of Brighton’s Only Secret Unlicensed After Hours Nightclub

We delve deep into the past, present, and future of Club Magnus, the open-all hours institution for the city's cabal of caners.
Brighton at dawn (photo via Flickr). This post ran originally on THUMP UK.

It's just past midnight, and I have been married for around twelve hours. The party's still going strong with most of the guests on the dance floor. I spy something unusual—a small card has been left on every table. "Ahhh," I think, "everyone's been so lovely today, and now here's another whimsical little surprise for us." My wife and I stroll over to see what delights await us now, only to find that the cards aren't cards at all. They are flyers, left there by a DJ, for a tech-house night. The DJ who'd used my wedding for a spot of last minute hype was Magnus Asberg, promoter, producer, and for around 20 years, host of Brighton's only unlicensed secret after hours nightclub, the legendary Club Magnus.

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Now, after-parties usually go one of two ways. At some you end up getting slowly digested by an unfamiliar sofa, as the same mix tape goes round and round, sat in a room full of ashen-faced strangers determinedly chewing their own faces off. The endless dabs, lines, spliffs, and cans of lukewarm Oranjeboom are less a serious attempt at a party and more like a set of strategies to ward off reality for a few more hours. These are the parties that teach you the vital lesson of when exactly to call it a night.

At others, there's barely enough room to stand let alone dance, with each nook and cranny bursting with the kind of vitality that only ever emerges once a communal decision's been made to abandon any hint of regular sensibility in order to commit to a proper weekender.

Magnus in a past life, 1987.

Club Magnus tended to lurch between the two extremes. Some nights it became, essentially, a drawn-out pharmaceutically-assisted comedown. So drawn-out in fact that you could, as the resident of a well-known London club once did, decide that things were winding down and spend so long gathering up your crew, saying goodbye and getting mysteriously lost in the cellar, that by the time you are actually ready to leave a completely different clientele have arrived, shared all their drugs, and it's game on again.

Magnus has been inviting Brighton's clubbers back to his yard at least once a month for the best part of two decades now. Starting at the edge of dawn, often lasting for days, always accompanied by the constant thud of house music, Magnus' soirees have become renowned for two things: the legendary levels of chemical ingestion, and the new peaks of sheer stubbornness they demonstrate when it comes to returning to reality. Oh, make that three things, with the third being the calibre of DJ that Magnus can call on for his early-morning parties. Sure Jackmaster turns up at the odd flat-party in Glasgow but over the years Mags—as he's known to friends and strangers alike—has boasted a roll call featuring the likes of Terry Francis, Gene Farris, and Luke Solomon. Which is a step up from your mate Mitch playing Marilyn Manson over a dodgy Spotify connection.

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The original Club Magnus was in a terraced house in a residential street near Brighton town centre. It was a two-storey affair, and one that always appears more complex and warren-like in the addled memories of its attendees than it ever was in the cold light of a winter's morning. Magnus did all he could to ensure that his club was as resistant to outside reality as possible—the curtains were always shut, and the door always open to revellers looking for a place to be. Put it another way: someone had to step and take one for the team, and Mags was the man to do it for Brighton's cabal of caners.

Magnus Asberg.

It was so successful as a means of shutting-out the outside world that one reasonably well known techno producer decided he never wanted to go home. Over the course of a couple of weeks he built himself a small mezzanine shack in the space where Mags used to hang his coats, constructed from 'repurposed' bits and pieces from skips and bits of Mag's house. The producer never asked for permission, and his effusive host simply allowed him to build a little house inside his house, where said producer then lived for several months.

The club ran on its own laws, adhering to its own moral and judicial code. When it was felt by a number of regulars that the aforementioned shut-in producer was taking advantage of Mags' good nature, a kangaroo court was called in the kitchen on a Sunday morning. A consensus was quickly reached, and both the mezzanine and its occupant were forcibly removed from the premises.

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Several years and many parties later, Magnus moved to a seafront flat, essentially because he needed more room for his records, but also to accommodate larger numbers at the afters. What's remarkable about the tale is that over the years only a tiny amount of people have ever been thrown out. Debauchery was pursued with a single minded passion, but the lack of any significant trouble is perhaps proof that an egalitarian approach can work perfectly well. Well, an egalitarian approach, the presence of a few friendly doorman and the occasional kangaroo court as mentioned above. But Club Magnus was essentially a self-governing entity, with the host happy to take to his bed for a few hours on a Monday evening and to come up smiling on Tuesday morning to carry on the party, safe in the knowledge that all would be well. Regulars and newbies all ensured that as far as possible a basic level of civilisation was maintained. It's all relative of course and one man's basic level of civilisation is another man's drug-fuelled rollercoaster of mayhem, but the near-spotless record of Club Magnus says something about the good-naturedness to be found in the kind of people who really enjoy the disco.

When you meet him, Magnus always seems to have the very slightly mystified air of a man who's not sure if he's just seen a bat. Slightly elfin features, huge smile, a laid back manner combined with an obsessive commitment, he's a strange combination of mellow and driven, like a hippified snail, but a snail who bears a startling resemblance to Arantzazu Marinez's the Fallen Angel, currently hanging in a gallery in Barcelona. What, I wondered, drives a man, now in his early middle age, to allow the barbarian hordes of South-East England back to his flat, every weekend, for all these years? It's not simply for the love: Club Magnus and Magnus himself has gone beyond doing something for the love, beyond simple habit, and into the realms of obsession, of continually repeating the same behaviours, performing the same rituals over and over again, with an ever changing crowd of new faces and old regulars constantly shuffling in and out. And the only constant is Magnus, a Swedish disco-sprite, putting on parties and putting on tunes, obsessively adding to his music collection, occasionally forgoing food for vinyl, filling ever more shelves with 12"s to play in marathon Monday Club Magnus sessions.

Like so many of us who have lived a life in clubs and raves, Mags thought he was just having a good time, having a laugh, living for the weekend, when in fact he was creating memories and friendships that will live with us for the rest of our lives. In the process, Magnus created a little oasis for Bohemians in a town famous for its Bohemians. Club Magnus was Bohemian-Extreme, a place where the truly dedicated hedonists could keep The Man and all his bullshit at bay for a few more precious, life-affirming hours. With his egalitarian ethos, welcoming attitude and hardcore commitment to, and genuine love of underground house music, Mags became a budget-Mancuso for the Brighton brethren. In times such as ours, who could ask for more?

Harold Heath is on Twitter