BEFORE I was a publisher, I was a club-runner. The club was called Chocolate City and took place on Thursday nights at The Venue on Calton Road in Edinburgh. Chocolate City is no longer (1990-1994, RIP) and The Venue has been since transformed into an amazing gallery space by Richard and Florence Ingleby. But the joy of DJing – and club culture generally – is something that I cannot see ever disappearing from my life. Once bitten, forever smitten.
So it's been a long-harboured dream to start another club night in Edinburgh – it was simply a question of where and with whom. As chance would have it, two of my colleagues at Canongate have also been involved in running various club nights, both h
ere and in London. Our head of publicity, Angela Robertson, has jointly run an excellent monthly night called Book Slam, which mixes up music and reading, while our senior fiction editor, Francis Bickmore, has been behind two great Edinburgh nights (Kin and Tongue'n'Groove, both of which brought music and literature together). But we were distracted, we procrastinated and it's only now that we have finally got our act together.
This Thursday sees the opening night of Irregular at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh. It's to be a quarterly night at which the three of us – in partnership with established weekly live music night Limbo – will serve up a smorgasbord of unexpected sounds that will include bands, readings, stand-up, video installations and DJs. The evenings will be fairly freeform, but I'm confident that anyone who comes along will leave feeling enriched and entertained and, all in all, glad to have been there.
One of the things that I have always loved about clubs is the way they create a shared space and provide a shared experience for everyone who crosses their threshold. Music is so obviously a communal experience, but literature tends to be consumed in isolation, even if it then inspires heated conversation and debate.
The staggering growth of book festivals over the past 20 years has shown just what an audience there is for public performances by writers, but even the best of these festivals present the work in a fairly conservative and traditional way. There's nothing wrong with this, but there are other ways to create platforms for writing.
In the 1990s, Edinburgh played host to the superb Yellow Café nights. At the same time, the magazine Rebel Inc was also organising anarchic but unforgettable evenings that, like the Yellow Café, championed work by writers whom you wouldn't expect to see on the programme of, say, the Edinburgh International Book Festival. And music, primarily from DJs, was also a key component of these salons. So, in a way, we are simply continuing an Edinburgh tradition. And it's worth stressing that the writers will be from across all publishers' lists and from all around the world, not just Canongaters.
Another inspiration has been Crossing Border, a pioneering festival that takes place in The Hague each November and brings together music and writing in the most effortless of ways. Many important writers have attended Crossing Border over the past 20 years – Alasdair Gray designed their official poster in 2007 – but the organiser, Louise Behre, also brings brilliant bands and singers from around the world, too.
This crossing of cultural borders is so important: by refusing to compartmentalise writing and music, this festival allows all sorts of fascinating connections to be made.
I have always seen this parallel between publishing and DJing – maybe they blurred in my own head because I was doing both at a very formative age, but the idea of curating is central to both. You have to make what are ultimately very subjective taste decisions as to what you think is worth championing, and then present that work to an unsuspecting audience. Many of the records I played at Chocolate City were hidden gems from the rich vaults of black America, records that were often little-known in this country but were, I felt, both important and irresistibly good.
Some of these tunes will be dropped in to the mix on Thursday night. As will sneak previews of videos of Nick Cave, pictured left, reading from his staggeringly good new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (his first novel for 20 years, due to be published in September). This morality tale, set in Brighton, tells the story of a travelling salesman in search of a soul.
An excellent trio of writers – Joe Dunthorne, Dan Rhodes and Tim Turnbull – will be performing live and also on the night's roster is a great band called The Black Diamond Express.
The Voodoo Rooms is an ideal venue for this sort of event, because you can either chill out and talk in the bar or you can lose yourself on the dancefloor, where the bands, DJs and writers will be performing. At any one point there will be as many six acts performing, so you never quite know what's going on elsewhere, but you can be sure of finding a different and inspiring vibe in each space. What more could you ask for on a Thursday night in March?
• Irregular is at the Voodoo Rooms, 19a West Register Street, Edinburgh on Thursday 19 March, 8pm-1am. Admission is £5, which includes a free copy of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father for every club-goer to take home.
