Lucy Gavaghan, in conversation with Jed Dutton

In late November, I met with Jed Dutton to write a story for the pollen project. The basis of this article is a write-up of the conversation we recorded in an Edinburgh bar.

Jed is the founder of an Edinburgh organisation called The Big Green - a staple of the city’s independent dance and clubbing scene. I’ve always been intrigued by its roots and growth and wanted to speak to Jed to understand the story behind the twist in the Big Green business model which diverts ticket costs to local eco charities and social initiatives like neighbourhood food banks. You will find a number of other articles and resources woven through the write up of our back-and forth.

The article concludes with a snippet of the book which sparked my interest in writing about the Big Green as part of the pollen project - PARTY LINES by Ed Gillet. Thanks to Jed, for giving his time to talk to us, and to those who wrote the pieces referenced.

How did the project emerge?

“I always make a joke that I was born in Dorset and built in Leeds. I grew up on the South Coast of England in Dorset in a quiet, beautiful area of the country. I had quite a left leaning upbringing and I grew up in an environment that was very in touch with nature.

When I went to Uni in Leeds, I learned a lot of things about myself. Probably the most influential in the long term was that I'm a massive fan of dance music. I went clubbing a lot, and I started to explore. That was when I began to have seeds in my mind of running something like the Big Green. I got into DJing quite early on and I wasn't initially thinking about running a club night. I was always quite passionate about the planet and grew up with a lot of messages around climate change and all the scientific warnings.”

Jed describes the formative experience of leaving home to go to university in Leeds. A major element of Jed’s education in the party scene was ‘Cosmic Slop’, a club night initiated by Tom Smith in 2009. As we unravel the effects of life in Leeds, Jed reflects on how a night out can be a vehicle to musical bliss, and togetherness extending beyond the dancefloor as money can be channeled to local charities. Cosmic Slop blazed a trail for Jed to think about clubbing as an act of meaningful community.

For more context on the Cosmic Slop story, I will share a lovingly written snippet of an article in leeds independent life:

“Cosmic Slop is one of Leeds’ most important and iconic nights of the last decade. Beginning as a fundraising party for local charity MAP, the event quickly became a cult dance favourite, its eclectic music, infamous sound system and artistic environment gaining wider recognition whilst retaining its original underground vitality.”

Cosmic Slop remains the main fundraiser for MAP, donating over £1 million towards the local Music and Arts Production charity. However, recent threats to their home building in Leeds underscore the importance of protecting independent venues and club nights. Jed’s creation of the Big Green, inspired by Cosmic Slop is a beautiful example of how the spirit of one can inspire another, offering more people a chance to engage with clubbing in an atypically altruistic way.

The unique fusion of partying and charity support gets people thinking about system change in a way that is cleverly indirect. Cosmic Slop proved the power of that idea, and paved the way for the Big Green to blossom further up North shortly after Jed left uni and moved to Scotland.

Jed reflects on the time around the end of his degree in Leeds and talks about the rising profile of conversations about the climate breakdown. He mentions Extinction Rebellion and young activist, Greta Thunberg, going on to say “I was continually in this environment where you just see governments and people in power not doing anything and it was, as we probably all resonate with, this increasingly despairing situation where you feel really upset about these things but you feel powerless to do anything.”

The Big Green came into being during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time in which the arts and culture scene in Scotland as a whole was placed under immense pressure. Many venues were left ‘hanging on by a thread’ - that thread often constituted by grassroots fundraising campaigns to keep open or resurrect independent venues. During lockdown, Jed recorded and released upbeat radio sets and, as restrictions lifted he started booking gigs and bringing his vision to life. Jed tells us that most come for the music, and later learn about the unusual diversion of their ticket cost towards ecological goodness.

Are there any venues in Edinburgh that feel particularly beloved to you now?

“The first place I did a party was upstairs at the Mash House. A lot of people know about the Mash House main room but more hidden upstairs, there's a little room where you can go and dance. Most people don't know it's there but we managed to fill it a few times - it's always going to have a proper place in my heart.

