If you’ve read much about London Night Czar Amy Lamé recently, it’s unlikely to have been particularly flattering. Since being appointed in 2016 to advocate for the capital’s nightlife and improve late-night policy-making, her whopping £130k salary and apparent inability to deliver tangible results have been met with increasingly vociferous criticism.
Lamé’s announcement earlier this month that she’s stepping down after eight years in the job (she officially departs on Thursday) has reignited rather than resolved that debate. Intended as a unifying figure for the capital, bringing together politicians and police, bug-eyed ravers and overnight carers alike, the Night Czar has instead become wildly divisive: a lightning rod for wider debates around night-time culture and commerce.
As such, Lamé’s departure has implications for much more than just her own career, and for music fans well beyond the M25. As the UK’s first Night Czar – Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol have since appointed their own Night Time Economy Advisors – Lamé’s tenure has been a bold experiment in the oversight and support afforded by politicians to Britain’s clubs, pubs and gig venues. Almost a decade later, it’s still not entirely clear whether that experiment has worked, or what happens next.
Much of this confusion stems from the way in which the Night Czar role was created. In 2015, it was revealed that London had lost roughly 40 per cent of its grassroots music venues in the preceding decade. A taskforce was set up by then-Mayor Boris Johnson to address the issue: their report, co-authored with the Music Venue Trust, was adopted by the newly-elected Sadiq Khan a year later. It called for the creation of a Night Czar, inspired by a similar role in Amsterdam, but by the time Lamé was appointed things had already been watered down.
“Originally, the way that we envisaged the role, it had more powers” says Mark Davyd, the CEO of the Music Venue Trust. “One of the key things that I said, which didn’t make it into the final report, was that the post needed budgetary powers in order to be seen as effective.” This didn’t happen: eight years on, Davyd believes he’s been proven right. “When you get to the nub of people’s criticisms,” he says of those dissatisfied with Lamé’s tenure, “they actually agree with me: the Night Czar didn’t have enough powers.”
In light of those constraints, Davyd argues, Lamé did a quiet but highly effective job. “At any point when there’s been a threat to a music venue, a club, a theatre, any kind of cultural venue at risk, Amy’s team would be part of that process. She would try and find consensus, and where there was dissent, work out how that could be removed.”
Davyd specifically cites Lamé’s work around Soho’s 100 Club as evidence of this – “that club would have closed, if it wasn’t for the way Amy handled it” he says, bluntly – along with her role in ensuring that GLA funds reached vulnerable venues, particularly those catering to LGBTQ+ audiences, during the Covid pandemic. His comments mirror plenty of other conversations I’ve had with people involved in London’s nightlife, who describe Lamé doing a laudable job with the imperfect hand she’d been dealt.
But it’s fair to say that not everyone agrees with that assessment. Davyd’s staunch support is conspicuously not echoed by his counterpart Michael Kill of the Night Time Industries Association, a trade body representing club owners and big nightlife operators. “What frustrates me with London, as opposed to other cities, is that particularly over the last few years engagement has been very limited” he says, describing a “breakdown in relationship” where offers to take Sadiq Khan on a late-night tour of the city went unanswered, and attempts to set specific targets for the Night Czar around protecting nightlife met a brick wall.
While the creation of the Night Czar role had been prompted by specific issues around cultural venues, Lamé instead defined her remit as “[ensuring] that the capital works better for everyone between 6pm and 6am.” Between her limited powers and this much broader scope, the resources at her disposal have ended up stretched. “We needed someone with real drive, that had an ability to take both the industry and the Mayor’s Office with them,” Kill explains. “I think without a doubt the role itself was very difficult, but also the approach to the role potentially wasn’t right either… some of the fundamental, overarching issues that face the industry just weren’t being dealt with.”
Kill is far from alone in thinking this. “I was just really disappointed, as were a lot of promoters, about the lack of engagement the Night Czar had” says Steven Braines, the promoter of LGBTQIA+ club night he.she.they, and a board member of the NTIA. “There was no reaching out, and not a lot of clear ways to reach in.” Even Lamé’s supporters concede that communication was an issue, with Mark Davyd referring to a “bunker mentality” developing in the face of sustained criticism, which limited her ability to celebrate successes or explain decision-making to wider audiences. Lamé’s reluctance to speak to journalists (she declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article) has become something of a running joke among those covering her work.
