“Whether we realize it or not, the time for the big events is over. People don’t have money. In the end it trickles down to the partygoers, but the producers of the parties also don’t have money because the costs here are very expensive and the municipality doesn’t help such things happen.” If this prediction of Amots Tokatli, a veteran nightlife man – DJ agent, booking man, everything you can imagine – sounds apocalyptic to you, then what can be said? this is only the beginning. The post-corona enthusiasm (we are out of lockdown! The clubs are back with us and in Europe everything is still closed!) has already dissipated and in its place we are left with an uncertain present and an even more uncertain future. Tel Aviv’s nightlife is seemingly functioning, but something has simply changed and it’s not certain if it will ever return to normal – and to be honest, it’s not even certain that it should.
“The story of nightlife is a long process and the thing that has the most influence on nightlife in Tel Aviv is real estate,” says Reuven Lublin, the founder of Haumann 17 (ever since its roots in Jerusalem) and perhaps The man with the best stories in Israel. “I don’t think that the corona is such an important factor. It’s that there is no longer any place to open mega clubs in the city, there is no physical place to put such a thing. The underground no longer exists, everyone has commercialized.” Here, it should be noted, along with the dry facts, there are also many matters of taste. For example, Lublin says “small parties, of 100-150 people, were never successful, you need a big production for it to be really exciting”. Tokateli says on the other hand, “The partygoers want to go where it’s economical and convenient for them, and if it were economical to maximize this culture it would happen. The festivals and clubs are going to shrink. The big things will be reserved for the more mainstream worlds, and in the end the club culture is an underground culture in its essence.”
Reuven Lublin (Photo: Ilya Melnikov)
They agree on the details, but there are differences between them even on the meaning of the word underground. And David Peles, one of the owners of the Pie, a small club compared to Uman 17, also uses similar terms – mainstream, underground – but surely his worldview is different as well. “Every genre comes from the underground and when it reaches the mainstream it is destroyed, because the cool people who founded it hate it, and this is what happened in house and techno as well. There are always a few good years of clubs and then it expands to other circles and then it loses its charm, people move on to more things Specific and small and less burning every day for them to go out. If the music I would listen to with 30 other people at 11 in the morning in the club today is heard by 30,000 people in Yarakon Park breaking the barriers – it doesn’t look good.” So maybe the question, beyond “what will happen to nightlife in Tel Aviv” should be “what does the audience want to happen to nightlife”. And here the complicated questions begin.
“A club after two years at home? Your senses are not prepared for this at all”
“After the corona virus, we could reopen the alphabet, But we decided to close it for good“, Peles says about the club from which the pie was born – which was then supposed to be a light alternative to the more intense entertainment within the alphabet. “We realized that after the corona there was going to be a certain deterioration in the economic situation of the people as well, people also left the city, people will also come from outside the city because they have the bars did not survive. In the good days both Pai and Alpha could spend one evening in the region of 1400 people, but Claver sat at home for two years and then he had to make the transition from parks or home to a big club? Your senses are not prepared for this at all. The pie was just right for the transition slot. There is a party but it is not with a lot of people and not with too loud a volume and there are squeezed juices at the bar. We realized that this was our advantage and we continued to refine it.”
And this is not the only substantial change that a club in the city has undergone after the corona virus. The revelers in the city have already gotten used to this strange situation – the block is open, but its central extension has been closed for many months. Only that, unlike the closing of the alphabet, here the decision was not exactly in the hands of the management.
“After the corona, the main extension came back for a short period of something like two months, but it was renovated because there was a leak that we had to fix and we had to replace the wooden floor for that. At the same time, we also wanted to lower the stage behind the DJ in order to enlarge the extension even more. When we started During the renovation, it turned out that the leak was much more serious than we thought, and to properly seal it in a safe manner required a larger investment than we had. We tried to get the Israel Defense Forces to come see it and take care of it, but no one came, the weeks went by, people got upset , asked where the extension is,” says Yaron Trax, the owner of the block, probably the club most associated with Tel Aviv and its nightlife in the last decade (and more).