Sneaky Pete’s is an amazing venue, pretty much any event I go to there I'll enjoy. It's a tiny little sweat box where everyone's just having a great time enjoying the music. The Bongo Club I love as well, they've got some really good nights there. And there were a lot of other interesting party ones along the way that I enjoyed.
Edinburgh is definitely an interesting environment venue-wise to navigate because there's lots of big venues that sometimes don't get filled and then there's smaller ones that get totally rammed. The thing I love the most is not necessarily the venues themselves but the people that are doing all sorts of interesting shit every other week.”

How would you describe the sound of a Big Green set to someone who's not heard it before? What kind of genres do you draw on?

“My first love musically, when I got into dance music, was house music, but I very quickly moved on to listening to a lot of disco. I used to play a lot of 70s, real classic stuff. But then, a lot more recently, my taste has gotten a lot ravier. I listen to a lot of stuff from the 90s, when that scene was popping off in the UK. But as well in the last couple of years I've really got into R&B and hip hop. I think the most exciting sets and musical gigs that I've been to are when you don't really know what's happening next. I really just enjoy trying to surprise people and keep them on their toes.”

Over time, the more parties you run, do you feel like there's a community building up around the Big Green?

“Yes, I think quite a lot of people are recognisable faces from previous parties. People message me sometimes about certain events. I've had people come and say, I really enjoyed the event yesterday, I'll definitely be coming along to some more. It's really hard... I know a lot of people who run club nights, and I think even if you have a residency, Edinburgh is a city with changing demographics. You have a big population of students who are here for three years and then they go on and do other things. It's really nice to see people enjoy the music and events. A really good friend of mine, Alex, came here as a student and obviously fell in love with the events and music. It's cool to see someone like him go through that journey that I went through in Leeds when I was a student.”

How do people react to the fusion of partying and planetary consciousness? or is that more of an unspoken element of the parties?

“I want it to be a night where people come out and they enjoy the music and it's like any other club night but they're doing a good thing for the world at the same time. I think it’s more on social media where I get a lot of response and people reaching out to talk more about my fundraisers.

But when I'm on a dance floor you see a lot of people who just come in, they seem to be reacting well to the music, they're having a good time and it's less about that on the dance floor. There's something I find really beautiful about it. Climate activism can be a depressing space, but when you're doing activism in the form of fundraising for a dance party, that kind of goes out the window. You get to the end of the night and realise we've raised £800 for a local community garden!

That's an amazing feeling because there's so many young people who grow up with a negative message around climate, and when you're supporting those community gardens or people are learning about how to grow their own food, how to live more sustainably. Everyone had a great time without directly thinking about the impending climate crisis.”

Jed’s inaugural years of partying with Cosmic Slop are, unfortunately, not the norm for those coming of age in the UK nowadays. My own experience of a night out playlist is of amped up chart tunes and a strong feeling that many are there to take photos rather than experience something joyous.

As we went deeper into the origin story of The Big Green, Jedd reflected on the UK rave scene and the myriad ways UK nights out have changed, sometimes imperceptibly, in recent decades. The euphoric-potential of a modern day night-out is often dulled by the dominance of mega-clubs, overpriced entry, and generic tunes played on a nightly loop. It’s a curious case of shifting baseline syndrome, whereby our conceptions of a ‘real night out’ are based on whatever feels like the socially accepted norm of one’s youth.

Not only is it more expensive to spend a night on a dance floor, it’s often prohibitively expensive to put on parties and keep the doors of a smaller venue open. A carefully crafted piece in Resident Advisor says,

“The rollercoaster ride of pandemic-induced shutdowns has been one of the most challenging periods in dance music history, producing lasting financial effects on everyone from lighting technicians to DJs to club owners. The impact on promoters has been especially harsh. Faced with a reduced playing field amid widespread venue closures, many can no longer afford the establishments that remain open. Meanwhile, rising artist fees, staff shortages and a general climate of uncertainty are placing pressure on an already vulnerable market.”

