"It was 20 years ago today...." Happy Birthday to us!

by Jimmy Mulvihill

6th December 2025

Thursday 9th October 2025 marked 20 years to the day that Sync City Rehearsal Studios changed ownership and became Bally Studios, and began to be run under the current management. The studio was originally planned as a single room recording/rehearsal studio on Drummond Road, Bermondsey, opening in June 2005. Less than 2 hours after moving into the original location, we received a knock on the door from our neighbour to tell us that the volume of our guitar amp was too loud.

Me: "You can hear the guitar amp?"

Neighbour: "Yeah, of course I can hear it, it's really loud!"

Me: "Oh. I thought this place was soundproofed?!"

Neighbour: "Well clearly not! It's acoustically treated, I mean, it's probably soundproofed enough for mixing, but not enough for a loud guitar amp. If it was, I wouldn't be knocking on your door."

At that point the neighbour glanced over my shoulder and noticed the drum kit, all set up and ready to go. His eyes shifted from mine, to the drum kit, before fixing his gaze on mine once again.

Neighbour: "You're not planning on using that, are you?!?"

Oh. Oh dear.

We piled everything back into the back of a 7 seater cab, and drove everything back to where we were living at the time, in Foyle Road, Tottenham. All of the equipment that we had bought to start a recording studio - a drum kit, a 16 track Fostex E16 reel to reel recorder, microphones, a Roland Space Echo, a Behringer Eurodesk mx9000, a few guitar amps (a WEM Dominator, a Fender Princeton,) a bass amp (a Fender Rumble 100) , some monitors and various bits of bobs, they were all loaded into the spare room of our first floor apartment, the door of which remained closed for the next 3 weeks, so devastated we were at the news that the studio space that had been sold us to as "soundproofed" was anything but. The sessions that were booked in at this point were cancelled.

If this had been the only setback that we had had at the time it would have been tough to handle, but we were coming off the back of a devastating end to a 18 month period of building up a live music venue. We - Jimmy and Francesca - had started in mid-2003 running a live music night called The Dirty Rider Club, which originally held nights at The Black Horse pub in Richmond, before moving to The Verge in Kentish Town, The Boston Arms in Tufnell Park, and The Pleasure Unit in Bethnal Green, before finally taking over the upstairs of an Australian themed bar in Kilburn, called Southern K, based on the corner of Kilburn High Rd and Willesden Lane.

The exterior of Southern K, now a Ladbrokes.

The venue was owned by one of the major breweries at the time, who had refurbished the upstairs venue in 2001. It had been used about 10 times in 2 years for private functions since then, and the decor resembled a mix of a Whetherspoons and a country golf club. The brewery was also the owner of The Hope and Anchor on Upper Street, a venue that Francesca had her first job in the music industry in, running the door of band nights run by Big Note Promotions, and it had been recommended to us by Duncan, the Hope and Anchor's manager, who would later design many of our posters for us in a simple black and white design, much like Bugbear Promotions still use today. We would drop in on him at the pub and he would hand them over to us on a floppy disk.

The brewery had spent about £200,000 on the refurbishment of the upstairs of Southern K, but seemingly didn't know what to do with it, so they spent another £12,000 on a PA system that was just about loud enough to have vocals and a kick drum put through it, with no money left over for stage lighting at all. Whoever sold them the PA system saw them coming a mile off. We ended up going to a cheap homeware shop a short walk down the road where we bought 12 reading lamps and 12 colored bulbs, scattering them around the stage for mood lighting, and away we went, booking as many gigs as we could in order to establish the venue. We paid for the security, and we split the door 40% to the bands, 60% to us, £5 entry on the night, £4 with flyer. By October 2003, we had 75 bands booked in for 25 upcoming gigs. At 12:20am one Saturday night in November 2004 we were paid a visit by Brent Council's Environmental Health team, who told us that we needed to close the venue immediately due to a noise complaint. At the time we had 120 people in the venue, and I asked if we could finish the night? There was only a couple of hours left, after all.

