Journey back to the early days of Charles Jeffrey’s LOVERBOY club night

Welcome back to Selections, a series of artist-curated playlists from those in the know.

In 2014, Charles Jeffrey was a Fashion Design BA student at Central Saint Martins. Precariously balancing his finances and fighting to make ends meet, he came up with an inspired solution – start a club night.

Taking place at Vogue Fabrics in Dalston, LOVERBOY instantly became an underground hit in the UK capital, drawing eyes for its bold, queer aesthetic where partygoers would turn up in extravagant outfits and body paint, while soundtracked by the likes of PC Music’s Finn Diesel. On top of financing Charles through university, it also formed the base for his groundbreaking fashion house, which takes the same name as the iconic party.

LOVERBOY has since stayed at the forefront of the British fashion scene, known for its avant garde blending of nightlife style and high fashion. Now, new exhibition The Lore of Loverboy at Somerset House – running until September 1 and topped off with a special late event on June 19 – celebrates the best of the label’s past decade, and the legacy built since those early nights spent dancing under Kingsland Road.

To celebrate a decade since it started, the designer takes us back to the beginning, with a playlist drawn from his 2014 club night. Dive in for a journey through time.

“This is an old playlist that I used to DJ with back when I did the club night,” Charles says. This would have been the fourth night so it would have been in December. As you can see, it’s an eclectic body of songs with some bangers, and some songs no longer exist but are still within the playlist that show from when Spotify used to have the feature where you could upload a track to play just for the night that you could rip from YouTube.”