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Is A Shady Entertainment Conglomerate Trying to Destroy Scottish Nightlife?

Who are G1 and what exactly are they trying to do to clubs and pubs north of the border?

"G1, oh my god, where to start? I love G1. Great employers, great venues and, from Dumfries to Dennistoun, providers of a cracking, harassment free night out. I love G1. Even the trifling seconds it's taken me to write this is time that I could have spent in a reasonably priced, no frills, big-fun G1 venue."

That extract is yours for the keeping, absolutely free of charge, from now until any point eternal. It's lifted directly from my new one paragraph tome The Art of Fiction and it's all you need to know about the art of fiction. Why? Because it is entirely made up. No-one has ever said any of those things and I'll lay a shiny 20 pence piece on the table that no-one has even deigned to think them. I can hear you now through the remnants of your lunchtime meal deal: "What, so all of that stuff above is a lie?" Yes, all of that stuff is a lie, because G1 Group are in reality the shit-smeared and hastily discarded boxer shorts of Scottish night life. G1, for those south of Hadrian's Wall, are one of those massive infinity-tentacled leisure companies with a controlling stake in everything from trendy cocktail bars and boutique cinemas to shrieking hen night inferno bunkers and pulled-pork-on-a-PE-bench vendors in Edinburgh's Old Town.

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You might recall that they're the lovable imps behind treating the minimum wage as a loose framework, not a legal requirement, dipping in to wages for staff training and uniforms, top bantz rape joke pub quizzes and installing two-way 'spy mirrors' in the ladies toilets of Glasgow venue The Shimmy Club, where men—yep, plural—paid around 800 quid to watch women washing their hands, all from the comfort of a grotty, tiny booth. So far, so incredibly, incredibly depressing.

They're headed up by multimillionaire grey cloud 'leisure tycoon' Steffan King, distinguished recipient of the Weekly Wanker award from the excellent A Thousand Flowers, and a man described as having 'the aura of a shipping clerk', with marginally worse hair. All things considered, just a top tycoon for a top leisure empire. A real captain of industry we can all get behind.

Anyway, they've been in the local Dundee press a bit recently with regards to the hasty closure of South Tay Superstore, which only opened its doors in September 2014 after replacing shite burger spot Ketchup, also owned by G1, on South Tay Street, located deep in the dark heart of the city's university chunder-and-frathouse toga highway. Its spasmodic, brief little life was marked by a couple of big events, including a terrifying sounding robbery and a flying visit from Jamiroquai, who was reported to have 'popped in' for a 'dance and a bite to eat at the bar' (reports of the Space Cowboy's subsequent 20 pints and snoot session in Mennies are, as of today, still unconfirmed). Basically, South Tay Superstore was Dundee's answer to Byron Burger wrapped in the thin shroud of an All-Bar-One that your mum would hate because 'the music's too loud' and 'I don't like the look of food served by a lady with tattoos, no thank you.' It was the gently weeping snapbacked white-tip on the boil on high street inanity.

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The venue's general vibe, buttressed by a lurid colour scheme and shiny exterior graffiti, screamed out an immense debt to queasily appropriated street culture and the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, aim of luring the slightly-left, but not too left of centre student clientele turned off by shag-tag Thursdays at Liquid Envy but insufficiently woke for the Reading Rooms. It's to be replaced, predictably enough, by a new craft beer spot called, simply, 'The Beer Kitchen'.

Edinburgh's Beer Kitchen (photo via)

This is where things get slightly complicated, as, according to plans submitted to Dundee City Council, the brand-spanking new rebrand will carry sponsorship from Innis & Gunn—the Edinburgh based brewery. The craft beer manufacturers relationship with G1 is a slightly hazy mix of 'cosy' and 'what in Christ's fragrant arse is going on?'. G1 were reportedly behind the opening of Innis & Gunn's first Beer Kitchen venue in Edinburgh earlier in the year, though reports of this involvement are still unconfirmed. Basically no-one has a fucking clue about the relationship between the artsy craft brewer and the G1 shaped Death Star at the heart of Scottish nightlife.

How do you investigate the Death Star? One cursory Google search will give you a link to the grotesquely minimalist, tolerably well designed G1 homepage. There's the number, go on, phone it. But how do you phone the Death Star? What's the appropriate opening conversational gambit for the Death Star? Hello? Don't make me laugh you wet prick. This is the boggy battleground of the war for content and a 'hello' just doesn't cut it round here, son.

So we at THUMP gave them a call to find out what's actually going down on a constantly fluctuating little corner of Scottish soil. And what we got back was a nice big gust of air and an e-mail address. No big expose. No moment of clarity. No eureka. It was barely a hello. Surely though, there was something sinister afoot. What was the lovely, reasonable sounding receptionist hiding? What dark filth was lying dormant in the sonic crackling of the phone line and lying with sinister intent in the 'oh, I don't know who deals with that." What terrible plans had been planned for yet another G1 rebrand? We will find out. Hopefully.

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