Ahead of its seventh birthday on January 31st, with Grammy-winning Jayda G headlining the celebrations — we spoke to Slipped Disc about carving out space in a Cambridge nightlife scene dominated by the usual players.

Slipped Disc Termly All-Nighter 29/11 / Kitty Fay (Edited)

Cambridge nightlife seems dead set on being shit.

For the price of a London pint, you can drink among a student body conditioned by the finest of British middle-class repression (Freud would have a field day in Mash). You can go clubbing in a building owned by an even more quintessentially stuffy institution - Father Cambridge, benevolent patriarch, thank you for closing Revs during exams. And when you tire of 2010’s remixes, my little starship, you can fly to the nearest polystyrene box of cheesy chips and garlic sauce.

First year was devastating. After moving down from Leeds, I missed the peaking monitors of an ill-prepared rave, techno shrieking through soundproof-less walls. By fourth year, I rebuke all Cindies nights. You will not see me in Kiki’s. The amount of alcohol required to have fun there is deleterious to human health.

But there is always something close to home about the walk down to Junction: pres on the way, bottle in hand, the familiar excitement of a Slipped Disc night.

Slipped Disc Termly All-Nighter 29/11 / Kitty Fay

Now celebrating seven years, Slipped Disc is the city’s staple independent student event. With the music pumping, the walls rattling, TCS went backstage to speak to organisers from across generations — the originators and the torch bearers — on what it takes to keep a night going: fast paced, electric, and energetic — in a city determined to keep the music to a minimum.

Apparently, Cambridge nightlife was not always quite so shit! According to Gideon, an original organiser who travelled up from London for the termly All-Nighter, the appetite for student DJs and decent music long predated Slipped Disc. In 2017, he helped set up Urban Bass at Fez - a legendary club since replaced by Mash.

Fez, in Gideon’s telling, sounds feral in the best way. Moroccan ornaments cluttered the walls. Above the frenzied crowd, the ceiling, “sort of collected everyone's evaporating sweat, and would drip on a specific spot on the dancefloor” — a cursed stain everyone learned instinctively to avoid.

More than the décor, it was the energy. As he tells it, he describes a different world: “It was just the way it was organised. They were really open to students putting on their own nights. No higher fee, with a real grassroots momentum.” On any given week, “six or seven nights would be running. We had people doing their birthdays there on like… a Wednesday!”

He reels off events that now sound like an archive of vanished guilds: Avant-Gardening. Haze. Turf.

He lingers on the last. “Turf was run by a guy called Napa,” Gideon explains, “who went on to set up one of the bigger agencies in London, One House. They put on people like Eliza Rose and Dan Shake — and they would come to play Cambridge, in Revs, back when we were students and they weren’t very big.”

Then Covid hit. Turf — which had dominated that corner of the scene, booked the biggest names, and ran the termly Junction Turf All-Nighter — folded. “They basically left during Covid,” Gideon says. “And never came back.”

The floor cleared. A vacuum opened.

The organisers had clocked the growing exhaustion with Sunday Life, then held at Kuda (now Vinyl). They approached “Barney,” who “used to run a club called Ballare,” before it shut. When Slipped Disc was first pitched, Gideon recalls, the idea was simple: no one wanted to be at Sunday Life anymore. Barney agreed — with conditions. “It's the same company that owns both clubs.” No outright crowd-poaching.

The instruction was blunt. “They’re going to be the sporty Drinking Soc night,” Barney told them. “I want you guys to do something different.’”

“And so we always had an ethos,” says Gideon. “Keep it underground. Platform the music first. Student DJs.”

Originally, the night was set to be called Off the Record. Then a Manchester event with the same name played in Cambridge less than a week later. Back to the drawing board, Slipped Disc became the city’s January 2019 inception to the event we rave to today.

The tension with Cambridge’s nightlife hegemon, Cindies, however, never quite disappeared.

For Olly, that dominance is corrosive to student music and creativity. “When you go to Wednesday Revs, you rarely know the DJs,” he says. “It’s usually someone brought in to play the same mix. There’s no investment in student culture.”

Slipped Disc’s response has been to build something parallel. The collective has attempted to run “an alternative Freshers Week where we amplify other student collectives: JazzSoc, Hip-Hop Soc, Slipped Disc, Off the Record.” (the Cambridge collective, not the Manchester one!). The pushback was swift. “Since trying to run that rival Freshers’ Week,” Olly explains, “we’ve basically been cut off from all Cindies channels. Blocked on Instagram.”

The control runs deep. “You know the Cambridge Freshers’ Instagram page?” he asks. “That’s run by Cindies Student Nights.” The relationship, he says, has shifted over time. There have been collaborations; Olly even worked as a Cindies rep while he was a student.

But the limits are firm. Gideon explains that the Freshers’ Page was explicitly told not to promote any event landing on the same day as a Cindies night — a policy that, during Freshers’ Week, effectively blocks everything else. “They run a night every single day,” he says.

The consequences border on the absurd. Gideon says a 2024 Slipped Disc night headlined by Silva Bumpa — a Boiler Room alumnus known for speed-garage and bass — was barred from being shared because it clashed with a “Fleek Thursday”.

In deliberate contrast to the “rinse-and-repeat” logic of Cambridge’s mainstream nightlife, Olly speaks warmly of Junction itself. “When Room 2’s full and the music’s good,” he says, “I genuinely think it’s the best clubbing experience I’ve ever had.”

The venue carries its own weight. Junction, Olly explains, “has a thirty-year history in the DnB scene,” hosting the longest-running DnB night in the country, Warning. “You’ve got people who’ve been going for eighteen years,” he says. “They’ve still got event promos stuck to their cars.” Its reputation travels. During a music production workshop in London, Olly mentioned running a Junction night — the tutor, a veteran who had worked with Public Enemy and played with The Wailers, was “ecstatic” upon hearing the name.

Even before Junction existed, the area carried a reputation. In 1985, revellers staged a disco in a disused cycle shop nearby. Police intervention ended in a riot: an energy that eventually crystallised into the Cambridge Venue Group, formed to pressure the City Council into supporting live music spaces.

That lineage now extends forward. This year marked the creation of Slipped Disc’s first committee. “It was hard to stay connected once we all moved to London,” Olly says. “But we want students to have the same experience we did.” The committee spans years — mostly second and third years, one postgraduate — and, for the first time, a fresher. Olly gestures to the sofa opposite. “That’s Miles.” Miles smiles back.

For Gideon, the collective’s strength lies in its peculiar positioning. “In London, it’s hard to book a big name — there’s so much competition. In Cambridge, there’s a real opportunity. Someone who’s just started DJing can play alongside someone who’s just toured the States.”

Olly sees it as formative. “University is a strange, intense three years. Nights out matter. We’ve been able to show people artists they never would’ve seen — DJs the city would never book.” What matters most, he says, is memory: “Seeing people at five in the morning, leaving with all their mates — that’s why we do it.” He pauses. “If it were left to Cindies, it just wouldn’t happen!”

Slipped Disc’s seventh birthday lands on January 31st. With Grammy-winning Jayda G headlining — tickets are on sale now.

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