Brent Council: "If you don't shut everything off now, we will seize the equipment, you're closed!"

Me: "For how long? We've got another gig tomorrow, with 5 bands booked...."

Brent Council: "No you don't, you've used up all of your warnings, this is no longer a music venue!"

Me: "Eh? What do you mean? You haven't given us any warnings?!?!"

At this point we looked to the manager of the bar, who looked at up sheepily and said "Yeah, I was going to talk to you about this on Monday." He had been given 3 prior warnings, yet hadn't bothered to tell us as he "didn't want to worry us." . The next day we had to call the 5 bands that were meant to be playing that night to tell them that their gig that day was cancelled, and then spent the next couple of hours ringing around to find alternative venues for them all. .Ironically, based on the amount of people that they brought to their rearranged gigs, it would have been one of our best gigs of the year. Shattered from having spent a few hours calling around to find other venues who could take these bands, effectively working hard to funnel profits to other promoters, but also satisfied that we had not abandoned those 5 bands, we took the time to process what had just happened. On the following day we called up 70 more bands to tell them the bad news. Something like this was too important to leave it to email. It was as emotionally exhausting a day as you could imagine.

With some more money being spent on soundproofing and with a dB meter fitted, the venue was re-opened in February 2004, at which point we were told that if we could get £300 of sales a night at the bar, and pay for the bouncer, we could have the venue for no cover charge. Again, we'd split the door-take with the bands, the venue would get the bar, and we'd have to do the sound and DJing ourselves. . We were not making much money at these events, but the plan was to build up the reputation of the night, improve the venue, and soon we would reap the rewards of that hard work. We had already blown through a first loan, taken out in March 2003, at 9.9% interest, and now we had taken out a second one in Feb 2004 at 16.9% interest. Our plan was to commit to this venue alone and build up it's reputation, and with the Luminaire, Powers Bar (run by legendary promoter Vince Power) and The Good Ship to open soon, Kilburn was the place to be based in 2004. My mother had done catering for the bar back in the 1970s when it had traded under the name Biddy Mulligans, with it being one of the best Irish Bars to go to at the time, and the surrounding area was steeped in musical heritage. It was directly opposite the old Kilburn National music venue that had seen gigs by bands such as Nirvana, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Bjork, Suede, Dexys Midnight Runners and numerous other bands over the years. The Smith's live album, "Rank" had been recorded there in full. Our venue was also only a couple of doors away from the old Gaumont State Cinema, which was a venue so established at the time that it would be easier to list the bands that didn't play there. The bands that did included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, David Bowie, etc. If they had released records anytime between 1955 and 1972, they would likely have played there at the time. Now both of these venues were operating as African Churches, and as far as we could see, Kilburn was the place to grow a music venue in, so we committed to it 100%.

The Gaumont State Cinema.

Sadly, our commitment to the venue was not reciprocated. We were soon told a couple of months later that the £400 we were taking at the bar was not enough, it needed to be £500. Within two more months the £750 bar take needed to be increased to £900, "otherwise we'll get new promoters in, this place is getting a good reputation, and now we've got more promoters wanting to run club nights here!" The fact that it us that had built up all of that buzz over the previous months was lost on the brewery, with us having distributed 20,000 flyers locally, and also having guided the landlord through the process of re-opening the bar. However, green shoots were appearing. Within the first 40 gigs, we ended up having an average of 23 people attending each gig who had not been brought by any of the bands, just walking in off of the street as a direct result of our promotional activities. We had very themed nights, and took great pride in matching bands up as well as possible. We could see bands forming relationships with each other, and we tried to inject as much positivity into each night as we could. If each band could bring 10 people, with each band having 4-5 members, that would be 85-90 people in a venue that held 130 people. The bar sold 3 bottles of Fosters for £6, and with the live music starting at 7:30 and being over at 10:30pm, people could be in central London in time to get cheap entry to clubs afterwards. We could then have more people coming into the club night afterwards. Our hard work was paying off.

