Not all clubs have to be giant rooms filled with teeming hordes of dancers. For example, there's the Cellar Club, located in Reynolds Nightclub in Stafford, England. Billed as “the Midlands' premier nightspot,” the venue has three floors, each with its own personality. The Reynolds Bar is dedicated to the “serious clubber;” the Attic Bar is the biggest room, featuring hit music from the last three decades; and the Cellar is meant to be a more intimate spot with Continental music.
In fact, the Cellar Club, a 150-person-capacity space, has recently undergone a renovation. It was previously empty, having suffered from years of neglect. But its vaulted ceilings and arches that snaked mysteriously below the ground level of the building proved irresistible to its owners, who decreed that it should be fixed up.
The club's lighting was designed by Colin Pattenden of CP Sound, a lighting and sound supply company based in Staines, Middlesex. The company, which has been in existence since the early 80s — before that, Pattenden was a bass player in groups such as Manfred Mann's Earth Band and the Nashville Teens — has a wide variety of projects to its credit, including Waxy O'Connor's pub in London's West End, the Playhouse Theatre in Covent Garden, and Barnaby Joe's live music pub in Bahrain.
In designing the lighting for Cellar Club, Pattenden opted to retain the natural character of the space, emphasizing its curvature and brick arches; thus he chose the ChromaRange™ of LED fixtures from Pulsar Light of Cambridge. The arches are downlit with ChromaHearts, which were chosen because of their color-changing possibilities — they have 14.7 million colors at their disposal — and their 25,000-hour lamp life. The central columns are lit from four sides with ChromaDomes, which are compact, surface-mount units, and help to illuminate the brickwork. These units are fitted with ChromaFilters to produce a wide beam effect and are controlled by two ChromaZone control boxes, each of which can control up to 12 ChromaRange fixtures.
The dance floor is lit with a system that includes eight QScans and seven QStars from Mad Manufacturing, the popular UK scanners perhaps best known for their colorful plastic housings. The Q Range also features compact design, an important consideration in a smallish space such as this. An ANYtronics strobe unit is included for effects, along with a Jem Magnum 2000 smoke machine. Control of the dance lighting is provided by a MAD1 console, also from Mad Manufacturing.
The club's look is completed by a neon sign announcing “The New Cellar” in red and green, supplied to CP Sound by Simply Neon.
CP also supplied the club's sound, using JBL equipment. Both CP Sound and Simply Neon will take part in the next phase of the renovation, which involves the top two floors. Clearly, Cellar Club is rising again.
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