Bugged Out: It’s Just A Big Disco
215 x 282 mm, 256 pages, hardback
Published in 2025
Published by: Disco Pogo Ltd.
Editors-in-chief: Paul Benney & Johnno Burgess
Design: Chris & Harriet Jones
‘There was The Twisted Wheel in the sixties, The Electric Circus in the seventies, The Haçienda in the eighties and Bugged Out in the nineties’
First came the irreverently-named nineties club culture and music mag Jockey Slut, then came Disco Pogo—a revised re-launch, responding to a changed world—now, founders Paul Benney and Johnno Burgess are back with a series of hardback books; this one commemorates thirty years of Bugged Out, the duo’s legendary northern-born club night.
Tracing the infamous party all the way back to its rudimentary origins—the first iteration was held in a former cotton mill in Manchester in 1994—the book charts its mind-boggling evolution over the following three decades. Ambitious in its scope, the weighty hardback features never-before-seen interviews with former resident DJs—amongst their ranks The Chemical Brothers, Erol Alkan and Hot Chip–as well as written contributions from journalists such as Jim Butler, Ralph Moore and Luke Bainbridge. It’s a nostalgic archive packed full of larger-than-life anecdotes, an almost inconceivable amount of ephemera and tender snapshots of nights spent on the dance floor, but, perhaps most significantly, it also serves as a ‘chronicle of UK club culture from the 90s to the present day’ at a time when Britain’s nightlife is under significant threat.