Which is what made everything that followed all the sadder. One day in November 2004 we turned up to the venue to find the PA missing. At first we thought it had been stolen, but it turned out that the new landlord of the bar had lent it to someone.

Me: "We've got 5 bands playing tonight, what do we do for a PA system?!?"

Landlord: "Hire one!", the clearly inebriated landlord told us, glassy eyed, swaying so much that he now had to sit down on the steps behind him.

Me: "Will you pay for that?!?"

Landlord: "Will I fuck!!", he replied, before staggering off to the bar downstairs, at 1pm, already hapmmered from the Aussie Rules event that had started at 7am that day. We paid £150 to hire a smaller PA, spent hours setting it up, and just about got through the gig. On Monday we were called by the landlord, and whilst we expected it to be an apology, he casually said:

Landlord: "I was just thinking, (long pause, with much sighing), do you remember a couple of months ago, when we talked about that Drum'n'Bass night taking over the venue for this coming weekend? Remember we talked about that?"

Me: "An even longer pause) "Erm, what!? No!!"

Landlord: "Yeah, maybe you forgot, but we talked about that......"

Needless to say, there was no such previous conversation. Someone had come up to us a week earlier talking about hiring the venue for a drum'n'bass night, but we thought it had been a hypothetical enquiry, not a confirmed booking! We ended up turning up to the venue on that Friday, having been hired by the promoter for that night to set up the equipment, who said that he had booked it on the Saturday before, while watching the Australian rules game in the morning. "I think this venue is great, the landlord seems cool, I needed to find a PA system last week for an event we held somewhere else, and he hired out this one for me, for only £100, cash!" he said, tapping the subwoofer with his hand. He beamed with delight as he told us the story of how well that gig had gone. The innocence at which he was sharing this information with me made it impossible to blame him for the part that he had played in the landlord's actions.

From there the writing was on the wall. We turned up the next Thursday to give out more flyers the local area, which was a regular activity for us, and upon dropping into the venue to gather some more of them we had a strange experience of the landlord sitting us down, telling us we could have a free bar that night, with him telling us how much we were valued at the venue. It was very surreal, and we weren't quite sure as to what to say. Maybe things were getting better?!? I ordered a cheap Fosters, only for him to say, "Fosters? Nah, take the Kronenbourg Blanc, that's the best one, go on, it's on me!" The bar staff seemed as surprised as I was.

Two days later on Saturday we turned up at 2pm for a soundcheck, with 6 bands on that evening, and we then had the deputy manager storm in halfway through soundcheck to tell us, "don't listen to what the landlord says, he's a fucking liar! He's screwed me over, he'll do the same to you!!" . He sat us down to explain that the landlord had (****retracted for legal reasons*****) on Thursday, and that he had to leave as a result. A new deputy manager was appointed, who recommended to us that we should allow Match Of The Day to be shown on the big screen behind the bands while they were playing, "so that you can get both the music and the football crowd in at the same time. They can listen to the music, and watch football! That would be fun, wouldn't it?!"

Things were going downhill fast. We had a night when 150 people were crammed into the venue, which had a 3am license, only for her to close the venue down at 1am as "she was tired and needed to go to bed". We once saw her taking a keen interest in the football that was being shown in the bar downstairs.

"What's your team?", we asked?

"Chelsea, although I can't go much now, I've been banned from all football stadiums in the country for the next 2 years."

Oh. Oh dear. I don't know what she did for that to happen, and quite frankly, at that point I was scared to ask.

We contacted the area manager of the brewery to try to work out a way to make it work, and we were told, "you've got a bit of a nerve, considering you are barely taking £250 a night at the bar." In truth the bar was taking at last £800 a night, and we were getting about £240 on the door, of which we were keeping just over half of it, between 2 people, which meant that as we were leaving home at 4:30pm to get to the venue for 5:30pm to start soundchck at 6pm. We left the venue at 3:30am and got the N16 night bus from Kilburn to Trafalgar Square, N25 from Trafalgar Square to Bank, and then the N149 from there to Tottenham, with a 10 minute walk at the end, arriving home at past 5am most nights, to the sound of the clinking of milk bottles from the passing milkman. We were therefore making about £140 a night on a good night for 2 people to work/travel for nearly 13 hours, without taking into account the promotional costs that we had had, as well as distributing 20,000 flyers by hand. And now we're being shouted at by the area manager who is not happy with our attempts to turn around the venue that we had played the biggest part in getting it on it's feet.

