Now based in London Baker’s occasional Return To New York nights pay homage to the city’s club-culture high-water mark when after

Now based in London, Baker’s occasional Return To New York nights pay homage to the city’s club-culture high-water mark, when, after the demise of disco in the late Seventies, dance music went underground. There would be gang warfare.”How different it was when New Order were entranced by the New York scene, ditching studios in Stockport for the skills of Arthur Baker in the Big Apple, the producer of that seminal electro track, Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”. “In the UK, you can have a main room playing house and a chill-out room playing hip hop, but you can’t do that in New York That music would attract two completely different crowds. There is no central Andy Warhol figure to bring together the different strands or, as St James puts it, “draw the freaks uptown and pull society people downtown to the punk clubs”.Matters have got so bad that it is impossible to have one club playing different types of music, even in different rooms, says Bob Jones. You really need a trust fund,” he says.What is left is a fractured nightlife, with swish venues uptown, and underground types crossing over to Williamsburg and Brooklyn. James St James looks back wistfully to a time when you could bum around New York with little or no money “You have to be rich to live there now.

“It means people are spending more time outside the clubs than in them,” says Owen, a Mancunian who left the UK for New York in the mid-Eighties to seek out its glamour for himself.As the streets have become cleaner, real- estate values have rocketed. Nightclubs have been forced out and replaced by luxury shops and plush apartments, even in downtown areas, leaving but a handful of exclusive venues. Gatien himself was convicted of tax evasion, though elsewhere the authorities rigorously enforced archaic cabaret licenses, first introduced during the Prohibition era.Now, Giuliani’s successor Michael Bloomberg is compounding the damage with his ban on smoking in public places. They stayed open for 24 hours at a stretch, open sex and drug-use were widespread, but obviously that couldn’t last,” he says.After clearing out the strip clubs and homeless people, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani hit the clubs hard. The city’s nightlife has been devastated by a backlash against the in-your-face displays of the Club Kids, though Frank Owen refuses to pin the blame on Alig and Gatien.

Instead, he sees them as part of a wider problem.”During the early Nineties, the city itself was in decline – the cops were too busy with all the murders and robberies going on to deal with the clubs You could get away with anything. “Until then, we were amateurs, but people such as David Mancuso invested a lot in creating PAs that did justice to the tunes they played.”London’s Ministry of Sound and the former Hacienda in Manchester were templates for future UK clubs, but they were designed by people in awe of New York venues and their sound systems, notably Paradise Garage, the venue that bequeathed the second half of its name to the strand of house music that remains funky and soulful.Nowadays, no single venue encapsulates the best of New York like Paradise Garage did, and other legendary venues such as Danceteria and the Mud Club. With these building blocks, New York DJs turned their craft into an art form. Scratching and mixing came from the city’s block parties, though their influence goes much further The veteran soul DJ, Dr Bob Jones, began his career in 1967.