David Vincent

The Sankeys boss looks back on an incredible journey and ahead to an even bigger one

 


A last minute operation saved the life of Sankeys owner David Vincent earlier this year. Lying in an Ibiza hospital bed he decided he wanted to write his life story – warts and all. Dan Prince gets the world exclusive as David recalls the days of his East-End London roots before working at The Hacienda, Ministry of Sound and Pacha and then embarking on his Sankeys adventure…

Photography by Justin Gardner


David a big welcome back to DMCWORLD! Well Mr Vincent it is fair to say you don’t do things by half! What a winter you have had with trouble over in New York, relationship break ups, a near death experience in hospital and all that whilst trying to plan the line up for summer in Ibiza 2015! Quite a few months?

“You could say that Dan. To be honest the last few months has been a massive learning experience for me and as they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – and I really believe in that.” 

New York New York…so good you tried it twice! First Manhattan goes tits up and then Brooklyn goes down the pan. What the hell happened?

“New York…where do I start? I was never truly happy with the whole American project looking back. I have gone through life trusting my intuition, trusting my gut feeling and I knew deep down that New York was never right. My partners over there saw Sankeys simply as a brand, they thought they could book some DJs that were big in the city, stick a logo on the advertising and people would come running. When I went over and started going with them to meetings they were introducing me as the Sankeys Brand Ambassador. I was thinking ‘Brand Ambassador? These guys just don’t get it’. I tried to explain to them that Sankeys doesn’t come from that school of thought. We are forward thinking, we always try to be one step ahead, we don’t book the same DJs as everybody else. It went straight over their heads.”

It sounds like they don’t get dance music or the whole Sankeys vibe at all?

“Exactly. They were trying to tell me that New York was a market I didn’t understand. I was like ‘listen guys, New York is hipster enough as a city to get what we do. We have always been a forward thinking club, we discovered Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers when nobody had heard of them, you simply cannot just copy everybody’s line ups’. They just didn’t get it – from the marketing point of view, the DJs, the door pickers and even the location…it was all wrong wrong wrong.”

I remember speaking to you when you were standing in the site in Manhattan…you were clearly uncomfortable in the part of town you were in?

“I said from day one that I thought Brooklyn was a better proposition. They assured me that they were in the right place and due to the fact that these people were partners in Sankeys Ibiza, well my hands were tied. I can remember telling a friend at the time that I thought there wasn’t one thing I was happy with. I think my line was ‘it’s turning into Sankenstein’s Monster’. January came and I told them I was heading back to the UK, I’d had enough and wasn’t happy just churning out average nights. They begged me to stay but I just said that I wasn’t feeling it, I don’t do things just for the sake of it. August came round and they admitted defeat and agreed to close, thanks largely to the fact that they had found a site in Brooklyn.”

So a huge sigh of relief then? Brooklyn was always on your radar…

“By this time I had lost all hope with the partners and New York in general. Not satisfied with one project all of a sudden they wanted to run three new clubs – Sankeys New York, Space New York and Sankeys Miami. It was absolute chaos. They were over leveraging themselves and were just interested in franchising brands. We knew we had to re-negotiate things and said we are not doing Miami with them. Our original plans was to let these guys have the contract for Sankeys across the whole of America, well that went out of the window straight away. I also realized that they were relying on Sankeys Ibiza to fund New York, I told them they needed a separate pool of money and couldn’t base the funding of the new club based solely on the profits from Ibiza. Then said admitted they didn’t have the money to do it on their own.”

There were stories floating around that they waited until you went to Brazil on holiday to sack all your staff? 

“That’s right. Even though my parting bit of advice to them was ‘give Brooklyn a year – after Manhattan it will take some time to re-brand Sankeys in New York’, the next thing I knew all my team were sacked. I decided to close the club and they reacted by re-branding the venue Open, announcing a new forward thinking music policy and told everyone that Sankeys was over. Open lasted just one week.”

