Is it time Gatecrasher’s reputation crashed and burned?

Is it time Gatecrasher’s reputation crashed and burned?

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Gatecrasher One nightclub was Sheffield’s answer to Studio 54: hedonistic, exclusive and profoundly influential. Alison (not her real name) didn’t even like the trance music it was most famous for — the titular Gatecrasher event “just used to sound like one long song all night,” she says — but she still remembers the three years she worked there as the best of her life. “There was always something crazy going on,” she says, recalling the intense hedonistic atmosphere of the late 90s that Gatecrasher, more than anywhere else, epitomised. On more than one occasion, she saw a DJ receiving a blowjob in the booth, mid-set.

The club on Matilda Street — known as The Republic until it was purchased, refurbished and renamed by the Gatecrasher events company in 2003 — left an even stronger impression on those who came from far and wide to party there. Alison remembers being approached years later by a stranger from Portsmouth who recognised her face from behind the bar. “He only went once,” she recalls, “but he said it was the best night of his life. He’d clearly memorised everything about it.” The club’s regulars and true devotees — the “Crasher Kids” — were instantly identifiable from their lurid spiked hair and intricate outfits, which they sometimes spent weeks putting together, and would proudly wear the Gatecrasher logo to make their allegiance clear. 

Getting in was not easy, and not cheap either. Despite a maximum capacity of more than 1,200, the club reportedly once turned away almost twice that many punters in a single night. For those lucky enough to make the cut, entry in 2003 could cost as much as £20, the equivalent of almost £40 today. Unsurprisingly, Gatecrasher One spent years making money hand over fist. Alison says she personally put at least a grand in the till every night she worked and remembers one Thursday night when the bar made around £28,000 in total. 

That’s how most people remember Gatecrasher. As a dizzying carousel of drugs, music and money brought to a halt by the devastating 2007 fire that razed the club to the ground. As the institution that helped launch myriad DJ careers and became the spiritual home of the trance genre. And as one of Sheffield’s most important cultural exports, up there with Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys. Before long, there were Gatecrasher clubs in a number of UK cities — Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham and Watford — and even a short-lived expansion to Ibiza.

But, to those in the know, Gatecrasher has long been an “industry inside joke,” as one former employee put it, a joke that only gets less funny as the years go on. “It’s a shame because a brand like that meant so much to people, it shaped their teens and provided the soundtrack of their lives,” says one clubland insider. Like many people quoted in this article, he asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the company’s notoriously litigious owner. “When you understand the true story behind it all, it’s very sad really.” 

The problem, according to everyone I spoke to, is said owner: 59-year-old Simon Raine. “He didn’t like paying people,” claims a former employee from the brand’s Sheffield heyday, even when Gatecrasher should have been making more than enough money to do so. As time went on and profit margins grew thinner, this tendency only became more egregious. Another former staff member who worked for Gatecrasher during its short-lived attempt to take over Area on Burgess Street in 2018 alleges that, at every event Raine attended, DJs still owed their fee “would be circling the venue asking where he was.” 

And it wasn’t just those behind the decks that reportedly struggled to get him to cough up. Suppliers, lighting engineers, cleaners, landlords, councils — everywhere money could be owed, it was. This same employee claims there was “a stand-off every week” at Area with irate door staff, that the building’s phones were disconnected because the bills went unpaid and that Raine would only ever “pay what he had to to keep the club open”. Even the rubbish was sorted on the cheap: he allegedly let bin bags pile up in a side room, hiring a skip company to cart everything off once it was full. Before long, Area’s landlord, Sheffield Council, had seized control of the building.

According to Amadeus Mozart (yes, really), co-founder of the Tidy Trax label, everyone in the industry has “at least five” stories about being burned by Raine. “They’re all quite horrific and always on the same theme too: he ripped me off, he owes me money,” he says. “I don’t think you could find one person in the industry with a good word to say about him.” Despite this, Gatecrasher is still organising events and even has one booked in just over two weeks time, although many have good reason to suspect this night won’t take place. 

The Tribune’s attempt to contact Gatecrasher through its official Facebook page — the only channel available, since its website and email are both down — went unanswered for days. Eventually, after securing Raine’s personal phone number from a former associate, we received an email that insisted the allegations we put to him reflect “a one-sided perspective that misrepresents several critical aspects” and contain “10%-20% truth and 80-90% BS”. Over a handful of emails back and forth, however, the only thing he specifically denied is being the owner of Gatecrasher, although he refused to name the new owner. “It’s not for me to tell you how to do your job,” he wrote. “If you’re an investigative reporter, you need to find out who owns it.” According to Companies House, Raine is the sole active director of both Gatecrasher Ltd and Gatecrasher Classical Ltd, while his LinkedIn page still lists him as the CEO of the Gatecrasher Group. 

“You are a newish publication and I am always keen to assist and support new ventures,” he wrote in an earlier, friendlier email, “especially in Sheffield, as the city was good to me and my businesses.” If we held off for a week, he would be prepared to offer us “a scoop”. However, if we refused to delay publication, he threatened to sue, not only The Tribune, but me personally.