House Is Coming To Durham?

Are you bored with the same rotation of pubs and clubs every week?

Listening to the same music over and over until, against your will, you know every word to a random Sabrina Carpenter remix and can’t get Angels by Robbie Williams out of your head? This is exactly why Ollie Williams, a second year Collingwood student, created Jinky, a house and dance music events group, with the aim of bringing dance back to Durham.

It’s an ambitious goal we can all agree, Durham being infamous for its poor nightlife which many, including myself and Williams, saw as a caveat for accepting the offer. When comparing Durham to other more clubbing-prone universities, Ollie saw that it wasn’t the lack of appetite for house music that was the problem, nor the lack of any good DJs willing to perform, it was the lack of any company offering events like this, in which he filled the gap in the market pretty quickly. Clearly, it worked to his benefit, the Angel pub, where the white party event was held, filling up in under and hour with people cramming to get closer to the decks. This begs the question: why hasn’t anyone done this before?

A trigger to the start of Jinky was the liquidation of Snafu, of which Ollie was a rep and head promoter, which handed him the networks to begin this entrepreneurial gig. This began the growth of the company, building up to tickets selling out within minutes despite only having two previous (and obviously very successful) events. The rapidity of the organic growth of Jinky is amazing, word of mouth and social media coverage meaning there has become a catfight on Fixr for an event, despite claims around the country that the nightclub scene is dying. With the mantra of good music, good people, the product that Ollie is selling is impressive enough to attract collabs with Rotate and Satsuma in the near future (set your alarms now), and hopefully, soon enough Durham’s reputation will be completely reworked.

Williams himself is a DJ, though he humbly credits his partners Dante and Paddy Harvey for a lot of the success of Jinky, after he picked up DJing in lockdown. Although everyone may have bought or considered buying decks out of sheer boredom in 2020, he worked over the summer to become as good as he could, and with the help of the others, has created something that can be enjoyed by the whole university. Hopefully, the movement that Jinky has started in Durham will continue over the next few years, so when we tell our friends that we go to Durham, they wont look at us with pity and ask “how bad” the clubbing actually is.

If anyone is on the fence about going to a Jinky event, never has a bad word been spread, almost a guaranteed good time and a definitive change from the regular rotation of songs and events we have become so familiar with, events now even spreading to London - get your tickets while you can!

By Mariella Locke