Dave Beer
musician
David Michael Beer (born 24 January 1965) is an English music mogul who came to notice in the 1990s as the promoter of the UK's longest running club night Back To Basics. In the early days, his passport occupation read "purveyor of good times" and he went on to be nicknamed by music Mixmag as the "King of Clubs". With his Leeds based club night Back To Basics, Beer features as one of the youngest men in Leeds City Museum's exhibition chronicling the popular culture of Leeds.
Early life
Dave Beer was born in Pontefract, West Yorkshire and grew up in a single parent family on a council estate in Pontefract. He attended Carlton High School as a teenager but left at the age of 16 looking for a new challenge.
He found solace in art and went on to study at Wakefield Arts College where he met his best friend and, later, fellow Back To Basics promoter, Alistair Cooke. The pair wanted to make films and be in a band and went on to study multi-media, film and TV at Sheffield University.
As a youth, Beer was a rebellious punk; he dyed his hair red, wore a kilt and listened to punk anthems like "White Riot" and "God Save the Queen". He followed bands like The Clash and The Cure across the country and once got into a gig, climbing in through a dressing room window, too young to get past the bouncers on the door.
Career
Roadie and tour manager
Beer's obsession with the punk-music scene saw him become a groupie, hitching up with punk band The Clash.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5228318. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dave Beer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.