Trying to write your own biography is incredibly hard and I have been putting it off for years. Lots has been written about me in the music press over the years, but it’s pretty fragmented and usually only covered a brief snapshot of my career or the antics at the time, so, with the publication of this new website I thought it was the ideal opportunity to pull them all together and commit my personal story for the record. Anyway here goes… I was born in London in…let’s just say the Swinging Sixties, and spent most of my school years playing truant and getting into trouble. I left school at fifteen without any qualifications, and started working in a menswear shop in North London. This would not last long and I soon got the sack for spending too much time in the record shop two doors away, but the seeds were sown for a career in music. Fast forward to1979 and a sixteen-year old Nicky Holloway had just discovered clubs, lager and of course girls, and I found myself standing on the balcony at the Royalty Club in Southgate watching Froggy mixing two copies of Instant Funk’s “I Got My Mind Made Up” and thinking, “I wanna to be a DJ” - which back in those days was hardly considered a good career move. I never had enough money to buy a set of decks (Technics 1200 had just come out) but I do remember waiting for Mum to go to work, so I could borrow her hi-fi and install it in my bedroom next to mine where I would practice for hours on end dreaming of the day when I actually played to a crowd, in fact come to think of it I was the original bedroom DJ. After numerous unsuccessful auditions, I finally found an agency that booked DJ’s for the thriving Disco Pub scene that had sprung up around the Old Kent Road and in 1980 got my first ever paid gig. I started to work 4-5 nights a week at various South London dives longing for the day when I would play in stylish venues and to bigger and better crowds. I finally realised that one way I could make this happen quicker was to put on my own parties. When I first started to organize nights out back in 1984 the whole club thing was very different from what we have come to expect in this day and age. Even if you were clued up, back in London in 1984 you had a very limited choice as to where you could spend your Saturday night. If you knew the score you managed to get hold of a ticket for one of my Special Branch parties or “Doo's”, where, along with a relatively unknown at the time Pete Tong, we combined Hip Hop, Rare Groove, R&B and early House in one room while Gilles Peterson spun a more Jazzy eclectic mix in the other room. You could find me playing a similar selection on Friday nights at the legendary Royal Oak in Tooley Street but this was just a taster of things to come. By now I had really got the promotion bit between my teeth and between 1984 and 1988 I put together sixteen “Doo at the Zoo's” at London Zoo, four Weekenders at Rockley Sands, and many other assorted one-offs at unique venues such as the Natural History Museum , Chislehurst Caves, Thorpe Park and even took three hundred people for their first taste of Ibiza – this is in 1985 a mere twenty one years ago, half of those that went on that trip are still known to be wandering around club land “’avin’ it", even though they are all now well over thirty five! The Special Branch’s reputation grew and grew until the end of 1987 when the whole of the club scene was about to be turned upside down, enter stage left, House music. 1988 turned out to be one of those landmark years that will be embedded on peoples' brains for the rest of their lives, you only have to read one of the many books published that cover the period such as Adventures in Clubland, Once in a Lifetime, Class of ‘88 or Altered States to realize something happened that year that completely changed the face of clubbing. When I opened Trip at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road at the end of May 1988, I was expecting to get somewhere between six and eight hundred people. Much to my delight and amazement two thousand clubbers turned up every Saturday for the next two years at what was probably the first big legal (for want of a better word) Acid House club with me and, for a year or so, Pete Tong as residents. The likes of Dave Morales, Todd Terry, Kevin Saunderson, Derek May and West Bam weren’t anything like the legendary names they are now however, always the pioneering sort, I stuck my neck out a bit and gave them some of their first ever gigs in the UK during this period. Of course the exploding Acid House phenomenon couldn’t stay out of the spotlight for long and I decided to change the name of Trip to Sin, because of the misinformed media exposure and panic tabloid journalism that Acid House was attracting at the time. It had also become a regular experience for the Charing Cross Road to be blocked with dancing, smiling faces when the club ended, the police at the time had absolutely no idea as to what was going on, and just stood back in amazement. During