How 121 Went From House Parties to a 5000-Person Festival

Anyone familiar with house and techno knows the scene: Heavy bass, sticky floors, a room dark enough to make the music your only focus and have you forget who you came with. 

These are the base ingredients for any good dance music event - and Club 121 was no different. The second brick-and-mortar iteration of the 121 collective took up an underground space on Cambridge Terrace, Poneke, from 2020 to late 2022. 

If you could make it past the stragglers on Courtney Place and tear yourself away from riding the bull at Dakota, Club 121 was a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone seeking out a legitimate house DJ line-up.

But 121’s beginnings are more akin to that of any rowdy first year-flat. 

VICE chatted to founder, Olly de Salis, about how he transformed piss-ups with friends in his early days at uni, into one of Aotearoa's most prominent music events platforms. 

Hey Ollie, you good to get stuck in?

Sweet, yeah. 

So 121 has been around Wellington nightlife for a long time, but I'm sure there are probably younger people who are more aware of you because of the club and the festival. But 121 started out as house parties, right?

Yeah. We started doing house parties in 2015 up at my family home in Wadestown actually.

Are we literally just talking normal parties?

Yeah, so my parents went away for six months and they rented the house out to me and some school friends. So it sort of started as your classic flatwarmings and stuff, but I remember going to a friend's party and it was the first time I'd ever seen live music at a house party.  It seems so basic, but I remember I was like, Oh my God, you can put live musicians in the house.

The party that really kicked off 121 was the last week of lectures for the year, and I pretty much got everybody who I was mates with at uni ‘round and we all painted outdoors and painted the walls and made this big multimedia collaborative exhibition.

So it quickly went from just parties, to house parties with musicians, to house parties with musicians and lighting and art installations and paid door entries.

How many parties do you reckon you had in your home?

Well, we were the first people out of our group to be living in a flatting situation, so there was upwards of two to three parties a week.

And this was when you were in first year, second year uni?

Yeah, this is first year uni, fresh out of high school. It was proper like… frat house, always drinking… just first flat, you know? 

I'd also been hit in the face playing rugby and I’d had facial reconstruction surgery. I was coming off Tramadol and Codeine and I had a really severe concussion so, like, I didn't really have much thoughts about right and wrong – Things like painting on my parents walls and shit actually didn't register as being something you couldn't do at that point. 

I look back at all that shit and go, I can't fucking believe I let 300 people paint on my family home’s walls. 

What was it about the parties that you were having that made you think that other people would want to go to them?

In 2016, I know for myself and my friends, there wasn't anywhere in Wellington, per se, where we wanted to go out. As the house gigs sort of refined themselves, they became more popular and it really snowballed quite hard. 

And we had a big crew of people to start the basis of the snowball – 5 different graphic designers and 20 mural artists, a lot of musicians and 10 photographers. And some of these people I started working with in 2016, at uni, and I'm still working with to this day.

On the social side of it, did you guys feel cool?

Hm. I guess so…

You can say yes without it sounding bad.

Yeah, I don't know. Strange question to answer, obviously, like, Kiwis have this thing...

The tall poppies thing?

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if “cool” is the right word. Like, I didn’t think I was cool. But I felt like what we're putting on was very cool.

Yeah, yeah. I suppose no one is ever like “fuck, I’m sick”.

So where did you go from there? Like once you started making the gigs public?

It was quite a thought through plan that we would do one gig, and have all these photographers, and then have all of these images to then market the next one. We did a show in 2016 at the tugboat (Boat Cafe) with 500 people, and then we followed that quickly with a free event at Treetops skate park. Then we did the Corner Basement rave, which is 1500 people. 

It was pretty unknown for a local promoter with a local lineup to sell over 1000 tickets, you know. 

But it really does come down to how many people I was working with. I think that every gig we did had like 10 different posters, different photographers, and art installations. I think that really sparked something. 

And I think it was quite an underground thing when it first kicked off. Our ethos was doing unique locations, only a few times a year. Like, we were quite elusive. 

It wasn't until we opened the Cuba street club it became more of a dancing institution. Less raw and more focused on dance music nightlife and creating safe dance floors really.

It must feel crazy for you how much it’s grown?

The funny thing to look back on is how incredibly green and inexperienced I was then. Like, the skate park and Treetops shows, y’know, I just rolled up there with a stage and sound system and a generator. 