The last time we spoke you mentioned that offers for worldwide Sankeys franchises were flooding in. Miami, Toronto, Croatia, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Paris, Moscow, Brazil and South Africa were all on the table…are we any further down the road with any of these locations – will you ever think about New York again?

“It will be a fair few years before I look at New York again. The next opening is Sankeys Italy, a great venue just outside Bologna headed up with Idris Dib who is coming on board to look after the bookings for Tribal Sessions. I am not going to rush into anywhere else around the world, there are a few projects that I want to look at such as a Sankeys festival and I want to make Sankeys Ibiza one of the best clubs in the world.”

Okay well let’s move onto your near death experience. You had us worried for a while back there…

“It’s a cliché but when something like that happens to you, you really do re-evaluate where your life is going. From the outside I know people think I have this great life but these past few years I have been floating along. Take the book project for instance. For years I have been rattling on that one day I should tell my life story, I have experienced so many highs and lows that I have always known it would make a compelling read. Imagine if I would have died on that operating table, what a sad way to die and what a shit obituary I would have had!”

But you thought it was simply a case of really bad food poisoning to begin with?

“I did. To cut a long story short, I have never had food poisoning before and my ex-fiancee at the time was cooking for me which I was always sick after eating. She was a fucking awful cook. Well I was holed up in bed and my stomach was really hurting, after a few days I was thinking to myself ‘this pain is getting worse, not better – this isn’t right’. So I decided to drive myself to the Can Misses Hospital in Ibiza Town and had all of the tests – but because my Spanish isn’t great and nobody there could speak English, these routine tests which should have taken an hour or so took over seven hours. I was treated like a third class citizen and it was only when I collapsed on the floor that they gave me pain killers. I kept asking ‘when will the results be back?’ 

‘Later later’ they said.

In the end I ripped the tubes out of my arm and decided to go home. Down in the car park I realized you needed a code to get through the barrier and thinking I was that crafty East End boy, I tried to drive through the gate right behind another car. Well it didn’t work and the barrier smashed down on my bonnet…and who was behind me? Only the Guardia Civil. I had to spend an hour going through insurance and driving license bullshit whilst all the time I was in obvious agony. The following day I called Danny Whittle for advice, someone I have always found to be very wise. Ultimately I think he saved my life. He told me to immediately get to the private hospital Clinica Policinia De Rosario where as soon as they saw me told me that unless they operated within the hour I would be dead. I had Acute Appendicitis that Can Misses completely missed.”

Word on the street is that you will be doing some form of charity party at the club raising some money and also awareness of the need for clubbers to get holiday insurance in Ibiza?

“Yes I am definitely going to do something after what happened to me. People moan about the NHS in Britain but the Can Misses Hospital is a disgrace. There are three things I want to shout from the roof about; tell kids to think about insurance rather than buying that extra holiday t-shirt. Get people asking the Ibiza authorities to sort their hospitals out – there is no management system, the staff are overrun and when I was there it was a case of whoever shouted loudest got seen first. And thirdly, there HAS to be a British liason at the hospitals…too many people from the UK head to Ibiza and it just isn’t good enough. If I have to be controversial then so be it. It scares me the level of facilities on the island health wise, I’m scared for British children coming here…I want them to enjoy the experience.”

We shall come to your book in a moment. Before that let’s kick off with Sankeys Ibiza. You announced to the world that 2015 will see “major exciting changes within the club’s musical programme this summer plus a brand new sound and lighting system.” Where are we at with everything?

“To be honest I cannot announce too much right now, we are still confirming everything. I can tell you that Magna will return on Saturdays and so will Tribal Sessions, although we are moving the night to Tuesdays”

Reason being…?

