Luckily Sara Jade had the desk in front of Nadia Dahlawi otherwise Young and Lost Club might never have happened. “We were 12 and Sara kept turning round to talk to me,” Dahlawi recalls of their boarding school days. “We were really good friends straight away.”
The music industry is synonymous with hard-nosed men signing the next fame school kid just to rake in the money. Refreshingly, Young and Lost Club are the complete opposite. And it’s their knack for finding the best new music that has made them one of the industry’s hottest labels.
“Ideally we would’ve formed a band, but I play the harp and Sara’s not musical. It was never going to happen!”
At 16 found them down the darkened corridors of their boarding school at night, photocopying their fanzine while the rest of the school slept on above them. From there they began to venture out into London and became the Pyrrha Girls, running regular nights at Soho dive Push Bar.
“We tried going to uni but we both dropped out in our first years,” says Jade. “Nadia got a summer job as the Queens of Noize assistant and I worked for Razorlight’s press office.”
Slowly, and with money saved from working the door at their Push Bar nights, they started Young and Lost Club at the tender age of 19.
“When we first started the label we were always broke. We used to have to DJ for 7 hours straight at bars around London. That was pretty boring.”
But it’s not all sticky CDRs and backroom nightclubs. “Once we were flown to Tokyo to DJ at an indie club. That was definitely our best DJing experience! Another time there was a stage invasion during one of our sets. The security guard just shook his head at the kids on stage as they all meekly jumped back into the crowd. Timid, but impressive!”
In March sees the release of their 50th single as well as their 5th anniversary. “We were only 19 when we started this, it’s amazing that any bands trusted us.”
In the middle of it all the girls somehow found time to start PUSH, an extremely successful club night at the now defunct Astoria 2 with fellow DJ Imran Ahmed. “Sometimes it does seem like we are YALCing all the time.”
Although they do stress to having a social life, it’s not long before the conversation turns back to work.
“We’re going to release our compilations album in March as well as the Oh Minnows album and the Planet Earth album and the Noah and the Whale EP…”