“There were hundreds of times,” says Mark Dayvd, “when Amy would have loved to have been in the Evening Standard saying ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ But she didn’t have the power to do that, and it would have undermined the soft power she was trying to exercise in the background.” The word which comes up repeatedly with Michael Kill is “autonomy” – the sense that while Lamé might have been the one copping most of the flak for London’s struggling nightlife, her room to manoeuvre was dictated from above.
Lamé’s failure to provide the robust voice music fans and industry figures had hoped for has created a vacuum, which her Conservative opponents have been only too eager to fill. “I’m a Labour boy at heart, more on the left of the party” says Steven Braines of he.she.they, “but I had more contact with queer Tories inviting me to the London Assembly to discuss everything from transphobia and Islamophobia to drug testing and female-identifying safety on the Night Tube than I did from Amy, which seems extraordinary.”
Between the numerous anti-Tory memes on he.she.they’s social pages, and the idea of an avowedly trans-inclusive rave joining forces with a Conservative party which may soon be led by someone with Kemi Badenoch’s views, there’s certainly something of a dissonance here. In July, both Braines and Michael Kill were part of a roundtable discussion hosted by the Conservative group at the Greater London Assembly: a policy report based on that conversation, focusing almost entirely on attacking Sadiq Khan and Amy Lamé, was rushed out at 6pm on the day Lamé resigned.
Depending on your ideological persuasion, you might see all this as a heartwarming display of bipartisan collaboration, a reflection of industry frustration at Lamé’s repeated fumbles, or some old-fashioned political opportunism. “Too many people in the night-time economy have found themselves standing next to certain groups, echoing their words,” says Mark Davyd, “without really considering what those people want.”
Emma Best, deputy leader of the GLA Conservatives and the driving force behind their nightlife report, dismisses such cynicism, and says that club culture’s been part of her life for decades. “I grew up gay in Ilford, which is not somewhere you’ll find many people from the LGBT+ community. It was only when I started going out with friends that we saw this whole new world.” It’s not that the Tories are suddenly jumping on a bandwagon, she argues, but that people are finally willing to listen to them. “I’ve been talking about this issue for 10 years. Nobody wanted to talk to the Tories. The fact they want to talk to me now is a reflection of where we are: people feel that the friends they had in politics are no longer the people they trust to come through for them.”
Her diagnosis of what’s gone wrong touches on many familiar frustrations. “I started to realise, as I got older, that the places I used to go out weren’t open any more” she explains, “When we came back from the pandemic, one of the first things Sadiq Khan and I clashed on was re-opening the Night Tube. The fact that nobody saw it as a priority to restore access to the night-time economy shows me where we stand.”
In terms of Amy Lamé’s performance, Best also pushes back convincingly on the idea that soft power required the Night Czar to stay silent. “You don’t have to go around calling [local councils] stupid to find a way through, do you? You can still champion the night-time economy, to my mind. And perhaps if they’d been giving more evidence at licensing hearings and policy-making sessions, they wouldn’t have had to write angry pieces in the Evening Standard.” Best is earnest about improving London’s late-night culture, but it’s clear that party political concerns aren’t irrelevant either. “As a GLA member, my literal job is to scrutinise the Mayor” she says. “So I have to look at ways in which the Mayor can change things, because that’s what I can realistically affect or talk about in my work.”
Luke Robert Black – the Chairman of LGBT+ Conservatives and a fellow contributor to the roundtable and report led by Best – is somewhat more stark in his reasoning. In an opinion piece for ConservativeHome published two months before the 2024 Mayoral election, he outlines the partisan imperative for toppling Lamé. “If her gravy train ends (in her resignation or termination)” he says, “it would be a victory over Khan’s biggest electoral asset.” This is not a reference to Lamé herself, but the nebulous “identity politics and vibes” she represents, and to which she apparently owes her privileged position. All’s fair in love and local politics, of course, but this line of thinking shows just how much of a political football the Night Czar has become. “Khan has a weakness” reads the headline. “London Tories should press the attack.”
