Block9’s NYC Downlow might just be the best festival arena on the planet

NYC Downlow is an unbeatable haven of night-world depravity, juddering analogue house, sex, mud-encrusted trannies, moustaches, sex, underground disco, game-changing global DJs, sex, strobes, hardcore homo frolicking, and the stench of amyl nitrate. It’s a queer bacchanal that never stops, a New York Meatpacking District warehouse party where homo, hetero, lesbian, bi, trans and anything in between are all thoroughly welcome, replete with sides of beef and hairy bear “gay butchers” ripe for priapic kicks. It’s all day, it’s all night, and, like Berghain (of which more later), cameras are verboten. What goes on at NYC Downlow stays within its dark and sweaty confines. This is clubbing as it once was – and ever should be.

One other thing sets NYC Downlow apart. It exists only for five days each June in a far-flung Somerset field. For NYC Downlow, now heading towards its 10th birthday, is Glastonbury’s – and maybe the world’s – best festival arena, a venue that’s hosted one-off, you’ll-remember-it-forever sets by The Black Madonna, Kerri Chandler, Roger Sanchez, Eats Everything, Joe Clausell, Lil Louis, David Morales, Robert Owens, Danny Krivit and plenty more.

“The intention,” explains Steve Gallagher, half of the NYC Downlow team, “is for people to have an amazing time but leave having experienced something much more than that.”

“It’s not about consuming entertainment through a device or even a performance, it’s about participating,” adds Gideon Berger, his creative partner. “It’s about the original spirit of dance music, so about each other, about turning off your phone and engaging. The lasting thing that the thousands who’ve come through Downlow have said is that people meet other people there. It’s a gay venue, but it’s inclusive. Straight people can come if they want. Anybody can come as long as they’re a freak.”

As radical set design outfit Block9, Gideon, 39, and Steve, 45, worked on Banksy’s Dismaland project and have built stage environments for Skrillex and Lana del Rey. They’re working with Jamie Hewlett as production designers for the Gorillaz’ 2017 live tour and as art directors of creative content for the new ‘Humanz’ live show. Block9 are also lead artists with Hewlett and Damon Albarn in the creation of the group’s Demon Dayz Festival, from concept development and graphic design through to set design for the festival’s stages. At Glastonbury alone they’re also responsible for sci-fi/post-apocalyptic dance venues Genosys and London Underground. But the Downlow is the jewel in the crown.

“What we’ll never do is quadruple its size, triple the drinks prices and monetise it,” says Berger vehemently. “Because it’s sacred to the people who love it and it’s sacred to the people who created it: me and Steve. We will never sell out, and it will never lose its magic as it only happens once a year.”

The £2 every Downlow clubber pays for a stick-on moustache has raised £57,000 for causes close to Block9’s heart over the last decade, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, the Human Dignity Trust and the Mother Of Mercy HIV AIDS hospice in Zambia. The moustache seems to give its wearers license to become even wilder.

“Life is a performance,” smiles Steve. “Downlow is an opportunity to wear your other self, do your own thing, discover yourself.”

“Or go in the dark room and discover other people,” adds Gideon for, as well as Maceo’s, the backstage bar that never shuts, Downlow boasts a bathhouse dark room where anything can happen – and frequently does.

NYC Downlow’s name is appropriated from Afro-American slang for men who consider themselves straight but indulge in gay sex. It began life when Joe Rush, Glastonbury perennial and Mutoid Waste sculptor extraordinaire, hooked up with Berger and Gallagher at Fuji Rock Festival in 2004. Berger grew up in Peckham and spent much of his life as a traveller, once involved with the soundsystems of the 1990s, while Gallagher, originally from Birmingham, built a career as a theatrical designer and scenery painter. Both were involved at the time with Lost Vagueness, another festival-centric production crew. Rush offered them a patch within his Trash City late night area of Glastonbury, a space where they could represent an alternative gay underworld.