this period, with a concept loosely based upon the Caister Soul Weekenders that I grew up going to in the late Seventies and early Eighties, the Incredible Organization as my promotions company was then known, successfully managed to spirit away three thousand people for the whole weekend twice a year to the aptly named “KAOS Weekenders” at places such as Pontin’s Holiday Camps at Camber Sands in Sussex and Hemsby in Norfolk. A monster had been created and like all good things there comes a time when it stops being fun and its time to move on. So that’s what I did. In April 1990 I finally got my first club and wanted to put a bit of style back into clubbing, a baggy jumper, strobe and smoke machine were no longer good enough, enter the Milk Bar - with it's whiter than white image and strict door policy it stood out alone in clubland. With Paul Oakenfold's Friday nights, Pete Tong and Dave Dorrell's Saturday nights, Darren Emerson on Mondays, Danny Rampling's Pure Sexy and Glam on a Wednesdays and in the latter years Brandon Block and Lisa Loud F.U.B.A.R. on the Sunday night, its suffice to say the Milk Bar rocked! Dave Morales, Tony Humphries the Brand New Heavies all graced our presence and even a then unheard of Jamiroquai played one night at the club. During the summer of ‘92 we also opened up a couple of bars in Ibiza under the Milk Bar banner which ran successfully for a couple of seasons while I managed to get Ibiza out of my system. I wanted to stay on the Island for the whole summer, so I had to get my own bars going – didn’t want to have to buy any drinks now, did I! Journalists often ask me what’s the best night I’ve ever put on, which is a tough one to answer. There have been so many good nights over my twenty six years of DJ’ing that to pick one is hard work, however one event that I’m really proud of and which was a spectacular achievement by anyone’s standards was back in 1993 when we took three thousand clubbers to Euro Disney in Paris for a one-off event named Dance Europe .This was originally supposed to be on site at Disney until three weeks before, when Disney Corp got cold feet and cancelled the event, worried about their family image and anticipating the potential for “Mickey Mouse on Acid” stories in the press. Determined not to be beaten I jumped on the train went over to Paris, secured 13 hotels nearest to Disney for the accommodation and bought three thousand passes for Disney which are valid for any day so they could not stop us using them. The event went off despite all odds and non-stop rain, and was very memorable. After the lease on the Milk Bar ran out in 1994 it was time to find a new home for my nocturnal activities. As with several things in my life, purely by accident I managed to find a site just around the corner from the Milk Bar in an old Salsa Restaurant and the Velvet Underground was born. In the three years that I was at the helm of the club it fair to say that everyone who was anyone in dance music graced the decks there. During this period We also opened MARS back on the old Milk Bar site (on a short lease) which while only ran for a couple of years was still successful and organized dozens of other one -offs. But life doesn’t always go the way you want it. To finance a new club project I sold my stake in the clubs to my former partner Leon and proceeded to waste a year and a half of my life and all the money I had on getting a big new club in Soho off the ground, which sadly due to planning permission never happened. My fall, when it came, was just as big and spectacular as my parties - suddenly I found find myself club-less, money-less, drinking out of control and firmly in the grip of cocaine fever. Something had to change - and that something was me. After a month in a very expensive private clinic and a lot of support from friends and family it was time to start the next “sober and clean” chapter of my life. For a couple of years in the early 2000 I was heavily involved with the operation of Lynn Cosgrave’s well known DJ collaboration, Trust The DJ. If you check the credits for most of the TTDJ mix albums sold on the site you will see that I was chief knob-twiddler on most of them. I am writing, producing and remixing all the time now, preferring to take a back seat and using several aliases to release the tracks. After twenty six years, music is still the most important thing in my life, and it’s great to now be in the position of having my own studio and the ability to be able to get an idea and get straight onto it.Check out a new album we have just finished here .These days, as well as production for many music clients, and myself, I still find time for three or four DJ gigs a month, a fair number of which are abroad - which I enjoy the most. I’m lucky enough to have travelled the world with a set of headphones and have made some great friends (and the odd enemy) in many countries, See You On The Dance FloorNicky Holloway
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