What was the old Studio 1, which has since been split up into Studio 1 & 5.

We eventually walked away from the venue in March 2005, having planned it a month in advance. We later found out that the landlord was putting the money that was coming through our nights into the bar downstairs to pretend that the nights that he was running were more popular, and that he had been doing it for nearly a year. This was only discovered when we left, at which point he was no longer able to cover his shortcomings with our bar take. At that point we were called by the same area manager, who told us that he was "willing" to allow us to come back on the same deal that we previously had. How gracious of him! We were £19,000 in debt at the time, having taken no wages at all from Feb 2004 to Nov 2004 in order to build up the business, living off of loans and self employed income based benefits. We had made a small wage from Nov 2004 to March 2005, but now that was lost too.

In June 2005 we were meant to open the venue in Bermondsey, but we all know how that went.

In the 3 months between walking away from the venue in March 2005 and opening the studio in June 2005 my band had broken up, and part of the idea of opening the new studio was to have a base for our rehearsals. We were paying £35 for 4 hours to rehearse at a studio in Dalston, between 2 and 5 times week, so I reasoned that renting a room for £650 a month, using it for band rehearsals, and then trying to do x8 recording session a month, whilst charging £120 for an 8 hour day, was a solid business plan. If the recording sessions paid for the rent, then we would basically have free rehearsals. When the studio was first planned, in late 2004, we were also meeting loads of bands while promoting, so we were building up a rolodex of potential customers. Our initial plan was to reduce the club nights from 5 a week to 2, concentrating only on Friday and Saturday, and then aim for x2 recording sessions a week, whilst also recording all of our own music. This was at the point that bands like The Libertines were self promoting their own gigs, and bands like Arcade Fire were having their music heard by hundreds of thousands of people every day on MySpace. By having our own studio base to record and reheare, as well as our own music venue in Kilburn to play gigs at, we could be completely self-sufficient, without needing to go hand in cap to a record label. Yet within the space of a few months the venue had gone, the supplementary income from the live music nights had gone, I was no longer meeting bands, and my own band had split up. Now the studio space that we planned to move into had fallen through. To say we were crestfallen would have been an understatement.

Another angle of our old Studio 1.

In retrospect the fact that the landlord had oversold the amount of soundproofing in the new venue, and us being able to back out of the rental contract as a result of this was a blessing in disguise. I had received another loan from The Princes Trust to open the studios, and the following week I had a meeting at their Morgate office to talk about how the opening of the business had gone. The loan was contingent on a studio opening, and now they were asking me how the sessions were going?

"Yeah, everything's going well!", I lied.

After a couple of weeks of not doing much at all, watching episodes of Seinfeld DVD's that had been sent through the post from Love Film, and sleeping in until past midday, in July 2005 I decided that I would get up bright and early and start afresh. Today was the first day of the new start for the studios! It all starts from here, a new day of positivity! I made myself a bowl of cereal and sat down at the dining table in the sitting room, to hear the news that "we're getting reports that there have been multiple power surges on the London Underground....." 20 minutes later, "we are now having unconfirmed reports of explosions on the London Underground...." To say that these were bleak times would be an understatement.

After a week of watching the news reports on loop, in an attempt to lift my spirits I walked from Tottenham to Palmers Green, having heard that there was a guitar shop there called Electrohill. I still had a few electric guitars that I owned, a 1982 Japanese Fender Strat, a 1980s Tokai Strat copy, a Gibson Les Paul Black Beauty, and I reasoned that this could be a place to sell at least one of them. I wanted to check out what the shop was like first, and whilst I was there I spied a flyer on the notice board there for "Sync City Rehearsal Studios, Tottenham Hale. 4 hour rehearsals, £45 a night, PA included, drum kit and amps £1 an hour each." A phone number was attached at the bottom so I made a note of it, and called them up to see what this studio was all about. At this point I had lived in Tottenham for nearly 2 years, and never once had I heard of a recording or rehearsal studio there, so I was keen to find out what the set up was. I called up the number, and enquired as to whether I could check out the studios?

