In the early seventies Keith Reilly was a thirteen-year-old lad growing up in north London. He’d recently saved enough wages from his two paper rounds to buy his first sound system along with his first record, David Bowie’s Honky Dory and that was that. Keith was to dedicate his life to a pursuit through the global library of music collecting, to date, well over two hundred and fifty thousand bites from the musical melting pot.

There are not many people out there that love music more than Keith, although, I guess there is always one.

“John Peel’s a God to me really. From my earliest days at the age of thirteen or fourteen, I’d fall asleep every night nearly strangling myself with my headphones listening to the John Peel show. He was the one guy who when you had a real lust for music and when you needed to devour as much as you could. He was the one guy out there that no matter what it was, if it needed playing he would be playing it. He’s the only one who has the guts to do it, he has incredible taste in music, he has an incredible energy, a really sincere energy as a man. He looks at the world of music in its entirety and I would have to say that there’s very few people I respect more than John Peel.”

Keith’s face is now more recognisable to the masses as the shy and dedicated face behind London’s premier nightspot and arguably the best club in the world – Fabric.

“I only really did Fabric ‘cos I couldn’t listen to other people who wouldn’t support the kind of music I felt needed it - was worthy of it really - and that’s what this was for. We wanted a big space to make this happen on the scale we wanted to, we wanted lots of rooms so we could do different things.”

It seems fitting that John Peel should now be a regular DJ at the club, compiling one of the most unexpected compilations for the club’s label.

“It was just my petulant reaction from school of not liking being told what to do. Everyone was coming in saying, ‘When are you going to do a CD? Why don’t you do a CD? Will you do a CD?’ when really the question was, will you do the CD we want? So when we decided to do it ourselves, we just thought let’s not just do one CD, let’s make them fall from the sky, not follow the marketing route but getting back to the old give-us-a-tape type scenario of the rave tape.”

Despite a troubled four years in a boardroom dispute, the club hasn’t missed a beat, staying true to the original promise to bring the best music through the best sound system to people who want to hear it in a safe and comfortable space.

It seems a simple and obvious promise from a club yet many venues would fall short of the basic criteria of what its main function is. Some might even say this about Fabric too, but just one look at this millionaire club owner and anyone can see that sitting there in Gap jeans and non branded trainers, all he cares about, still, is the music the same as he did when he was thirteen.

“Every penny I’ve got goes into the record store and I’ve always been like that, I mean, look at me. I know Gap has a bad rep and I shouldn’t shop there but I’m so skinny that they’re the only jeans that look all right on me… and they’re cheap! I wear crap jeans and t-shirts and go and spend all my money on records – I’ve always done that”

He takes me record shopping to his favourite Soho stores to pick up several hundred pieces of vinyl that have been specially put aside. He’s like a kid in a sweet shop.

“I own a massive club! Every job has a perk!”

As far as Keith is concerned there isn’t a better perk too.

“I’m ashamed to say it… actually I’m not, I spend up to fifteen hundred pounds a week some weeks and know I can’t listen to them all and everybody tells me I can’t but I’ve got well over two hundred and fifty, three hundred thousand records now and that’s not counting all the countless thousand CD’s. I’ve DATed sets at every club I’ve done, hours and hours on archive. I’ve even got tapes of old John Peel shows from when I was fifteen, it’s mad really. I just can’t get rid of it. I can’t stop, I can’t listen to it all and I know it’s pointless but it’s my archive. If I listened to it all end to end it would probably take another fifty lifetimes.”

Maybe this is mad behaviour, but who can you think of that has the soundtrack to the last two decades frozen in time for anyone to remember? Or put it another way, can you remember what you where dancing to back in the summer of 1987 or 1999? Can you remember what Danny Rampling was rocking dance floors with when Margaret Thatcher was seeing in her final week as Prime Minister? And can you remember what Louie Vega was importing from Chicago at the same time McDonalds where were bringing us the Big Mac? I’m not just talking about the obvious tracks that made the charts, I’m talking about the ones that we’ve forgotten, the ones Keith wanted to start Fabric for. Sod the BBC library; this guy is a historian with the same drive and passion to not forget what he feels passionate about as much as Simon Schama feels we shouldn’t loose sight of what the Tudors did.

Last word to Keith our guardian of the creative medium called music:

“That’s the kind of big twist on it I suppose, I’m not very social, yet I invite three thousand people to my house every night. It’s not about the scene for me, it’s purely about music.”

http://www.fabric-london.com