Fabric, London’s living monument to underground electronic music, is turning 15. The line-ups on show for the celebrations this weekend are testament to the breadth of relevance and gravity to the place – Four Tet, Goldie, Loefah, Pinch, Champion, et al mob all three rooms on Friday night with the UK bass vibes and then from Saturday to Monday straight, Room 1 goes with perennials Craig Richards and Terry Francis alongside Seth Troxler, Marcel Dettman, Ben UFO, and Dixon on the dark techno and house front.

As far as I’m concerned, Fabric has always been there. It’s where this whole dance music thing started for me. Prior to stumbling in there one Friday night around the turn of the decade as a wide-eyed, ex-pat grad student, my musical obsessions leant towards left-field, guitarry music. I often joke with people that, after that night, I never touched my guitar again. It’s almost true.

“I actually ended up going to Fabric’s opening night, cued up outside for about 3 hours for one of the best line ups I’ve ever seen. Was a planet V night, I was in pretty high spirits, so memories are a little patchy, but I do remember it being incredible fun…My first time there as a DJ was for the 10th birthday party. It was a real baptism of fire playing in Room One before Andy C. It was the first time in a while I had felt nervous, like properly knee knocking nervous, but it was an amazing night and nothing beats playing in that booth.” – Kasra Mowlavi, Critical Music

“Um…What kind of music is this?”

I actually asked that of a girl I met that first night. “I think it’s fidget house,” she told me. I still have no idea what the fuck it was I was listening to, but I ended up dating that girl for over two years. Incidentally, my love for UK bass music has significantly outlasted that relationship.

From then on, Fabric line-ups and FABRIClive mixes were my education. One night spent there awakened a voracious appetite for electronic music that is yet to relent. The friend who took me claims to have created a monster. We were there almost weekly for a time, but I was a crap rave mate, always wandering off towards the sound of some distant breakbeat and disappearing until 6 AM.

“I do remember the first time I played at Fabric – as it was obviously a big deal for me. It was for Bukem In Session. I remember it being super stressful because I was staying with a friend in Hitchin who drove me into London. He was like “yeah we have loads of time”. As it turns out we didn’t. He had to drive like a maniac for most of the way and I was only just in time for the set!” – Lenzman, Metalheadz

It’s difficult to explain to people just what defines the majesty of Fabric with words alone. Sure, some of it has to do with the venue’s obsession with sound quality, the relentlessly progressive programming, and the sheer cavernous expanse of the place. But on the other hand, it’s the only party I’ve ever found myself dancing between one person in a tuxedo and another in sweatpants. It’s the only club where I could lose my fiends for 6 hours and not think twice about it. If I ever left before the sun came up, I felt a weird sense of guilt, like I had failed my obligation to wring out every last moment out of the night.

And those co-ed bathrooms! There’s no more effective of a pick-up line than “So did you just take a shit or were you taking drugs?” It’s a redundant question anyway – Nobody goes to the bathroom to take drugs, and Fabric isn’t where you go to talk to women anyway.

“Rather than changing the musical landscape, I think Fabric has done something far more important – It’s consistently supported the underground…I’ve never really seen commercial types play there, even though you’d expect they’d fill it easily. It would be impossible to say they have ever sold out on commercial terms. Far from it.” – Erol Alkan

Fabric’s not for everyone, though, is it? It’s got a dash of the rough-and-tumble to it, a certain grit, a flair for dystopian aesthetic. A lot of people can’t see past the brick and mortar to the stuff of substance, that Fabric has transcended being a club. It’s a cultural institution. What goes on down those stairs defines culture around the world.

Perhaps a quote from Keith Reilly, Fabric’s Director in an RA interview sums up what makes the place so important: “We’re not interested in finding DJ’s who are going to give the crowd a great night, we are interested in finding DJ’s who will come down and play us music that we haven’t heard.”

“We played at Fabric once, for the first time…We started off electronic but then we went deep into playing 13th Floor Elevators. Literally, we got kicked off the decks. We ended up getting a residency at Fabric and playing there all the time…DJing and discovering music through clubs colored the music we ended up making.” – Simian Mobile Disco

As my tastes grew deeper, as they are wont to do, Fabric maintained its relevance. From Playaz to Hessle Audio to house residents Terry Francis and Craig Richards, Fabric is a definitive sounding board to what’s lurking about in the underground.

Nowadays, nothing gives me FOMO more than looking at Fabric line-ups. Sometimes I just sit and stare at them. Don’t get me wrong, LA’s a fun town, a cultural epicenter, but we will never have anything like this place.

When you get a booking at Fabric, you know what to expect – a musically educated crowd and a packed house with a firing atmosphere. But for some reason my last set in mid July of 2014 had something more…Getting every raver in the club to do a sit down on the breakdown of Double 99’s RIP Groove was very un-Fabric, but this was just another aspect of one of my favorite sets at Fabric.” – DJ EZ

I suppose all that’s left to say is thank you. It’s my job to share music and culture with the world, and I learned the core of my knowledge about dance music whilst down in the depths of Charterhouse Street. I do my best to avoid speaking in cliche except when entirely necessary, so you’ll have to excuse me when I say – Fabric changed my life.

All photos sourced via Fabric // Danny Seaton, Jasper Brown, and Sarah Ginn.

Jemayel Khawaja is THUMP’s Managing Editor in Los Angeles – @JemayelK