As I frequently point out on this blog, the dance music press are terribly poor at their job. They don’t hold people to account and they never challenge anything anyone has to say. And on the rare occasion they do, they allow the person being interviewed off the hook.

And that’s the first thing I thought when I stumbled across an article on Resident Advisor earlier in which Stuart Glen, one of the club’s co-founders, explaining that London club The Cause could be nearing its final days in its existing form.

Speaking to Resident Advisor, he said “The writing really is on the wall for The Cause in its current format and we’re absolutely gutted to see the club winding down. It really does feel like the odds are stacked against us with multi-story residential buildings rising up all around us and the challenges we undoubtedly will face by impending residents.”.

There’s a few things that Glen hasn’t mentioned here. Firstly, the club has been under threat from developers since it came into existence in 2018. It was previously set to close on New Year’s Eve 2019, then they applied and received a new licence. All in all, I get the distinct feeling Glen thinks the club is more of a hindrance than anything else.

Why else would he have done an interview with the London Evening Standard in March this year talking about his then forthcoming venture, Ernie’s Yard? There’s also the death of Bill Hodgson, a 21 year old aspiring DJ, who died after reportedly taking drugs at The Cause.

To the licensing authorities, the facts of this case won’t matter. Any mention of drugs anywhere near a licensed premises is bad news – and where clubs are notoriously bad at the diplomacy required when dealing with bureaucracy, building firms are very good at it. Which means the chance of the club retaining their licence is a difficult one to work out.

Yet readers of Resident Advisor – whose editor is on a crusade to “raise the calibre of music journalism” – aren’t made aware of any of this. Why?