Inspired by the explosively in-yer-face gay soundsystems Gideon had seen at Burning Man, the pair spent months researching, fine-tuning every detail of their fantasy New York venue, “right down to the detail on the entrance grill”. They developed its backstory like method actors do for their characters, then assembled a team with expertise in architecture, structural engineering, rigging, scenic painting, poly-carving and prop-making to bring that vision to life. Everyone provided their services for a pittance or free, the Downlow family was born, and despite the lake of mud outside their venue, their Glastonbury 2007, with Horse Meat Disco to the forefront, was a resounding success.

“By 2016 that old set was so fucked it was only held together with mud and spunk,” says Gideon, “So we had to rebuild it. We developed the new Downlow in response to what’s happened in New York and what’s now happening here in London. Manhattan is an over-priced, soulless tourist attraction, all the spirit has moved further out. Needless to say, anyone who’s tried to rent a flat or even buy a coffee in London knows we’re heading in the same direction. We wanted to reflect that. The original NYC Downlow was [conceptually] in a tenement in the Lower East Side. When it was gentrified we had to move across town to take over a Meatpackers warehouse.”

While Steve is in charge of logistics, Gideon, a globe-trotting DJ in his own right, oversees music programming. As well as their in-house DJs, the Downlow has persuaded a Who’s Who of classic house to get involved. “There’s never a dull moment,” he says, “flying superstar DJs over from New York, putting them up in a caravan in a lake of mud with the electricity failing every five minutes. It’s not Coachella! It’s quite an eye-opener compared to their normal experience, but what we do is unique and people want to be part of it. We’re able to get some absolutely whopping DJs involved for fuck-all. We can barely cover their flights and accommodation, but they do it because of our reputation. Everyone is linked – Kerri Chandler to François Kevorkian to Robert Hood to Tyree Cooper and so on, all of those founders of dance music, and the next thing you know you’ve got Masters at Work knocking on your door…”

This heavy hint at the 2017 line-up would be the latest in a long line of special Downlow moments, such as Roger Sanchez’ post-Orlando shooting anti-hate speech last year (which turned up recently on the collaborative Denney & S-Man release, ‘Unite’), or David Morales’ tribute to Frankie Knuckles. And then there’s the special relationship with Berlin’s notorious Berghain, whose DJs, including ND_Baumecker, Tama Sumo and Prosumer, are regulars.

“The Germans stay for the duration, they really go for it,” says Gideon. “They bring outfits and people and play as many different sets as they can for as long as possible. Prosumer donates his fee to Downlow’s door charities every year and always brings some really fucked-up looks with him – he really fully embraces it.”

The music played back in 2007 had a strict cut-off date of 1979, so was mostly disco and funk, but the next year it was pushed forward to ’81, “then we realised we couldn’t cope without pushing [it] to ’89” – and now it’s simply a distilled celebration of the gay heritage of dance music, the fact that our global club scene was born of underground gay, usually black/Latin US dance music (ie the whole house/acid house/garage axis).

But music’s only part of the ambiance. Aside from the extraordinary décor there are 50 performers, adopting every conceivable outré gay archetype, and in all sorts of states. Last year, at alt-drag icon Jonny Woo’s East London pub, The Glory, the Downlow recruited a slew of ‘gay butchers’ to join the madness.

“Jonny Woo is the house mother of the trans army that comes with us every year,” explains Gideon. “When we come across alt-queer performance punk anarchist fuck-ups who should belong to Downlow, we invite them to throw themselves into it.”

“There’s a very blurred line between what’s performance and what’s them really being themselves,” adds Steve.

Rain or shine, then, this June 21 a poppers-drenched party will begin on Worthy Farm, and it won’t quit for 104 decadent, deranged, sleep-deprived hours. “We’ll be turning it up to eleven, being as queer, non-apologetic and as pure as possible,” says Gideon, “And Maceo’s, our backstage bar, is where the revolution will begin.”

Fighting talk from an outfit that has its roots in the free festivals and the punk attitude of 90s sound systems – Spiral Tribe, Bedlam, DiY and so on – but combined with the true gay spirit of late, great American originals such as Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, David Mancuso and Ron Hardy, the DJs who invented this culture we love. Rude, raw and, frankly, unmissable.