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It’s not been long since the website opened its… doors. But you may not be fully aware of our rich history. Sure, there’s the LMU Past section up at the top there, dedicated to archiving our events from back in our University days, however that’s not the entire story.
This is.
In 1998 the internet came to the small village of Selston in Nottinghamshire. It was dial-up and prohibitively expensive and hardly anyone had it. Our school didn’t even have it [until 2000 in fact] but one house blessed enough to enjoy the Super Highway was Jammy’s. He also had the only digital camera in the area, which was the size of a Game Gear and ran on mercury and spells. A third thing about Jammy was that his house was frequently devoid of his parents, since they’d go away for the weekend fairly often, and this opened up the building to no end of parties.
Jammy took his three gifts and combined the lot into a website he called The Drunk Club [on which at no point were the “Rules of Drunk Club” IE/ you do not talk about Drunk Club etc… ] He added his lousy digital camera pictures with some funny captions, and yours truly would run down the events of the evening in what became known as a Write-Up in our parlance. We even had a NEWS Section that we used to put any shit on that we thought was funny. As is the standard of all late 90s amateur websites it was full of animated GIFs and embossed fonts for titles etc… Still it was quite good and all our friends went on it pretty religiously to check out the pictures and either try to remember what the hell had gone on or, if they missed it, catch up so they could join in to conversations.
Unfortunately the website could not last. Since the events which shook the core of The Drunk Club I’ve had to tell the story so often that I actually just wrote the fucking thing down and posted it as an article on LeedsMeUp, so I could just refer people there and wash my hands of it. I’m not gonna retell it here because it’s long and has a lot of backstory and this is already shaping up to be quite the monolith. Let’s just say there was a misunderstanding, the police were involved and the website was shut down.
We were despondent, but not to be deterred we found a new server and spent many weeks creating a brand new site in the same vein, however this one would focus much more on the events and members. It was known as Drunk Club The Next Generation, or more often than not simply DCNG.
The site had this wicked cool Devil Logo that Jammy drew one day and we both had tattooed on our arms [he’s had his covered over with this God awful Samoan tribal bollocks. I’ve still got mine] and a pretty awesome design too as Jammy got better and better with coding and graphics. Sadly this iteration didn’t last half as long as it’s parent, when our new server closed us down unexpectedly for “Remote Leading”, which means using links to images from other websites so that their bandwidth gets used and not yours. We weren’t doing that, but The Man was having none of pleading. Not only did they shut us down but they completely erased the site from the internet entirely after about a week, and while we were trying to find somewhere else to host it, a new player entered the game.
Nick O’Mahoney had seen our success with The Drunk Club and wanted a slice of the events website pie. He came out with Summer of Sessions in 2002, a flash based website which is still archived to this day.
SoS ran for two summers across 2002 and 2003, then came time for University and all of the previous friendship groups would come to an end. DCNG never got back on the table and when I went off to Leeds Nick suggested something incredible. The MeUp Exchange. An events website per university town, with his StaffordMeUp coming first in September and our own LeedsMeUp: Live From New York Street hot on its heels in December that same year. They did incredibly well, now refined by years of filters and feedback, Nick’s Flash based hub was all the rage in Stafford, where T-shirts were sported baring the logo. Over in the North our new original design got a revamp part-way through by the originator himself, Jammy, and took on a kick ace streamlined look.
2005 came LMU v2.0, again redesigned and with the first introduction of articles, reviews and stories. LMU v2.0 had much of an emphasis on members and their comings and goings. If someone’s Event attendance dropped too low they’d fall off the active members charter and end up in the Graveyard. The shame of it all prompted them to start coming out more and we managed to build a pretty large core group of friends.
In February 2006 we held The Member X Games, an event advertised on the site like crazy and was a competition for a handful of people who wanted to be members to decide which one of them would get the coveted and final spot on the page. Member 10, IE ‘X’. The contenders themselves went on about getting on the site whenever I saw them. They badgered me constantly “HEY GAZZ! Why aren’t I on the site yet? I’ve come out loads and I’m not a member or anything! What’s going on Gazz?!”
So I came up with the contest and they were all frigging delighted. They demanded to know what the game would be, how could they win, who were their opponents and when BY GOD WHEN would we actually be doing it?
Australia Day at Walkabout had turned into something of an LMU tradition and it was coming up, so I let everyone know a good month ahead of time, and reminded them every once in a while. There was even a huge banner all over the site to keep the Member X Games in the minds of all and sundry.
Finally came the night and everyone was to meet in Bourbon, a bar nearby to Walkabout, to hear the rules and meet the contenders.
Not fucking one of them came. 5 contenders spend months and months badgering me relentlessly about becoming members, and then even more about the specifics of the contest, and when the day actually arrived to show up and make it happen not a single bastard one of them bothered to show up. No attendance, no texts even. They just didn’t show.
I got a right cob on. I’d only done the frigging contest to keep them happy and get them off my case. I went home pretty early that night, the entire event soured enormously for me, and later that week I posted the pictures from the disastrous evening on the website along with a message. That LeedsMeUp was over.
I’d gotten sick of it. It wasn’t just the Member X fiasco, but for a while I had been the entire driving force behind the show, writing all the events, articles, reviews and stories, doing all the captions, creating the graphics and uploading the whole site by myself. When I didn’t have time people would get on my case for not having uploaded it, and when I did I found no one had actually looked at the site in weeks.
When I asked people for help with the writing they always enthused that they’d love to, but when time came for them to hand over the goods they hadn’t done it and didn’t care to do it either.
The whole thing had fucked me RIGHT OFF beyond repair, and despite everyone’s protestations I didn’t update the site again for several months.
Our final events, titled The Last Hoorah, came in the early summer and detailed the leaving party of some of our favourite girls of LMU, Claire, Lisa and Murph. They were all moving away due to the end of University Our farewell to them also became our farewell to LeedsMeUp. I never updated it again after that and when time came to renew the contract for our webspace, I quietly let it pass me by and the entire website was obliterated from the internet forever.
Until now.
When James discovered his old hard drive and had me remove all the files from it, we discovered a wondrous thing. All of those events and good times fully restored to their former prominence. The LondonMeUp website was already under construction, now fully in James’ hands for the first time, and the addition of LMU The Past was a great way to introduce our old members to our news ones and have them learn of our rich heritage. As is this, actually.
If you’ve read this far well done, and I really do suggest you check out Summer of Sessions to see some of the stuff our Mother site got up to in the Uni Years. Nowadays both myself and Nick are part of LondonMeUp, together on the same page for the first time, and we even brought some former LMU members with us.
It’s been almost ten years since The Drunk Club was first uploaded and my experience with events websites began, and I’m really looking forward to this chapter and what it might bring. Plus I’m delighted not to have to design the frigger this time.
It takes ages.
A Full and Complete History of London Me Up - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -