1992-1995 – Tunnel Club (Piter)

Denis Oding:
«In 1992 they started clearing out the squat on Svechnoy. We lost the premises, ended up back in our parents' flats and grew rather glum. It has to be said that by that point a new capitalist era had begun in Piter. Everyone was preoccupied with making money, and everything had been put on commercial rails. Unfortunately, this gold rush didn't touch the sphere of art. There was no art market as such. Galleries didn't exist, and it was impossible to sell paintings. After conferring, we decided to open our own establishment.
From the very start we were set on a club in a basement. Oleg had just come back from Germany, where he'd seen plenty of these underground clubs, and we understood perfectly that we needed to go underground. Only that way could we create a personal space; our own microworld, in which we and our friends would feel at home.
Finding a suitable venue was an incredible ordeal. We looked over a great many premises and, in the end, discovered a marvellous bomb shelter in Lyubansky Lane. However, getting hold of it proved no easy matter. Negotiations took about a year – the basement was on the books of a military factory. At first its management met our idea with hostility, and generally refused to have anything to do with us. Then they thawed, but then some Chinese people turned up with an idea to open some kind of shopping centre there. Negotiations with them took another three months or so. It dragged on, seemingly forever – the prospective tenants would disappear, then new ones would appear with new, even more insane ideas. In the end the management got fed up with it and agreed to hand the premises over to us, for our completely undefined and, to them, utterly incomprehensible club.
We had to work by «crooked» schemes. The factory, by law, had no right to lease us that basement, but they could set up joint ventures. Thank God there was a fairly reasonable director there, with whom we came to an amicable arrangement, for a percentage of the profit. It was a gentleman's, partnership agreement.
It has to be said that back then there wasn't a single legal, permanently operating club in Piter. The «Planetarium» existed in the form of one-off parties. The «New Composers» worked there, regularly putting something on. From time to time outside tenants would appear who tried to hold their own parties there. «Tunnel», therefore, turned out to be the first club registered by the authorities and possessing a heap of paperwork. We set up the «Tunnel» LLC and our activity now had an official character.
In the early '90s it was easy to gather people for a party. The core of clubbers consisted of a community of two or three hundred people. Counting their friends, girlfriends and those who'd randomly latched onto the movement – five hundred people maximum. They all knew each other closely, communicated very actively, so information spread through that circle instantly. It was enough to print flyers, hand them out – and the club was already packed.
With the appearance of «Tunnel» the number of «night dwellers» grew considerably. Mainly, unfortunately, at the expense of the Petersburg gangsters. A club «for our own», an enclosed space of like-minded people, didn't work out. Crime poured in on us. It was completely unclear what they wanted in the club. Probably they were simply curious to see what people got up to at night, what music they danced to and, in general, what was going on. And we were fair-souled young people, utterly unprepared for a harsh encounter with evil. We had no power to stand against this army.
Luckily, this interest faded fairly quickly – the gangsters were simply bored spending the whole night stuck in a basement under deafening music. It was «beneath them». And they vanished. But, alas, not for long. As soon as pills started appearing in the nightlife, the gangsters came back, apparently sensing the smell of easy money. Now that was scary. One fine moment the dancefloor was full of burly, shaven-headed lads. To somehow change this situation, we were forced to resort to a trick, staging fake police raids. It helped – we managed to get some of the lads out of the club.
But there were real raids at «Tunnel» too, very frightening ones. In principle, the authorities couldn't care less what went on in Petersburg's clubs. But as soon as some criminal emergency happened, as soon as one of the policemen was killed in a seedy spot, very harsh crackdowns would begin immediately.
Once there was a very scary «Masks Show» at «Tunnel». OMON troops burst into the club with automatic rifles, laid everyone on the floor and held them in that position for several hours. We happened to have a German DJ playing, and the poor fellow got it worst of all. Out of foolishness he raised his head and immediately got a boot to the face. In the end they knocked out the poor man's front teeth.
Incidentally, foreigners were reluctant to come to Russia back then. I remember that in 1994 we tried to lure Marusha over, but she flatly refused. For her Russia was then an unknown and incredibly terrifying country, which she didn't want to go to under any pretext. In 1993, by some miracle, we managed to lure Nick Warren to «Tunnel», there was a mighty party that people in Piter remember to this day.
At first only Lyokha and Andrei played at «Tunnel». Then Gavrila appeared from Goa with a collection of trance. Danya Andenson and Lyokha Zalogin specialised in house. Various directions started appearing and by about '95 we began holding specialised parties with different music – techno, hardcore, drum-and-bass.
Initially «Tunnel» operated twice a week, and somewhere after a year we switched to a three-day schedule. We also put on a lot of exhibitions at the club. We had many artist friends and, in the absence of galleries, «Tunnel» was a good exhibition space for them.
About 700 people fit into the club. We gave all our friends club cards, while everyone else got into «Tunnel» through the box office. All in all, the club was a profitable venture. It wasn't super-income, but you could live on that money back then.
In 1994 «Tunnel» got a connection with Moscow. By that point the capital, thoroughly wound up by the parties of the Haas brothers, Vorontsov, Birman and Salmaksov, had come alive. After «Gagarin party» came the Penthouse, «Hermitage», an active scene got going. But these, with the exception perhaps of «Ptuch», were commercial discos. And with «Ptuch» we were in close contact. They came to us, watched how it all happened at «Tunnel».
And in 1995 the «Tunnel» part of my life came to an end. All of us, somehow unexpectedly and very badly, fell out. It all started, as usual, with the sharing out of some money, and ended with mutual accusations. It's funny to talk about it now, but back then that subject was taken extremely painfully. We had a protracted conflict, very acute, and Oleg and I decided to step away from the business. It was easier to take up something else than to wage a long war of position, undermining and squeezing someone out. Oleg and I left «Tunnel», set up «Counterforce» and started organising independent events».