On the night of 27 August, the Dazed Club partnership that brought the (lip) service London debut to Dalston proved something the city’s sapphic nightlife has been quietly arguing for years: the demand was always there, waiting for the room to catch up.
(lip) service is a Berlin-based lesbian party co-founded by Gabriella Rowland and Lilian Aya Bencze. The night began, as many good things do, with a fairly precise ambition: to create a sexier, more music-focused space for, in the organisers’ own framing, ‘dykes of all genders and their NB and trans siblings’. That founding impulse, shaped in Berlin, found its first international expression in a takeover of the Cabaret Room and Sub-Rosa at The Roses of Elagabalus on Dalston’s Kingsland Road.
A homecoming with a Berlin accent
For Rowland and Bencze, both now based in Berlin, the (lip) service London debut carried the particular charge of return. London is still home turf; the Berlin energy they have spent time building was being brought back, not exported for the first time to strangers. Dazed’s Events and Cultural Programming Executive, Chinwe, put it well: ‘The venue was already such a sexy, moody setting, with low lighting, little rooms and corners that felt made for disappearing into conversation. It was extremely lesbian-coded, in the best possible way.’
The Roses of Elagabalus is the kind of venue that rewards a night like this: labyrinthine, low-lit, given to atmosphere rather than spectacle. There is something almost programmatic about the fit between the space and the party’s stated intention to build somewhere intimate rather than merely visible.
The (lip) service London debut on the decks
The music, as the founders always intended, was central. Co-founder DJ AYA delivered a bass-heavy set that set the room’s temperature early. Alongside her, London-based DJ and production duo FAFF took to the decks, and the night was rounded out by Or:la, a Liverpool-based DJ, producer and boss of the Céad label, whose presence brought a particular weight to the billing.
The line-up reflected a consistent curatorial logic: artists who treat a dance floor as something to be built over the course of a night, not simply occupied. Bass-heavy, intentional, unhurried. The low rooms of The Roses of Elagabalus absorbed it well.
What the crowd brought
A lesbian party worth its name has, by now, developed a certain visual grammar, and the crowd at the (lip) service London debut showed up fluent in it. Slogan tees carried messages ranging from ‘Girls Eat Girls!’ to ‘I Heart Lesbian Sex’; vests, caps and blazers were deployed with the studied casualness that constitutes, in these circles, a kind of dress code. The coded and the explicit existed comfortably alongside one another, which is precisely the point.
True to the party’s name, the evening generated its share of new connections. One anonymous guest, mid-first-date, offered a verdict that does more work than any promotional copy: ‘The whole thing felt intimate and sexy without trying too hard to be. The date went well, the venue was hot, and I left wanting to see her again, a successful Thursday night out in Dalston.’
Photography across the night was handled by Lu Deverall. (lip) service’s future events can be followed through the founders’ own channels as the party continues to develop its calendar beyond Berlin.