After discussing a mix of pressures placed on venues, DJs, party goers, and promoters, Jed offered some cautious optimism in the form of “the recent government announcement to make big music venues pay into a fund for smaller music venues. it would be like a proportion of a ticket price that has to go to grassroots music. It is good to see the government acknowledge that grassroots music is struggling, but I do think there is an element of it being a little bit too late. I don't know how the funds are going to be spent in terms of how they're going to be allocated. It remains to be seen how that kind of pans out but it's good to see them doing something.”

We went on to discuss the role of social media in the journey of the Big Green. I asked Jed: Do you find yourself taking up much time creating content for social media? Or do you tend to focus your energies elsewhere?

This is something I’ve always had a bit of a battle with and it feels like a bit of a necessary evil to me. I enjoy elements on the creative side but I don’t love the fact that you have to make everything algorithm ready - every experience has to be summarised in a clip or a photo or a reel which can feel contrived. The creative side of me does enjoy elements of it, although it doesn't feel very organic.

Everyone has to promote and people in the past had to do things like flyering at two in the morning! So it's a bit of a mixed bag but it can unlock freedom in a sense, creatively, if you want to, and it can lead to a busy event and raising money for charity… or raising enough money to keep your creative project going.”

To finish, I asked Jed to cast an eye forward and tell us what the dream Big Green night would look like if they had all the resources and all the time in the world?

“I think a big part of it would definitely be to have something outdoors where people can be in touch with nature. I've been a lot more interested in setting rather than who's DJing recently because I think back to many times in my life where I didn't necessarily know who's DJing and the music's good but it's more memorable because of what's going on around me. Whether it's in someone's basement or it's out in a forest or it's in a working man's club or, you know, the strange wonderful settings that people put on parties. I would love to make it a natural spectacle so that people can appreciate nature and not damage it and also have an amazing time and then hopefully raise a lot of money for kind of charities in the local area

Obviously with an unlimited budget I'd probably get all my favourite DJs playing. More than anything, that would be to make sure as many people would come along as possible. Some of the people DJing and performing on the local scene I think are better than some of the ‘superstars’. To balance everything out, the dream-line up would be a couple of local artists and a couple of scene stars like Mr. Scruff, Jeremy Sylvester, as well as friends like Alex Brown and the DJ’s from Sneaky Pete’s, Hap Tech, Superstar Fish Bar, and Cosmic Slop

It'll probably be quite a long list to be honest with you. I don't want to keep you for too long…”

If you're keen to listen to a Big Green set, there is a link at the end of this page. I would also urge anyone who enjoyed reading this piece to look for a copy of a book called ‘PARTY LINES’ by Ed Gillet. Reading this book set my mind alight, and taught me a great deal about UK politics. Without it, I wouldn't have reached out to Jed or taken the time to research this piece. In its final pages, Gillet pays homage to Cosmic Slop with a similar glimmer to Jed as he recalls his formative years at Uni in Leeds.

On page 384, Gillet writes: “Cosmic Slop refuses to grow beyond its 200-person capacity, a sign above the door reading ‘MUSIC IS LOVE’. In the near future, as AI and climate change begin to transform our understanding of dance music, this sense of personal connection and local communal identity may well become the only means by which to quantify its meaning.”

I reread that passage numerous times, writing it out in a notebook and feeling drawn to the assured assertion that all of this is connected: how easily we can go out dancing, who reaps what rewards, and the reality that our interconnected neighborhoods will be transformed through climate breakdown and technology. There's a great deal to process and we won't be able to do that if we're lonely. Immersion in music, whatever form that takes, has a way of melting time, and connecting people with a power that often feels better not to verbalise. There’s no doubt that the world needs more of that. As we grow, perhaps pollen can become a place to explore related thoughts more deeply.

Thank you for being here. Lucy.

Listen to the Big Green debut set, recorded in 2022: via mix cloud

Follow the Big Green on social media: @thebiggreeeen

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