“The Israel Defense Forces, instead of understanding that if they help us we can make money and pay them too – just demand the money immediately. But once we didn’t have the main expansion our revenue dropped significantly, we couldn’t bring in the big names either, we couldn’t bring in the same amount of people either. People really liked the squat and the courtyard and the lounge but they missed the main extension, which for them was the highlight. We lost a lot of people because of it. And the Israel Defense Forces said – bring the money, you owe us money. I tried to explain to them that if they help me and let me continue I can pay them after the main extension opens, but they probably thought I was working for them. They probably thought we were making a lot of money, like everyone else thinks If they don’t know the behind the scenes. And so, just out of a lack of understanding, all the tools were broken. This situation with the Israel Defense Forces,” Trucks concludes with disappointment, “apparently leads us to the end of our road at the central station.”
The central extension will no longer return? The block club (photo: from the block’s Facebook page)
And when you lift your head from the specific troubles of the block, how do you see the situation in the night scene as a whole?
“There is a crisis, not only in Tel Aviv, not only in Israel, all over the world. There are still big parties and big festivals, but there is a crisis that cannot be denied, and I am told this by DJs, party producers, DJ agents, club owners, everything. Germany, Romania , France, England, in all these places there is a crisis of the night scene. Fewer people go out, even for very big events with very strong lineups. Also the Berghain is sometimes full and sometimes it’s half full, which is something you didn’t have before. And it’s the strongest club in Germany, so What happens in the smaller clubs? Not to mention the ones that have closed. The parties themselves are also shorter, they no longer last until the afternoon-evening of the next day as it used to happen in Europe, but end at eight in the morning. My colleagues in Romania say that they think it’s because in Europe the clubs haven’t worked for two years perfection, so that’s where the natural and organic cycle of the generations that happens while the clubs are working is really damaged. There is a generation that stops being clubbers and there is a generation that starts to be clubbers, so on the one hand one generation stopped being clubbers, because there are changes in habits, changes in the way of life, they get married, have children or Just realizing that they no longer need to go out as much as they used to First – on the other hand, the younger generation didn’t have clubs to be exposed to this culture and is in more commercial genres. They don’t even know what a club is, what quality sound is. It also exists in Israel, to a certain extent, and in all of Europe. So this theory sounds quite logical.”
Yaron Trucks. Photo: Ilya Melnikov
“It’s not Tel Aviv’s anymore”
Adi Shabbat, one of the oldest and most respected DJs in Tel Aviv, obviously has a different perspective on what is going on than a club owner or party producer. “I’m not a business owner, so I don’t know what needs to be done to survive these days,” she admits simply. Her perspective is perhaps even closer to Blaini’s perspective. “The events have become more festival-like, the big lineups have moved outside, to external events, to external producers, Lih” Tsenim, it’s not for clubs, andIt’s not Tel Aviv’s anymore, it’s just not Tel Aviv’s.”
What about the little parties? The whole Alma, the harpy, the pie?
“It’s not clubs, it’s places where you can dance. It’s great, it’s charming, it’s a great and cute solution and it rebuilds the scene and it’s a crowd of young people. But Tel Aviv was known for its club scene and this city is on hiatus. I really like playing in clubs, at festivals , at big events, it’s fun. But The audience of the past really came to hear the music and today’s audience is looking for the party, the party, the happening.”
Solutions? Apparently, wait and try to maintain some optimism. Tuktali puts the ball back in the hands of Ron Huldai in this discussion. “Tel Aviv boasts that it is a 24/7 city. It is written in El Al’s brochure, there are hotels that make a living from it, but the city itself does nothing to support this. What will happen? The same but later.” Trax says that “very experienced people in the field rightly say that in the end nightlife has always been in waves of a few years. Both in Israel and in the world you can see this wave, so the estimates are that there is a chance that it will take three to four years for the scene to return to its previous size its”. Lublin agrees – perhaps he is the “very experienced people in the field”. “I’ve owned a club for 40 years and I’ve seen many incarnations. Every five-six years there is a reversal. I can say one thing, there will always be good music. The music that will be created in the future is the music that we will love. And that’s the beauty of it, that it’s simple. It’s that simple”.