At one of them a noise control person spent the whole day looking for us, and at the end of the event, he turned up and was like, thank God I found you, because they’d had so many noise complaints.

Like, I didn't even know that you needed consent or anything, I just did it.

I kind of look back and it gives me shivers down my spine.  That's really where Tim (Ward) and Cam (Morris) came along and boosted things. Cam was a DJ, he knew all the sound systems and lighting, and Tim had been in hospitality for 25 years, so he understood operations, staffing, consenting, liquor licensing. I pretty much purely had marketing and promotions before that point.

It is pretty crazy that there will be people who are 18-19 years-old who’ve been to the club and won’t know any of this.

It's so interesting. Obviously, I'm so familiar with it and people in my group and age are. But it's interesting meeting people at the club. One time someone was like “I heard a rumour that you started by doing school balls and made money out of that and then you opened a club”.

I was like: Oh, yeah. Cool. We’ll run with that.

Cool. But also, no.

And with Club 121, how did that decision come about to get a permanent venue?

So from the early house party days, I remember putting a big piece of paper on my wall and writing a business plan, because I knew that it had legs and it could take off. 

And the business plan was for 5 years, and it was to run a series of events randomly in New Zealand, and ended on year 5 with a 3 day music festival, somewhere. And nowhere in that original plan trajectory was a nightclub. 

Then, in 2017, after putting on a few shows ourselves, someone who’d interviewed me for a different job called and was like: “You didn’t get it, but also I've got this nightclub space, do you wanna have a look at it?” 

And I remember that me and Cam were 19 and 20 then, so really young and green, and I remember going to tell them that we don't do week-in week-out nightclub stuff.  

And then we went down to the space and that quickly changed. Walking into the basement we were like: okay, I think we can be club operators.

It has actually always fascinated me that no one else had really jumped on that dance scene here, because I would have thought that would have been a lot more in demand.

Yeah, I think Wellington's gone through waves, like you had your late 90s, early 2000s wave of dance music and then it kind of died off.

I remember telling Tim, one of the co-directors, “this is the first proper nightclub here”. And he was like: “Yeah, It's the first one you've experienced, but there's been fucking heaps in the 90s in the 2000s”. 

True. 

And Tim ran clubs in the 90s. He had a lot of experience. So there was this quite cool cross-generational relationship. 

I think there's a big difference with the radical first rave wave, because they didn't have anyone who was nurturing them, I guess? So we were already privileged. 

These older figures have been there to help out, and give advice, and just be a part of it again. Just excited to see the torch being handed over.

That's sick to have had that.

And now you have the festival as well, which must feel huge. 

Yeah, to achieve that goal, from a piece of paper on the wall in my parent’s house when I was 18… And now it's the 3 day festival, 5000 people, it's a full-time job, 6 months of the year. It’s definitely our baby.

I’m so hyped for it. I find that we don't actually have that many festivals that fall in the “indie” space. 

There's a lot of stuff that leans more into the psy-trance, acid-hippie shit.

Yeah, you've got your Twisted Frequencies, your Aum’s. Which is very cool. And then you've obviously got your big ones, like Rhythm and Vines, Rhythm and Alps. 

Where we feel that we serve is like: you've got us and your Shipwrecks and your Outerfields festival, Beacon Festival,which is happening in Auckland, just an urban version of us up there. 

And it's pretty cool to watch the scene grow so much that a bunch of different 3000-5000 person events can sustain a dance music lineup. 

Yeah, that's really cool to see. And so cool that you said that was always in your original plans. 

Yeah, I’m pretty sure my mum still has the paper. 

I was gonna say, when you’re older, if you had kids, do you think you'd let them pull the same kind of stuff you were doing to your family home?

Either I'll be so for it or I’ll be so against it. 

But my parents were always really supportive. Like, they changed the dining room into an art studio for me in school. The way I pitched it to them was I was doing a big multimedia Art Gallery exhibition. But that was a little white lie, because it was also a huge party with really cool artwork on the wall. 

Forgiveness for them was when I took them to my business plan, and showed them what I was going to do. And it was pretty special being with them at the festival. Because they were at the first one going: you actually did achieve that.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That is really amazing. 

Here are some of the best pics from over the years

Rachel Barker is a Writer / Producer for Vice NZ in Aotearoa