They have done so with gusto – another research report by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute, similarly scathing in its treatment of both Khan and Lamé, features a foreword by current Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick. Susan Hall, Khan’s opponent in this year’s Mayoral Election, brought up nightlife repeatedly on the campaign trail, even referring to herself as a former “raver” and promising to go on a big night out with Michael Kill of the NTIA. In the run-up to polling day, the Daily Mail ran a succession of hit pieces targeting Lamé, each illustrated with the same picture of her standing next to Khan. Political gossip site Guido Fawkes spent the summer analysing Lamé’s out-of-office messages while she was on sick leave, with the not-so-subtle implication that she’d been skiving. Comments under the piece obsess over her weight, or refer to her as a “maggot”.
Perhaps surprisingly, Emma Best and the GLA Conservatives have been perfectly happy to applaud the Labour-run administration in Manchester and its Night Time Economy Advisor, Sacha Lord (appointed two years after Lamé, in 2018). The Tories’ recent nightlife report calls directly for Lamé to be sacked and the Night Czar role abolished, to be replaced with an unpaid advisory position identical to the one Lord currently holds. The concept of an industry leader sharing his expertise at no cost to the taxpayer, rather than an overpaid civil servant running things, is clearly a more natural fit for Conservative inclinations.
Lord’s approach to that role has been assertive and less assiduously political than Lamé’s, arguing loudly in the media for the nightlife industry’s economic and cultural importance, regardless of whether it’s Labour or the Conservatives in his crosshairs – exactly what many people say Lamé should have been doing. But Lamé and Lord’s differing job titles reflect distinct political priorities: unlike Lamé, Lord doesn’t have an office in City Hall, isn’t paid a wage by taxpayers, and isn’t directly answerable to the Mayor, giving him far broader latitude to criticise local councils and decision-makers. Speaking to people directly involved in Manchester’s night-time scenes, it’s also not clear that this approach has been any more effective than Lamé’s, or that merely adopting the same model would magically solve London’s problems.
“My overriding thought with all of this is that these figures aren’t what dance music is looking for. There’s a huge miscommunication between what a Night Czar or Night Time Economy Advisor is, and what people actually want and need,” says Finn McCorry, a DJ and promoter who also runs the Manchester studio of online radio station NTS. For him, political disputes continue to miss the bigger picture, in Manchester as elsewhere. “The industry’s been in constant crisis since about 2007,” he argues. “Dance music’s as visible as it’s ever been, but unless you’re one of maybe 100 big-name festival DJs, there’s been a hollowing-out of the touring circuit that was birthing these sounds. We’re witnessing a slow but seismic change in the culture of where music is performed, and where it comes from.”
For many years Lord has juggled his political role with ownership of Manchester’s biggest promoter, Warehouse Project, and its biggest festival, Parklife, prompting concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Earlier this year, after an investigation by Mill Media alleged that a security firm owned by Lord had fraudulently claimed £400k in Covid relief funds, he sold his remaining stake in WHP to the global promotion monolith Live Nation, and stepped down from his role at Parklife.
“I mean, it’s just so clearly inappropriate, isn’t it, that it stuns me that we’re still being forced to comment on it.” McCorry says, specifically citing Warehouse Project’s notoriously aggressive use of exclusivity contracts to lock DJs out of other venues in Manchester – an issue Lord has conspicuously not addressed in his political capacity. “Warehouse Project is famously divisive, it’s caused a lot of problems and frustrations, and has clearly not been a friend or partner to Manchester’s grassroots scene and culture. How is it not completely inappropriate for someone with that big a stake in a specific clubbing entity, which has that approach, to become a Night Czar?”
“I think Sacha is an extremely effective figurehead for nightlife in Manchester, and meetings happen because he causes a situation to be brought to the forefront,” says Mark Davyd of the differences between Lord and Lamé’s approaches. “But I don’t see him in a lot of meetings.” This has particular implications for smaller venues, Davyd explains. “I’ve been in rooms with very aggressive landlords, trying to hike a venue’s rent by over 100% while also being in dispute about building maintenance. Amy will pacify everyone, make sure they get heard, and then come up with a report afterwards suggesting ways forward that everyone can buy into. Sacha might do that too, but I haven’t seen it.”
