Clydesdale at the heart of new club Matter

Published on Sunday 21 September 2008 21:16

CLYDESDALE has bankrolled what is being billed as the biggest new dance club in London in a decade.

In an unusual move for the bank, it has come up with a multi-million pound package to fund the Matter club.

The venue is part of the redevelopment of the previously troubled London Dome and opened with a 30-artist show on Thursday.

It was built and fitted at a cost of around 14 million by the company which owns Fabric, the Farringdon-based club that was recently voted the number one venue in the world by DJ magazine.

Since then, Fabric has been approached about new venues across the globe, all of which have been rejected. Cameron Leslie, who quit as Deloitte's hospitality analyst to co-found Fabric in 1999, said even the Matter site was only considered in early 2006 as a favour to a family member, at a time when the London Dome was considered a complete failure.

However, after being impressed by the plans of the dome's owner, AEG, the company set about planning the club in earnest, culminating in the launch last week.

The deal is left-field for the Clydesdale, in particular for its London business, where about 80 per cent of the deals are property related. Paul Barnsley, a partner at Clydesdale's business banking centre in Canary Wharf, not far from the London Dome, said the multi-million pound funding was partly a signal that the company "was seeking more trading companies".

Clydesdale is funding a deal which other banks were not prepared to support.

After committing to taking on the project early in 2007, Leslie and his business partner, Keith Reilly, spent months attempting to secure funding, but struggled, even before the term "credit crunch" had entered the public's vocabulary.

"After spending five years taking bankers to Fabric and showing queues a mile long just to get in we couldn't understand why they weren't falling over themselves to be part of it," said Leslie.

Fabric's incumbent bankers, HSBC and later HBOS, are believed to have turned down funding before Clydesdale approved a deal.

Barnsley admits that, were the company to approach the bank about funding Matter today, it is likely the application would be rejected with lending criteria having been tightened since funding was approved 12 months ago.

Despite this, he reels off a number of reasons why he believes that the club will be highly successful, from its ability to tie in with events at the 26,000-seat O2 Arena, to its new all-night deal to provide a ferry link to central London and the growing number of professionals in the Canary Wharf region.

Even under a worst-case scenario, he said, AEG, the dome's owner and one of the world's largest promoters of live music, would buy the venue.

Leslie says that while the venue will ultimately tie in with other events in the arena – which range from Metallica to Disney – the first few months' shows will be used to turn Matter into a venue in its own right, with the top DJs being invited to perform.

The new club has a capacity of about 2,600, over three floors. From the barcode-based coat-check system to its sound and light systems the venue, which is part of the O2 dome, is state-of-the art in all respects.