‘Here, it’s like fucking water in a desert.’ Oxford’s nightlife as well as the DJs who comprise it are, to put it politely, dry. For that reason, when faced with the prospect of something new, it is worth paying attention.

 

 

NightSchool’s launch was something of a flop. At the end of last year, Ethan Penny and Nahom Lemma announced their arrival onto Oxford’s music scene with an event in their college’s common room. Before it could really kick off, the porters appeared, and it was shut down at half-past 10. To make matters worse, Nahom had brought down a fellow DJ and friend from Birmingham—he got little more than 30 minutes of DJing time.

 

 

Since then, however, things have only been on the up. Their first major event—‘Lesson One’ at the Bullingdon—sold out. That was despite a last-minute discovery that they would have to pay £250 for the room they had hired, and the subsequent decision to expand capacity (for another £200) and sell more tickets.

 

 

‘In the end it was an unreal night, it had so much novelty to it, so much excitement,’ Ethan enthused. And it was more than enough to render a ‘Lesson Two’. In the meantime, NightSchool have moved out of basements and bops and on to balls (sometimes multiple in one night), May Day raves, and the Oxford Union.

 

 

‘When we started, we had a few goals that we wanted to hit, and one of them was to do an event in the [Union] chamber,’ Ethan continued. As anyone who throws an event at the Union knows, good marketing is key. Referring to a reel on their Instagram, I asked where the idea of DJing in the library came from. Ethan explained how Georgia Gibson, co-founder of Youni, helped: ‘That was her idea.’ The rest of the time, however, Ethan and Nahom, who live next to each other, do their own thing: ‘We’ll just dedicate a day to grafting as much as we can.’ Accordingly, their marketing has moved from the library to the porter’s lodge (check your pigeonhole).

 

 

With a few successful events under their belt, and an established name, I asked what the vision was for NightSchool going forward. ‘We want to bring back the whole feel of students bringing nights out for themselves, and that will last way longer than us, if we do it right, you know?’ To revive a once vibrant underground scene, essentially.

 

 

To this end, Ethan explained how they put out details of upcoming events to the Electronic Music Society and take applications: ‘People submit mixes, which is like so cool to hear. A lot of DPhils have got backgrounds in DJing, and they go back years and years, like way longer than us, which is really cool.’

 

 

Like water in a desert perhaps, but Ethan and Nahom were both keen to emphasise just how much potential there is in Oxford. ‘There’s serious quality here as well, which is crazy,’ Nahom assured me. Ethan added that there really isn’t much difference between a professional and, say, a student DJ, which is ‘kind of the beauty of the underground scene, like, there’s all the talent of the mainstream, but slightly undiscovered and cooler.’

 

 

Apparently, there is no limit to their ambition. ‘Plush is an insane space…like it’s so nice down there,’ gushed Ethan. (That might be the first time I’ve heard Plush described in such endearing terms.) Ethan’s reference, I should add, was to a bygone weekly event at the club which was hosted entirely by student DJs. ‘The big thing is whether you can make your night regular, right?’

 

 

But such things no longer occupy the Plush basement. Covid, they agreed, is to blame; after lockdown, the event was never restored. The stories of pre-pandemic Oxford, Nahom told me, are nothing like how it is now: ‘That one year where no one was going out just left a massive vacuum, and it’s still yet to be filled.’

 

 

But that void—which Ethan blamed on a lack of ‘institutional memory’—is also their biggest advantage: ‘Here, since there’s so much less, it just means you can start doing stuff yourself.’ And now, having built up the credibility and the confidence, they ‘feel a little bit more freedom to try things out.’

 

 

It’s paid off. NightSchool’s term card is filled with events across Oxford; it’s hard not to stumble across their DJing on a random night out. As Ethan put it: ‘If you’re doing something brilliant, people reward for you with their attention.’

 

 

So, next time you see someone DJing in the library, you know who’s to blame. In their own words: ‘The kind of dissonance of playing electronic music in like an ancient library, it’s quite cool.’ But don’t expect them to stay there for long: ‘We’ve got a few events in the motions.’ In Oxford’s clubs, colleges, and perhaps even crypts, look out: the city’s student DJs are back, and NightSchool are the ones leading them.∎

 

Words by Jack Stone. Photo courtesy NightSchool.