Kung Fu: Interview
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By Emma Haslett
Posted: Mon Apr 24 2006 -
UK hip-hop champions Kung Fu gives Time Out the lowdow on hosting hip hop parties
Kung Fu, champions of UK hip hop artists like Skinnyman, Jehst and Braintax, celebrate running their club night for six years when they take over Fabric for a spectacular birthday shindig on Thursday. Their night and their name (rough translation: achievement through great effort) seem to be going from strength to strength: having just moved their offices into a swanky loft space in Kentish Town, they’ve also recently launched a clothing line. Why are they doing so well when so many others fail? Charlie Smith, Leo Marks and Harry Love, the founding masters of Kung Fu, explain their seven golden rules of guaranteeing hip hop nightlife success…
1. Spot a niche market Feature continuesAdvertisement
Harry: Just before we started in 2000, hip hop in this country had kind of folded. Rodney P was still bringing stuff out and Blak Twang was about, but there was a gap between that generation and our generation. There wasn’t any awareness of our generation of hip hop heads. We knew that there was a scene of people who didn’t have any exposure, but deserved it for the stuff that they were turning out, so we started Kung Fu as a forum for that.
2. Get good resident DJs and MCs
Leo: People book Harry to do their headline sets, but we have Harry Love and Sarah Love and Mystro there every single week, regardless. While somebody is standing next to me flyering saying, ‘Harry Love, Harry Love of the Extended Players’, we stand here going, ‘Harry Love’s our resident…’
3. Collaborate
Harry: Kung Fu started at exactly the same time as Itch FM, MSN mainsource record store and www.spinemagazine.com
Leo: You had the radio station, the record store, the nightclub, the website. We created an alliance – people could go to the store, buy tickets for the nightclub there, listen to the radio station, and read interviews and reviews online.
4. Expand (and keep open-minded)
Harry: We started out wth an ideal: to give exposure to UK hip hop. But now, imagine if we’d never got Guru or Raekwon. I got a message on myspace yesterday, saying ‘Wicked, really loved the birthday bash, but enough of that American Raekwon bollocks.’ I had to message back saying, ‘Look, don’t be ignorant. Don’t be ignorant and don’t be like, “Oh fuck America!”’ That’s like being like, ‘Oh fuck grandma, she’s too old and decrepit.’ You can’t diss the Yanks if you like hip hop – especially Wu -Tang! We’ve got to this point now where we keep on expanding. You have to move with the times and that’s what we’ve done. From what it was then, which was almost unbeatable, to something new, which was almost inconceivable,
5. Use multimedia
Charlie: When we used to walk into [Camden’s] Underworld [when they ran a weekly night there], it just looked like the Underworld, but we wanted it to look like Kung Fu.
Leo: We started giving Solo One a budget as our visual artist like we did for musical artists. It changed everything. He’s put a lot of effort and a lot of time into it, he’s as much a resident as Harry or Mystro. Our mate also once set up a photographic studio backstage and did portraits of people as they tried to get into the VIP room and the exhibition was called ‘Where’s My Wristband’, because that’s all you hear.
6. Flyers work!
Leo: Never ever underestimate the power of a flyer. We fully embrace the internet – we’ve always had a nice website, always used the internet, always taken email addresses. A lot of people think flyers are something of the past, but the printing press is the original and principal form of promotion. I could say, ‘Hey, check out our website, man, it’s www.kungfu-london.com. Yo, it’s gonna be sick.’ The next morning you’ll wake up and you won’t even remember talking to me! But, if you look into your bag and you’ve got our flyer, it’s like, ‘What’s this?’ You leave that on the table in your front room and someone walks in and picks it up and then they show it to their mate and that can spread to like 15 people from just one flyer. And so you think 25,000 flyers must reach a lot of people…
7. Club names don’t really matter
Charlie: We only came up with the name Kung Fu because you’ll remember it.
Leo: It’s just a Nintendo computer game.
Charlie: We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if people said, “Let’s go down to Kung Fu tonight?”- Add your comment to this feature
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When most people think of the Shaolin Temple, they think of Chinese Buddhist monks. The legendary temple on the Song Shan mountains in China, however, attracts many non-Chinese martial arts enthusiasts from around the world. Some sight-see, some train. One enthusiast included Gajanand Rajput, who became the first and only Indian 35th generation Shaolin Temple warrior secular disciple. He has a doctorate degree in Philosophy of Asian Martial Arts, and is the founder and head of The Chinese Wu-Shu Kung-Fu Federation of India.