For all the good Lamé and Lord have done in their respective cities, both clearly come with baggage, and the thought of their approaches being the only ones on offer feels profoundly underwhelming. If we’re after a genuine alternative, then maybe it’s Belfast we should be looking to, rather than Manchester. Instead of outsourcing the debate to political operatives and industry powerbrokers, the campaign group Free The Night have instead taken the apparently revolutionary step of letting DJs, dancers and cultural communities advocate for themselves.
Here, the divide isn’t between different political factions, but between those who view the issue in terms of culture, or in terms of commerce. “There’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be talking about the economic value that culture brings to cities and places,” says Boyd Sleator from Free The Night. “But one of the things we need to stay true to is that even if these spaces aren’t economically valuable, they’re still socially and culturally valuable.” Even subtle semantic shifts can reveal a fundamentally different approach to the problem. “We don’t want to use the words ‘night-time economy’ unless it’s specifically about financial viability,” Sleator explains. “We talk about culture and communities at night… it’s about building consensus across political parties about why these things are important.”
Free The Night was founded in 2021 when Sleator – a former promoter whose day job now involves campaigning for human rights – and the DJ and label owner Holly Lester, amongst others, realised that nobody else was doing this work. It hasn’t been easy, even if there’s now growing cross-party support for their position. “Originally I’d gathered a group of people involved in nightlife who were also interested in making a change,” says Lester. “It didn’t get off the ground at first, because we didn’t have anyone who knew how to lobby the government. Without Boyd’s experience from his day job, we wouldn’t be where we are now. I think a lot of people struggle with that sense of knowing where to begin, or how to do it.”
But if it’s possible for working DJs and creatives to take ownership of the conversation in Northern Ireland – home to the most restrictive licensing laws in Europe, and without a functioning government for most of Free The Night’s existence – then what’s stopping the rest of us? “It’s actually not that difficult to do once you’ve got a sense of what you want to achieve and how to go about it,” says Sleator, when asked whether more DJs and dancers need to link up with campaigners. “But maybe there does need to be some form of training for creatives about what advocacy is and how they can get into it.”
The nearest equivalent to a grassroots campaign on this side of the Irish Sea is probably Save Our Scene, a well-meaning but somewhat nebulous organisation which ran a series of politically incoherent protests at the end of lockdown, is constituted as a for-profit limited company and now appears to function largely as a marketing agency, running rave-related brand activations. “One of my big radicalising moments was during lockdown, probably because I’d spent far too long in my bedroom,” says Finn McCorry, “but I remember seeing how many people in our industry had lost their jobs, and it didn’t really feel like any big-name DJs had come out swinging for them in the way that, say, Ian McKellen was constantly talking about people who worked in theatres. I think the crux of the issue is that there’s not really any cultural leadership.”
This absence of a UK-wide voice for grassroots dance music is something that crops up with everyone I speak to, a charge tacitly accepted even by Mark Davyd and Michael Kill: the Music Venue Trust does represent clubs, but their roots are in live music and bands; the NTIA focuses exclusively on clubs, but that includes everything from basement dives to massive entertainment conglomerates, with the latter inevitably exerting greater economic influence on the conversation. Politicians of all stripes, Night Czars or not, continue to refract the issues through their own partisan lenses. Underground culture, for culture’s sake – the sweaty, messy, financially precarious labour of love that makes the UK what it is – never quite reaches the top of anyone’s list of priorities.
In the wake of Amy Lamé’s resignation, Sadiq Khan declined to name a direct successor. Instead, nearly a decade on from the Night Czar concept first being suggested, yet another taskforce will review London’s late-night landscape and determine its fate. The Music Venue Trust, the NTIA, and local Conservatives are all set to be involved, while the Mayor’s Office remains characteristically tight-lipped on when they’ll report and what they’ll cover. DJs, dancers, promoters, musicians, and music fans of all kinds remain largely on the outside of these discussions, waiting to hear what’s been decided on our behalf. Perhaps it’s time we started getting our own hands dirty.