"Are you actually going to book a rehearsal though, or do you just want to look at the place?"

I explained my situation, and I was told that this was the owner of the business, who ended up being a lot more friendly in person than this first phone call suggested. He told me he was willing to sell the current business, with soundproofing in place. We came down to see the place, and there were less than 15 sessions booked in the next month, but the place definitely had potential. We spoke to a financial advisor at the time, who had been provided free of charge by a company called Kiss Training, also based in Tottenham, which had been provided to us though the New Deal for Musicians that the Labour Government had set up, who advised us that the current business was not in a great shape.

Our home for 20 years, Millmead Business Centre.

Financial Adviser: "Do you have the money to buy out the owner?"

Me: "Not really, no. I was going to borrow it on a credit card."

Financial Adviser: "Hmmmm." (He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, before putting them back on.) "That would be very reckless, and it could lead to you being declared bankrupt, but......"

Me: "Yeah, but to be fair, if I don't find a studio to take over, then the loans that we already have will be called in, and we can't pay them either, so we could go bankrupt in any case." I shrugged.

Financial Adviser: "Yes, that was going to be my next point. You're caught between a rock and a hard place. This is not something that they prepare you for when you study accounting at University! (He gives a sombre laugh at this point.) It's, erm....... well, it's not ideal, put it that way. (long pause, while he stares out the window). Either way, if you fail then you're...... (another long pause)...... well, there's no difference between going bankrupt with £20,000 or £35,000 of debt, it's all the same, that's all I can say!"

He shrugged. I shrugged. We shook hands, and the meeting was over. We applied for 3 credit cards the next day and put most of the purchase price of the business on them, at about 20% interest. We agreed to pay the rest of the purchase price over the next 6 months, and we were now the official owners of the business. Sync City studios was now Bally Studios. On the day that we opened in Oct 2005 we had 2 studios, and we found out that the former owner had not paid the rent at that point for 4 months. Thankfully this was where most of the money that we had paid them to take over the business was going to go. Within a month the 3rd rehearsal studio had been soundproofed. The 4th opened in June 2006, and the 5th followed in April 2009.

20 years after taking over the business we've had nearly 3,000 bands use us, with nearly 40,000 sessions in those 20 years, (as well as the 10,000 sessions from 1989-2005), with 21 jobs created in that time. Best of all, we're still here. In 2020 when Haringey Council turned us down for the COVID funding that we were entitled to 5 times, having been unable to trade for 3 months at that point, we were 48 hours away from having a near £2000 rent bill come in that we could not pay. We also didn't have anything to sell either. We finally got the funding that we were entitled to at the 6th attempt. At that moment my Fitbit started sending me messages to tell me that my heart rate was at unprecedented levels. The whole process of getting through COVID nearly killed us, both figurativly and literally.

Fast forward to today, and 2025 has been - officially - our best year so far, and 2026 looks like it could be even better. We have plans in place for live streaming sessions, for events that people can meet musicians at and find new band mates, our 8-track recorder is allowing numerous bands to record whole albums themselves in a single weekend. Things are buzzing. Hundreds of people now have a Bally Studios T-shirt at home. Sometimes we will chat to a band on Whatsapp, and the same day we need to re-send them some information and we have to scroll down, and down, and down, and down to find our chat with them, that's how many bands we chat to every day. It's been hard, and we have faced challenges over the last 5 years that most people will never know about, but we are still hanging in there.

To everyone that's used the studios in the past 20 years, thanks for making the studios what it is. It's been great fun, and without you it would just be 5 empty rooms.

Here's to the next 20 years. Onwards and upwards.