“We just thought it was the sensible thing to do. Tribal Sessions has been the most successful new night in Sankeys history and deserves the best possible techno line ups. We were finding it hard to book a couple of big names that we were after on Wednesdays, so we decided to move it. Danny Whittle always call January/February the Transfer Window, it’s when all of the bookings get done for the year ahead, me going into hospital means I missed a lot of it.”

And there’s a new Friday nighter coming in?

“Yes Andy and Dawn are coming on board, I am so excited about this and have been wanting to work with them for a while. I go way back with these two, years ago myself and Andy would stand outside The Paradise Factory in Manchester flyering for our new respective nights…I was promoting Colors and Andy was pushing the early Manumission. I think he is one of the unsung heroes of clubland, it is going to be an honour to work with him and I know I am going to learn a lot from him.”

How did this all come about?

“We were having a laugh together at Pikes a little while ago and we just got talking about the old days. I was telling him about when his posters started appearing around Manchester, the ones where the guy is saying ‘I was a happily married man until I found out that guys give better blowjobs!’ Andy told me that there were two industry people who he remembered from the opening party, Mr Scruff and myself. I have always supported him. I said to him ‘why don’t you come and do something at Sankeys?’ And from that conversation ‘We Are Rockstars & Sankeys presents Shelter’ was born. A new night of underground electronic talent. Who knows where this will lead in the future? In my mind Manumission created the art of promoting in Ibiza, they set a template on how to fill your club, they are always thinking outside of the box and not just relying on superstar DJs to pack it.” 

Well young man. It is a well know saying that ‘everyone has a book in them’. And now you are actually doing it. You are well under away scripting your debut novel which you have entitled ‘The Eccentric’ – 21 chapters chartering the life and times of David Vincent from the days growing up at 69 Tunis House, through university, acid house, working at the likes of Hacienda, Ministry of Sound and Pacha before finally realizing your dream and opening your very own nightclub empire. I have had a glance through some chapters and dug out some questions I wanted to discuss…

Chapter 2. Being Jewish, Simon Marks & JFS

Racism is all over the news at the moment with the Chelsea supporters abusing a black guy in Paris and the West Ham fans singing anti-Jewish songs to rival Tottenham supporters. Were you a victim of racism growing up at all?

“Of course I was. We were one of the last Jewish families left in East London back then, everyone else had moved up to north west London. When the kids found out I was Jewish they’d do things like cut a penny in half, throw it on the ground and shout ‘pick that up you fucking Jew’. My mum was very concerned about me losing my Jewish identity so she made me attend a Jewish night school, learn Hebrew and even wear a Tzitzit. When the teachers at my day school found out I was Jewish, without any permission from my parents they made me stand in front of the whole school and recite a long Jewish prayer. The bastards knew what they were doing, I was only 7 years old and just because I was a bit lively back then they thought they’d teach me a lesson. In the end I had to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist who both came to the conclusion that I wasn’t all bad, just a bit over excitable. Looking back I can now see I had the early stages of Attention Deficit Disorder, but in the early 80s no one really knew what it was, it wasn’t a prescribable condition in those days. I ended up moving from school to school before finally ending up at a place called Simon Marks. My local Stepney (East London) friends who were all West Indian used to calm me down, shielded me from any problems and took me under their wings. I would say to them, ‘I wanna be black’ to which they’d reply ‘you are black David, now chill out’.”

Chapter 4. The Acid Mad-House

I am going to skip mentioning you in the swimming pool with Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Push It’ blaring out as you tried to entice girls for a dip. No, what intrigued me was 1988 was a big year for you. Acid House had just exploded with ‘Ecstasy Airport’ and was all over the front page of The Sun…looking back, had you any idea just how big the scene was going to be? Did you think it was just going to be another musical fad?

