Laurence Malice

Laurence Malice is a London club promoter, best known as the founder of Trade, the after-hours gay club at Turnmills in Farringdon that ran from 1990 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest club nights in the world.

Malice came to Trade through an earlier career in London nightlife that placed him at the centre of gay club culture in the 1980s. He co-created Pyramid, a mixed gay night at Heaven, and was involved with the Thursday night Asylum sessions there – events that were among the first in London to take house music seriously as a gay dancefloor proposition. By the late 1980s, as acid house transformed British nightlife, Malice was already thinking about what came after.

Trade opened in November 1990 at Turnmills on Clerkenwell Road, with a 3am start time made possible by the 24-hour licence held by Turnmills' owner John Newman – one of the very few such licences in London. The concept was straightforward and radical: a legal, safe, after-hours space where gay men, and anyone else with the right attitude, could dance until morning. Malice described it as a reaction to the danger of being visibly gay in London at night. "Much safer" in daylight, he said, was the logic. The dancefloor that resulted was anything but safe in any other sense.

His philosophy of radical inclusivity – "bankers dancing next to pop stars," people of any background and sexuality absorbed into the same music – distinguished Trade from a narrower gay venue identity. It was always queer-centred without being exclusionary, and that combination proved to be its particular power. The word "Trade" itself was Malice's choice: Polari for a casual sexual encounter, immediately understood by those who needed to understand it and opaque to everyone else.

Trade ran for twenty-five years in total, across Turnmills, Ministry of Sound, and other venues, before its final closing party at Egg London in October 2015. Egg, in King's Cross, is also Malice's club, founded around 2003. He has spoken of daytime clubbing as his preferred mode – more honest about what the body needs, he has suggested, than the conventions of the night.

See also: Trade, Tony De Vit, Heaven, Turnmills, Egg London