The Late Show has been on every Saturday night at Revolver Upstairs since the club got its 7am license in 1999.
DJ Phil Ransom has been in charge of The Late Show from the start, and he’ll be part of the event’s 25th anniversary celebration on Saturday 24 May.
Spread across the club’s two rooms – the front room, aka the Stage, and the back room, aka the Cage – the 25th birthday lineup features Ransom and fellow Late Show regulars Lewis CanCut and Kovac, plus Colpast, Alex Virr, Hayj, Tony 2000, Paz, Kovac and Henry Who.
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Ransom started DJing at Revolver – better known as Revs – when the club opened in 1997. “I played on the opening night,” he says.
Revs, located on Chapel St in Prahran, is notorious for its all-night-long programming, but the club was initially only licensed until 1 am. Ransom had a regular all-nighter at another club at the time, but when Revs got its 7 am license, he didn’t hesitate to join the team.
“Camillo [Ippoliti, Revolver owner] made me an offer and I flipped over to help them kickstart the late nights at Revolver,” Ransom says.
The crowd for The Late Show was there from the beginning, says Ransom, but there were a few logistical challenges to sort through. “Running a club is like walking through a minefield of regulations and pitfalls – it’s hectic,” he says.
The first thing they had to figure out was how to get several hundred partygoers to leave the venue without disturbing the community of Prahran. “There used to be a big fruit and vegetable store next door. They were open bright and early on Sunday mornings, so piles of ravers coming out used to cause a lot of headaches for us with the cops and the council,” Ransom says.
The solution? Offer the ravers breakfast before leaving.
“The music at 7am in the back room, it got weird,” Ransom says. “You’d play a techno song, like a Jeff Mills song or something like that, but then you’d play something super weird and avant-garde. So, after a while, a few people would leave, and then a few people more, and then people would go, ‘I’m not ready to go, let’s get some breakfast.’ So, you’d see people in there eating eggs on toast or pancakes.”
Ransom has witnessed the coming and going of umpteen trends in club music over the last 25 years. But, he says, the music you’ll hear at Revs in 2025 isn’t that different to the music that dominated the club in 99.
“When we started [The Late Show,] what they used to call 2-step, which is now what they call UK garage, was the new music on the block. Now, you can still go on a Saturday night and you can still hear what they call UK garage now, which can probably pass for something very similar to 2-step garage.”
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The 90s was also a peak era for house music in Melbourne. “That music wasn’t that different to what you would hear today,” Ransom says. “There’s been a lot of twists and turns in between, but we come back to the same motifs or the same central themes.”
The recent UK garage revival has been accompanied by a jungle and drum and bass resurgence. But you’re less likely to hear these more aggressive, higher tempo sounds at The Late Show.
“Revolver doesn’t really dance at 160 beats per minute,” says Ransom. “Revolver is more of a 125 beats per minute club. In the front room, we play a lot faster than that, but in the front room we also have a finish line, which is 7am. In the back room, the finish line is Monday lunch time, so the music is a lot more steady out there.”
The Late Show’s 25th anniversary party will double as a launch for the first-ever vinyl release on Revolver Upstairs Records. Titled TLS EP 001: Cage Trax, the four-song 12” includes new music from Ransom and Tonelab (under their Cable 54 alias), Lewis CanCut (aka DJ Snow Fleas), Tony 2000 and Paz.
There have been plenty of digital-only releases on the club’s in-house label over the last half-dozen years, but this first vinyl release has been a long time coming.
“Doing a record label was one of the first things we talked about – as soon as they got their late license in 1999.”
The Cage Trax Record Launch is on Saturday 24 May from 7pm – 7am. Find out more here.