“Fuck me Ecstasy Airport’…I remember it well. It was over at White Waltham in Berkshire wasn’t it? My aunt saw the newspaper the next day and threw it at me – ‘you were there weren’t you taking drugs!?’ she shouted. And yes I was there, but I wasn’t off my head. If you look closely at the photo on the cover of The Sun you will see me crouched in a corner on the stage fast asleep! I have to say though I always knew that dance music was going to be here for the long run. To me it was like a religious experience, it broke down barriers, it taught white people how to dance! I liked soul music back then but I didn’t love it like my West Indian friends did. I liked pop music too like Duran Duran and Wham!…but I didn’t love it like My Jewish friends did. But as soon as I started to go to events like Sunrise and Energy there was no turning back. Doug Lazy ‘Let It Roll’, E-Zee Possee & MC Kinky ‘Everything Starts With An E’,  Cry Sisco ‘Afrodisiac’…tunes like that sends shivers down my spine just thinking about them. I simply cannot imagine a world without dance music.”

Chapter 9. The Ministry of Pound

Loved your banter on Facebook with the Mark Rodol concerning your New Years Eve party you organized for The Ministry Of Sound in the 90s – a massive night on Radio 1 featuring Danny Tenaglia, Pete Tong, Todd Terry and co. Couple of questions regarding your time at one of the world’s biggest clubs… 

The club has employed a whole host of people who went onto to greatness; Amy Thomson who created Swedish House Mafia, Caroline Prothero who discovered and manages David Guetta and Lynn Cosgrove who is behind the likes of Carl Cox and John Digweed. In your opinion, do you think the The Ministry was a great breeding ground for people to work and learn the ropes…or do you think whoever hired people back then deserves a bloody big bonus for simply finding great members of staff?!?

I think The Ministry was like a musical university for people to learn and get connections. The problem with the club and it’s bosses was that they were too big for their boots – they thought they were the industry. At the time the industry was very young, a few British clubs such as Cream, Basics, Renaissance and yes Ministry leading the way. It’s not the billion pound worldwide phenomenon it is these days and the Ministry was a horrible place to work drilling it into our heads that we were the biggest brand in the world – ‘we are untouchable’ they’d say. At the time I was the young hotshot from Manchester doing Ministry parties at The Hacienda and filling it for fun. Lynn was a mentor to me in those days, she’d tell me that they were grooming me to take over the club the following year when I finished my degree. To a kid at uni, that was a big deal. So I went down and did three days of work experience…it  was the worst time ever, I felt like I was working in bank – not a nightclub. Everybody had to be in by 8.30am and you were expected to stay until 10pm, god forbid anyone who left early – we’d all be staring at each other across the office wondering who would have the bollocks to be the first to leave. I remember the staff meetings so vividly. We would have to sit in a circle and James Palumbo would walk around the room pointing at someone and shouting ‘merchandise?’, ‘club?’ or ‘label’ and the relevant person would be expected to appease him with the latest news in their department. Btw for the record, like I said on my Facebook, I do believe Mark Rodol was an uncreative muppet in the Ministry days, he did not have a clue “.

But these girls have gone onto unbelievable success, the club must have taught them something?

“Yes I agree. This trio have helped to shape the industry thanks partly to their Ministry experience. I have to take my hat off to James too who used his financial background to turn the club into what it has become now. But I was always too creative for them and their corporateness stifled me. I remember telling them that the reason that The Bar wasn’t working was because they had the DJ booth in the wrong location, it was too high and should be brought back down to ground level. Well they were bowled over with the idea. But here’s the thing. They then had a further three meetings to discuss what height to move it to. At The Hacienda they would have done it that afternoon. Too much admin and too much corporate bullshit”.

Chapter 10. The Magical White Island

Ah Ibiza. And what a history you have with this Balearic paradise! You have done amazingly well in turning Sankeys into one of the major players on the island. Year 1 though things could have been oh-so-different…although numbers were respectful on most nights…behind the scenes you were looking down the back of sofas for spare change to pay the bills. What was the lowest point. And as we approach summer 2015…what has been the highest point?

