Shoom

Shoom was a London acid house club night founded by Danny Rampling in September 1987, widely credited with launching the British acid house movement and the Second Summer of Love. It was not a gay club, but its origins, its culture, and its influence are inseparable from the history of gay nightlife in London.

Rampling had returned from Ibiza in the summer of 1987, where he, Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, and Johnny Walker had heard DJ Alfredo playing at Amnesia and experienced something that bore no resemblance to what London's clubs were doing. Shoom was the attempt to recreate it. The first party was held at a 300-capacity basement gym at 56–58 Crown House on Southwark Street, South London. Rampling's wife Jenni managed the door. The music was Chicago house, Balearic beat, and the emerging Detroit techno sound, mixed with a warmth and fluidity that hard rave would later lose.

Shoom moved venues as it grew – to a YMCA basement on Tottenham Court Road, then to The Park in Kensington, then to Busby's on Charing Cross Road – but its original crowd of perhaps 300 people, who had experienced the first parties before anyone knew what acid house was, remained its defining constituency. The strawberry-scented smoke machine, the smiley-face logo, and the all-enveloping physical experience of the music at Shoom are a fixed point in British cultural history. Primal Scream's Screamadelica is one document of what those nights felt like.

Shoom's connection to gay culture ran through the personnel and the dancefloor rather than its identity. Danny Rampling himself was straight, but the world he drew on – Ibiza, house music, the Paradise Garage lineage – was a world built by gay black American musicians and DJs, and the London gay circuit absorbed Shoom's influence immediately. Troll, the gay acid house night at the Soundshaft behind Heaven, was directly inspired by Shoom and opened in 1988 as its queer counterpart.

Shoom closed around 1990. Billboard magazine ranked it seventh among the greatest dance clubs of all time in 2005. A 30th anniversary event was held in 2017–18. A combined Shoom and Troll revival night took place around 2013–15; coverage appeared in the Guardian.

See also: Troll, Soundshaft, Heaven, Trade