Bugged Out! took over Friday nights at Cream in 1998
Dave Clarke in the Nation Courtyard(Image: Mark McNulty)
The nightclubs of the ’90s and ’00s have come and gone, living on through memories of an era gone by. But one club night continues to stand the test of time, Bugged Out!. Despite starting just up the M62 in Manchester, Bugged Out! moved to Liverpool, where it welcomed thousands of clubbers at Nation.
Having celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024, Bugged Out! is one of the UK’s most formative and enduring club nights. To celebrate the huge milestone, Disco Pogo has released a book ‘Just a Big Disco: 30 Years of the Seminal Club,’ which explores the history of the iconic clubnight, including its time at Nation and Creamfields, and the UK club culture from the mid-1990s to present day.
To this day, Bugged Out! continues and has events planned across the UK including a Bugged Out! Weekender in Butlins Bogner Regis next March. They recently hosted an event in Liverpool in November at Kapsule, featuring favourites Dave Clarke, Justin Robertson and James Holroyd. Their next Liverpool event is at Kapsule on February 28 2026, with Erol Alkan and Rob Bright.
Bugged Out! began after Paul Benney and Johnno Burgess, the editors of British music magazine, Jockey Slut, threw six small parties across the summer of 1994 called Disco Pogo. Their events were noticed by the owners of Manchester’s Sankeys Soap club – Andrew Spiro and Rupert Campbell – who offered up their Friday nights to them from November 25 1994. This is where Bugged Out! began.
Johnno told the ECHO: “We put a few little club nights on for a couple of hundred people. But we could always get quite good DJs because of the magazine, because we maybe featured them in it. People like Andrew Weatherall and The Dust Brothers, who went on to become The Chemical Brothers, also played these little parties.
“And so Sankey Soap in Manchester was this relatively new club and their Friday night wasn’t really working so they asked us if we wanted to give it a go. They actually already had a really good line up booked for what became the first night. They had LFO and Ortega booked who basically sold out the first night.
“But then there were a good few months where it wasn’t very busy. But we had the right people in. And people were travelling too. We had people from North Wales, Liverpool and Leeds coming to see the DJs we were putting on. So it sort of took off around March 1995 and then we haven’t really looked back.
“Back then it was mainly techno we were putting on in the first couple of years and then in November ’96 a second room opened at Sankey’s. That meant we could diversify and almost make it like a magazine in motion because we were putting techno on in the main room and upstairs was drum and bass, there was trip-hop.
“The mid-90s was a very fertile time for dance music. Drum and bass was really big and that’s kind of what we took through when we moved to Liverpool in 1998.”
Sankey Soaps closed its doors in the summer of ’98 but this didn’t mean the end for Bugged Out!. They were offered an all-night spot at Nation, and Bugged Out! had found a new home by September 1998.
Armand Van Helden and Darren Emerson at Nation (Image: Mark McNulty)
Johnno added: “Cream had been running an all-nighter that ran till 6am and we took over that slot every month. It was the last Friday of the month. There was a guy called John Hill who helped book the Saturdays at Cream and he was also doing the Saturday at Sankey Soaps so we knew him.
“He knew Bugged Out! had been really successful, he knew people travelled to it from all over the north. It was a big leap though we went from like an 800 capacity club to a 3,500 capacity club. So we were quite reticent about it. We were like ‘god can we do this’. We were quite an underground club compared to Cream, say. But we just programmed it like it was a little festival in the club.”
“I think the people that came had a favourite room. There were the people who loved the Courtyard which was the techno room with Dave Clarke and Justin Robertson. There’s people who love the big Main Room because it was more house music and there’s people who love the Annexe where Jon Carter was resident.
“We hit the ground running. So The Chemical Brothers DJing at the first one, September ’98. So they obviously helped fill it. And then I think the second one we had Carl Cox and Laurent Garnier who were huge. The third one was our fourth birthday, which was November 98.
“Funnily enough, we had the flyers out there with a great line-up on, but the week before, we added Daft Punk DJing and Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk playing live. We didn’t have time back then to get anything on posters, so it was a bit of a surprise when people turned up that Daft Punk were DJing.”
Main room at Nation
He added: “We used to put the train times from all over the north on the back of the flyers, so you could see which train to get that got you to Liverpool by say nine o’clock and then what trains to get back after 6am. So, you know, if you were in Liverpool Lime Street about half nine on a Friday, you saw all these trains from Sheffield and Leeds and Manchester, all the people just pouring off them and then heading down to Wolstenholme Square.”
There’s been many stand out moments for Johnno from Bugged Out’s time at Nation. He said: “I think Daft Punk DJing at the fourth birthday was definitely a huge moment for us. They played ‘Happy Birthday’ by Stevie Wonder when they came on.
“Just Dave Clarke and Justin Robertson in the Courtyard were just real staples and had such a huge following. There was these guys called the Courtyard Kids [who were regulars at Nation] who would always be down the front.
“They actually played in our football team at one of the Creamfields football matches. We didn’t have a Bugged Out! team, we just sent the Courtyard Kids. I think getting Jon Carter’s sets in the Annexe was amazing. He played the day George Harrison died, so he played ‘My Sweet Lord’ at the end of his set.
“All the security were coming in tears and stuff. It was surreal to be in Liverpool on that day, when he passed away, and to be able to sort of pay a tribute to him. It was a really moving moment.”
He added: “It was incredible. The Courtyard in particular and the Annexe, I think because they were smaller. The Annexe that Jon Carter played was just incredible because it was this 500 capacity square room where people danced on the speaker stacks and it was just very intimate.
“And the Courtyard was twice the size of that. But still had that sort of intimacy. I think the rooms were brilliant at Cream because they were all just big box rooms so everyone could see each other. The bars were in good places so there were dark rooms. The atmosphere was pretty unrivalled. And obviously everyone was in the moment because no one had cameras. No one had camera phones to hold up so everyone would just dance.”
More information on the book can be found on the Disco Pogo website.