While it’s no Ibiza, Bahrain is the region’s hottest spot for DJ culture. Gulf Life waves its glowsticks for the promoters who are helping a small scene to make a very loud noise
A pampered life of luxury suites, stretched limos and free-flowing bubbly is par for the course for top DJs in London or New York. Not so in Bahrain, where the country’s best-known DJ, promoter and nightclub owner squeezes his office into the storage room at one of Manama’s less salubrious hotels. Karim Miknas owns two clubs in this building, Club Seven and Level, and while these attract only a fraction of the crowd that venues in nearby Dubai regularly command, he’s proud of the Kingdom’s fledgling scene. “When people want to party here, they go bananas,” he laughs. “Everybody’s jumping around. Everybody mixes with everybody else. It’s no longer just a nightclub, it’s a party.”
Nightlife in Bahrain is by no means a recent phenomenon. “From what I understand, the scene was pretty crazy in the mid-1960s,” says Miknas. “Bahrain was a British protectorate and followed closely what was going on in London. The British top-40 chart was our top 40; whatever was hot in London was hot here too.” Yet when Miknas launched his entertainment group, Seven Leisure, eight years ago, most club owners were only interested in luring the weekend traffic from across the causeway in Saudi Arabia. Only a couple of clubs had professional equipment and underground dance music couldn’t be heard anywhere.
Miknas gained his exposure to the international clubbing scene during a spell living in Los Angeles. “When I returned to Bahrain, everything seemed so tame,” he recalls. “The people DJing in this town were doing a terrible job and I thought, with a little collective of people, we could do better. So we started to hold parties in people’s houses and, after a while, decided to go legit.”
His double-decker venue at the Mishal Hotel is as cutting-edge as local nightlife gets, with Club Seven playing Arabic pop, R&B and house downstairs, and, upstairs, Level showcasing underground techno and hosting residencies by acclaimed British brands Defected and Housexy. “Before, it was all commercial, but now it’s changed,” says Miknas. “And we are part of the reason it has changed.”
A funky, contemporary lounge at the Best Western Elite Hotel, Cocoon is one of the most exciting venues to open in Bahrain in recent months. Its co-owner, Damian D’Costa, started working as a DJ in 1984 and had long harboured ambitions of opening his own lounge. “Cocoon is the first club I have properly invested in,” he says. “I’d come up with the concept four years ago, but it wasn’t possible. I had to find the right partners, the right investors and the right venue.”
The result is a sleek, European-style lounge, with some of the most dynamic acoustics in town. “The lounge concept is very 1980s; it died out in the 1990s and is now making a comeback. You can have a complete night out here. You don’t have to leave after dinner, worry about parking your car and lose the atmosphere. It’s all very sophisticated.”
With several new lounges scheduled to open over the next few months, D’Costa understands competition will remain tough: “At the moment, we’re all fighting for one small market.” Yet he is optimistic about the long-term health of the industry in Bahrain. “We’re preparing ourselves for the Bahrain boom,” says D’Costa. “I totally believe in it. The country is taking a sophisticated path. We’ve got good projects and we’re hitting the right markets.”
An influx of tourists and new residents would see Bahrain’s clubs competing for the new arrivals, although Miknas shudders at the thought of changing his music policy to appeal to a wider audience. “We don’t want to be commercial. We don’t want to be cheesy. We want to make a point.”
It’s this sense of individuality and rebellion that makes Bahrain’s clubs so appealing. While club-goers in the bigger cities seem perpetually obsessed with how they look and what other people are wearing, Manama’s party crowd is unpretentious and genuinely excited about being exposed to new music.
“In Dubai, everything’s commercial,” says Miknas. “Here, we want to do something we’re proud of. Dubai has big bucks, big venues, big crowds, but less of a focus on the quality of the music. They hesitate to go for an underground sound. Here, it’s intimate and DJs can play whatever they want.”
“It’s our island mentality,” continues Miknas. “Bahrain is the Jamaica of the Gulf.” |
