Will Paterson - the man behind hard house behemoth known as Frantic - has never been one to stand still when it comes to business. 9 years after setting up the world’s best known hard house event, he’s accumulated DJ agencies, a venue management company, a PR & Design agency, and 2 events companies, and continues to search for new ways to work within the dance music industry. It’s no surprise then that he’s become the first promoter within the hard house scene to (legally) take the music out of the clubs and into venues long associated with other sectors of rave culture; the warehouses. The first such venture was One AWsum Night a few weeks back, with Frantic NYE taking over a bigger warehouse space for a rousing 2007 finale on December 31st.

“After 9 years of working in clubs I liked the idea of using a space that you could make your own and design from scratch” he tells me. “I’d also been to quite a few warehouse parties and loved their underground feel.” Currently managing the bookings for 4 different warehouse spaces in East London, he’s been attracting everything from minimal techno promoters to dubstep ones, all keen to try out fresh spaces which afford a wealth of possibilities for creative party-throwers. Of course people have been throwing parties in warehouses in the UK since the early ‘80s, but the difference now is that it’s all above-board, all kosher. “We only put on legal events. We fill in forms with the local council and Police and then, providing everything is in order, they grant us a license for one night.” Such licenses are called Temporary Event Notices (TEN) and are granted by councils for “one-off” events in venues which don’t hold entertainment/music/dancing licenses. Applying for these licenses and getting them OKed is often the most stressful part of putting on a warehouse party, as Will suggests. “Usually you face the problems in the weeks running up to the event, so the biggest problem I’ve had is with overeager punters getting lost looking for the spaces! We literally spend weeks planning everything down to the last detail. We go to the site many times with the sound and lighting engineers to make sure everything is in place for a great party. We also bring in décor designers so we can make the whole place like a different world!” Clearly, there’s quite a lot more to be taken into consideration than putting on a party in a club where all the sound, lighting, bar, cloakroom, queuing and heating facilities are all in place. I ask Will if there’s anything that is actually easier in terms of running a warehouse party compared to a club one. “No…ha ha! Joking aside it’s easier in that you can start from scratch and put on what you think the punters are looking for rather than being restricted by the design of the club. This can be a lot of fun as you can do lots of really cool things with staging, visuals and lasers that it would be hard to do in a traditional club.”

Frantic’s NYE party takes place at a venue known as the Hearn Street Car Park in Shoreditch, a place which has hosted parties for the likes of Sasha, Bugged Out and French Connection.“After helping to run quite a few warehouses for electronic and rock events this year I thought it was high time that the hard house scene got in on the party” Will explains. ”I knew that few people party as hard as the hard house fraternity and believed that we could show them how it was done.” And why the shift from the traditional Frantic New Year’s Day event to New Year’s Eve? ”Having helped run a big Old Skool NYE event for the last 2 years, I noticed how excited people get about their NYE Clubbing and I wanted to bring some of that back into the hard house scene. It has to be said there are few better times to be clubbing than when you countdown to NYE with hundreds of your mates!”

Will’s right-hand-woman in all things Frantic, Chloe, has been helping run such warehouse parties for over a year now, having encountered every possible difficulty and fine-tuning the organisational process along the way. She offered lots of helpful advice to reassure people about raving in such “unchartered territory” “We have asked outlets to send out paper tickets rather than door collection lists, so the ticket collection should be kept to a minimum. We will recruit extra staff to take care of the ticket collection. The guestlist is also kept to a minimum and many guests are being sent paper tickets. Again extra staff will be on hand to cover this. Basically this means it will speed up the process at entry. We will keep searches thorough but fast, and we will be ink stamping people upon entry rather than using wrist bands. This all means less time queuing on the door!” A huge outdoor area for smokers complete with hanging halogen heaters (like those used at Fabric) and seats will be available, as well as indoor heaters to keep the indoor space at a comfortable temperature. Wasn’t One AWsum Night a bit chilly though? ”We ordered heaters for AWsum which didn't arrive from the company, so were let down completely on that occasion. This time round, we’ve bought them ourselves so it won’t be a problem! There will be proper toilets, drinks token booths away from bar and cloakroom to ease congestion, a large cloakroom, flooring, signposting…basically everything you need for a trouble-free night out!”

As for production, we’re promised brand new Frantic décor, a powerful laser and light show, a room decked out in UV lighting, stunning visuals, live feeds from the DJ booth and thumping soundsystems. The acoustics in a warehouse differ vastly from most club spaces – so it’s important to get this aspect spot on. “We bring in systems that are designed to give the optimum sound quality for the space” Will tells us. “We always use the best sound engineers and state of the art DJ equipment so that the DJ and the clubbers get the very best from the experience. We are going to be using the brand new TurboSound Rig that is intended to beat all comers in giving arena-quality sound…”

And finally you’ll be wanting to know how exactly you get to this mysterious warehouse space I suppose? In Shoreditch you say? I thought warehouses were located in the middle of desolate industrial estates? “You'd think, but this is an inner city urban space” Chloe points out. “Don't think cowshed. Think concrete structure, huge space. It's literally 5 minutes from Liverpool Street tube and mainline train station. Trains run to Liverpool Street from North London and all over East Anglia. It’s less than 10 minutes walk from Old Street tube on the Northern Line too. So you couldn't find any other space that was best located transport wise.”

If that didn’t all convince you that hard house in a warehouse is going to rock…then nothing will!


CLICK HERE FOR FULL DETAILS OF FRANTIC'S NYE WAREHOUSE MASH-UP!