“The low point was the long list of people who wanted to kill me. Or the times I considered jumping off my balcony and ending it all. It was a very dark time for me. When the investor pulled out at the last minute I found myself pleading with people every day to stick by me; ‘please don’t take the fire alarm away’, ‘please don’t take the sound system’. It was constantly begging to let me stay open one more day. But I am glad it happened. It has made me more resilient and I know I can survive anything after that. As for the high point? There was a moment at the Tribal Sessions Closing Party last year with Luciano, Greg Vickers et al when I looked around the room. Every face on the island was there dancing, feathers were flying everywhere, the music was unbelievable…it was a real spiritual moment.”

Chapter 11. Captain Yao’s White Lines

You teased us all with the basis of this chapter mentioning Armand Van Helden’s ‘You Don’t Know Me’ anthem. The song reminded you of a time when things started to go wrong for you for the first time in your life…and there was a dig at all the negative people out there, stating ‘you don’t know me’. What is the number one pre-conception that you have had to deal with as Mr David Vincent owner of the Sankeys empire?

“A lack of belief. People thinking I am some money orientated, megalomaniac monster – which couldn’t be further from the truth. I have seen the comments about me on social media and most of the time I simply ‘like’ what they’ve said to wind them up. How can people slag you off when they don’t know you? My family know me. My friends know me. These people don’t. A famous line from Tony Wilson…’when people aren’t talking about you, that’s when you have a problem’. And he’s right. As I see it I have always taken the longer route, the independent route instead of selling out. I’m still skint, I drive around in a beat up Sankeys car for the last 4 years and I have never been flash. And at the end of the day, these people having a dig at me in public are simply promoting me and my club further. So thank you.”

Summer is around the corner and Ibiza is getting set. Whenever I interview you I always ask you what you think about the status of Sankeys in Ibiza and you always say you are nowhere near the likes of Pacha and Amnesia yet. How do you feel in February 2015 about that? Is Sankeys now one of the big boys?

“We probably are right now. Four years ago we were at the bottom of the pile and each year we have moved up a position. We aren’t number one in Ibiza yet, but we are not far off. The most important thing is now have respect from the island and I can’t wait for the summer.”

A DJ to watch out for in Ibiza this year?

“Sidney Charles & maybe Noir.”

Stage diving at Sankeys Ibiza this summer, getting a bit old for that shit aren’t you?

“Haha! I won’t be doing that again. I broke a couple of ribs last year leaping into the unknown, you just forget how old you are sometimes…”

Putting Sankeys aside for one minute, what are your overall thoughts on Ibiza 2014? It was the busiest on record, the most nationalities ever and clubs yet again broke attendance records. As a club owner in Ibiza, are you happy with the season it just experienced? Do you agree with certain superstar DJs who were moaning about the island being too commercial?

“So these DJs don’t mind having their faces plastered all over billboards – isn’t that commercial? In my opinion when certain DJs stop being as relevant as they once were in Ibiza they start to lash out at the island. I bet if Paul Oakenfold was resident at Cream at Amnesia he wouldn’t be coming out with bollocks like that.”

And finally Mr Vincent. One last Chapter I wanted to mention. Chapter 21 – The Witchdoctor concerning your ex-fiancee. A few months ago this question would have been ‘how the fuck did you pull an ex Miss Brazil David?’. Today though I want to ask you about the poison rumours? Any substance on the stories going round that she tried to kill you with her cooking?

“Well I am David Vincent aren’t I? I am a dance music legend aren’t I? lol. Actually she pulled me believe it or not. She came up to me and said “hey eccentric, I wanted to meet you because I see myself as eccentric and I heard everyone say this about you which attracted me to you. Hence now the title of the book “The Eccentric” Anyway you need to read the book to get the full low-down but as the opening sentences go for page one of a book I am fairly happy with the one I have : ‘I am lying in a hospital bed and I think my fiancee has been trying to poison me.’ It’s not bad is it?

http://www.sankeysibiza.info/