'CAN I put on a club?' It was a simple request, but it spawned a venue which, a decade and much reverberation of the bass bins down the line, has become that rarest of breeds, an underground clubbing institution.
At the Bongo Club, firmly settled into premises on Holyrood Road which could even been called swish, a line has finally been drawn under its arty origins in the Out Of The Blue studios on New Street, now demolished to make way for housing.
But the club which started it all off, Messenger Sound System, is still going strong once a fortnight. "The big difference between here and the old place is the size," says the Bongo's administrator, Barney Waygood, over a cup of coffee in the venue's cafe.
"In here we can put on bigger nights, with bigger guests and get more people in.
When we first moved there was definitely a bit of stuttering. A lot of the older people were not keen on the new Bongo Club. But now, enough people have come along and realised that this is a great space - its huge and we actually have toilets that work.
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Size does matter. And when clubs like Headspin - another of the long-running originals - can get 500 people in, as they did on Saturday to witness David Holmes pull a set of "surprisingly housey" tunes out of the bag, the Bongo can be sure that it is on a solid enough financial footing to survive and prosper. It has even become a limited company.
The difficulty for the likes of Waygood and the rest of his team was that the old venue had been such an institution in its own right. Born out of an art gallery and studio space, the artists lived upstairs from the dancefloor and would come down and attend some of the clubs themselves.
"When we moved here, that tie was broken," explains Waygood.
"We wanted to maintain our level of alternativeness, but also achieve a level of professionalism that we didn't have before.
"To get that balance without going mainstream is quite tricky. But that is why we have a cafe open during the day where we still have art exhibitions, and why we still have swing classes and live music.
"Messenger was one of the first nights. They just went: 'Could I put a club on'. We said: 'Okay, we'll buy some beer and sell it', and that was the start of the club.
"But the bigger something becomes, the more people rely on it and then you have to be professional because of people's wages and all the regulations. You can't operate in that sort of whimsical way any more."
Less whimsical it may be, but the Bongo still keeps itself very much at the cutting edge.
During the Fringe, Finer Noble Gasses, a darkly comic play about a band living in a New York apartment that ended with a live gig, won a Fringe First.
Waygood is happy to bask in the play's reflected glory, but is quick to emphasise the Bongo's friendly and hands-on approach to people who use the venue.
"We have never written down an agenda for the club," says Waygood.
"It has just happened that the spirit of the company is such that everyone who works here, the bar staff and the door staff as well, are all friendly people. If the people who work here are, by their nature, nice people then the people that come to spend time here are likely to be as well."
With clubs as diverse as the Rebel Country Club, Ride This Train, mixing with indy-punk club Fast, and the Afro-jazz night Four Corners, the Bongo's success is down to not being simply a commercial venture, says Waygood.
Because their main aim is not simply to make money, they continue to appeal to a wide spectrum of clubbers. And when clubbing fashions change, the Bongo somehow stays out there on the edge.
"We haven't set out to be on the cutting edge," says Waygood.
"People come to us with things they want to do and it just seems that the right people come at the right time.
"People come with ideas and the will to make it work. Of course, some do and some don't.
We don't go out to attract these people, they just get attracted here.
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