The Ark Reunion — Sunday 1 October 1995

“Without a past there can be no future.”

That was the line across the flyer, and it summed up exactly what The Ark Reunion was about.

On Sunday 1 October 1995, Adelaide’s Dance Ark Club came back to life for one night at the Arkaba Hotel in Fullarton. The original club had opened on Friday 28 February 1991 and, across the next few years, became one of the defining homes of Adelaide’s early dance and rave scene. By 1994 The Ark was gone, but barely a year later the people behind it were already looking backwards — and getting many of the old crew back onto the same floors.

The reunion flyer did not undersell what The Ark had meant:

“It changed the way people saw music. It created new names and provided many with the best nights of their lives.”

For anyone who had spent Friday nights there during the early 1990s, that was not much of an exaggeration. The Ark had hosted a remarkable run of international visitors including Carl Cox, Lenny Dee, Frank De Wulf, Westbam, N-Joi, DJ Edge and DJ Dag, alongside a strong local backbone of DJs and MCs including ATB, Brendon, UZI, HMC, MPK, Angu$, Madness, GTB, Nigel, Noddy, MC Tim and Maestro D.

For the 1995 reunion, the featured names were ATB, Brendon, UZI and MC Tim, with The System A.D. direct from the UK. The special guests were HMC, MPK, Angus, Madness, GTB, Nigel, Noddy, Fantasia, Justice and MC Maestro D. It was less a new event than an attempt to reassemble the cast of The Ark itself.

Tickets were $15 in advance from Central Station Records, with only a limited number available at the door. The flyer promised three levels, a 9pm start and a suitably uncompromising NO ID NO ENTRY warning.

But one of the best things about the reunion artwork is that it never takes itself too seriously.

Alongside the DJs, the flyer proudly advertises multi-level dance platforms, PMD dancers, pool tables, pinball machines, a jacuzzi, “Ugly Security (but they’re nice)”, “No Food”, “No Juice Bar”, a three-legged race, a kissing booth in the cloakroom, big speakers, 12 Samurais, four Golden Scans, one strobe light and, finally, “a partridge in a pear tree.”

That mixture of nostalgia and piss-take feels completely right for The Ark. It was remembering something important without turning it into a museum piece.

The artwork itself was also built from the club’s history. Around the main reunion poster were reminders of the nights and artists that had passed through the venue — Carl Cox, Frank De Wulf, Lenny Dee, Public Enemy, DJ Edge and others. By 1995, those names already represented a remarkable few years for an Adelaide club.

What is especially interesting today is how little survives about the reunion itself.

There is no known contemporary newspaper review, no published running order, no reliable crowd figure and no circulating recording known to come from the night. Despite the importance of The Ark in people’s memories, the reunion is documented principally through its flyer rather than a detailed report written the following morning.

That makes the flyer’s enormous thank-you list even more valuable. It reads almost like closing credits for an era: Brendon, Tim, Brenton, Gary, Adam, Paddy, Roger, John and Tanya, Daniel, Paul Hodder, Central Station Records, The CORE, PMD Dancers, Peter Hurley and many others. My own name, Paul Hamon, is buried in there as well.

It is a reminder that The Ark was never just a list of touring DJs. Clubs like this existed because of promoters, resident DJs, record shops, printers, dancers, magazines, venue staff, lighting people, friends and the crowd that kept returning every week.

The memories that do survive from the original Ark years give some idea of what those rooms had been like. Comments beneath footage of Lenny Dee’s infamous Good Friday 1993 appearance remember an “insane ear bleeding night”, people trying to work out how to dance to music that hard, and one attendee saying Adelaide’s scene “got a lot harder after Lenny Dee came to town.” Those comments refer to the earlier club nights rather than the 1995 reunion, but they help explain why bringing The Ark back mattered.

The timing was significant too. The reunion happened at a point when Adelaide nightlife was changing again. Planet nightclub opened on Pirie Street in October 1995, the same month as The Ark Reunion. One chapter had finished and another was beginning.

Years later, the Arkaba would again become a meeting point for people from that period. A 2004 Anthems night brought many of the old names back to the same building, and reviewer Tara Mitchell described constantly bumping into old school friends and dancefloor mates. She called The Ark the “original granddaddy of dance music venues” in Adelaide.

But the 1995 reunion came first.

Only a short time after The Ark had closed, its community returned to the original building, put the old names back on the flyer and filled three levels with the people who had made the club what it was.

The flyer said it best:

Without a past there can be no future.

And on Sunday 1 October 1995, Adelaide went back to The Ark.