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There are weekends when a venue simply has “events”. And then there are weekends when a room seems to say something larger about the city around it.
This Spring Bank Holiday, Howard Assembly Room on New Briggate is doing the latter.
Across three nights, the Leeds venue is pulling together a programme that moves from the city’s own electronic music memory, through Cuban timba, son and salsa, to a full-scale disco and house celebration led by two men whose fingerprints are all over several decades of British music culture.
On Thursday 21 May, Leeds-born DJ E.A.S.E reunites with the original Nightmares on Wax line-up for a rare live set honouring the life and music of Chris Dawkins, the renowned session player and original member of Nightmares on Wax who died in May 2025. On Friday 22 May, HAR Late: A Night In Havana brings Eliane Correa y La Evolución to Leeds as part of Leeds Jazz Festival. And on Saturday 23 May, Reach Up Disco Wonderland arrives with Andy Smith and Nick Halkes, joined by local disco and house acts Galaxians, Golden Gate and Ian Ossia.
For anyone still labouring under the notion that Opera North’s Howard Assembly Room is only a place for polite recitals and carefully folded programmes, this may come as a useful corrective. The grand old room above Leeds’ cultural traffic has become something far more mischievous and expansive: a late-night home for sound, experiment, heritage, improvisation, memory and movement.
In other words, exactly the kind of room a northern city needs.
The Thursday night event may be the emotional heart of the weekend.
Chris Dawkins was known for a rich musical language that moved between soul, jazz and hip hop. His career included collaborations with Maurice Fulton, Jimi Tenor and Corinne Bailey Rae, alongside long-term work with Leigh Kenny and Wulls. He also released three solo albums - Hero’s Journey, Painting Colours and Rastanaut - as well as the collaborative project Dawkins & Wulls.
But for many, particularly those raised on Leeds’ electronic music culture, Dawkins will be associated with the early years of Nightmares on Wax, where he helped shape DJ E.A.S.E’s developing sound in the 1990s on records including Smokers Delight and Car Boot Soul.
These are not just records people once bought, filed and forgot. They are part of the city’s musical bloodstream (and the soundtrack to our editor's younger self). Nightmares on Wax is one of those names that tells you Leeds was never simply consuming culture made elsewhere. It was making it, exporting it, changing the temperature of rooms far beyond Yorkshire.
This commemorative evening brings together friends and collaborators to celebrate Dawkins’ life and music. At the invitation of Hamlet Luton, DJ E.A.S.E reunites the original Nightmares on Wax line-up: DJ E.A.S.E, Isaac Heywood, Hamlet Luton, Sarah Garvey, Rhianna Kenny and Dan Goldman. Support comes from The Flying Hats - Dawkins’ most recent band project - Jamettone, an improv jazz and hip hop group featuring Chris’ daughter Shaneen Dawkins, and Wulls.
It is being presented in association with Leeds Jazz Festival, with tickets priced at £21.50 including booking fee. Doors open at 7pm and the event begins at 7.45pm.
All profits raised from the commemoration performance will go to the Chris Dawkins Estate.
There is something particularly poigniant about this kind of event. Not a tribute in the embalmed sense. Not nostalgia under glass. But musicians, friends, family, scene-makers and listeners gathering in the same city to say: this sound came from here, and this person helped make it possible.
By Friday night, the temperature shifts.
HAR Late: A Night In Havana returns to Howard Assembly Room for a Leeds Jazz Festival special, curated by DJ Lubi. The night brings live Cuban music, Cuban dance, a DJ after-party and - because somebody at HAR clearly understands the assignment - daiquiri Cuban cocktails.
At the centre of the evening is Eliane Correa y La Evolución, a high-energy Cuban timba fusion orchestra made up of leading Cuban and Latin musicians in the UK. The band comes to Leeds for the first time as a nine-piece, with a repertoire curated specially for the occasion. Expect Cuban timba and songo classics by Havana D’Primera, Los Van Van and Issac Delgado, alongside Correa’s own female-fronted contemporary timba compositions.
For those not fully fluent in Cuban music terminology - and there is no shame in that - timba is a modern, high-energy Cuban genre that grew from son Cubano and draws in funk, jazz, rap and Afro-Cuban folkloric influences. In practical terms: this is not a night for standing stiffly near the wall pretending to check your phone for a text.
Correa herself is a major figure in Cuban music and culture in the UK. She has curated the London Latin Jazz Fest for almost a decade, worked as musical director for artists including Mayito Rivera of Los Van Van, and tours regularly with film composer Hans Zimmer. La Evolución have sold out shows at Ronnie Scott’s and regularly headline the Latino stage at Glastonbury Festival.
The evening opens with doors at 7pm, followed by an early Cuban salsa dance class at 7.45pm with resident teachers Yersin and Dahi. The band begins at 9pm, with DJ Yersin Rivas continuing from 10.30pm with classic and new son Cubano, timba and salsa Cubana. Tickets are £26.50, with the choice of standing tickets for those who want to dance or upstairs seated tickets for those who prefer to watch.
Again, it is worth pausing on what this represents. Leeds’ best cultural nights are rarely parochial. They are rooted locally, but they look outwards. They understand that a northern city becomes more itself, not less, when it lets other rhythms in.
Saturday night belongs to the glitterball.
HAR Late: Reach Up Disco Wonderland with Andy Smith and Nick Halkes brings disco-spanning DJ sets to Howard Assembly Room, but the evening begins with conversation. From 6.30pm to 7.30pm, Halkes and Smith will be “in conversation”, sharing stories from a lifetime inside the music industry before the main event begins at 7.45pm.
And what stories.
Nick Halkes co-founded XL Recordings, signing acts including The Prodigy, before launching Positiva, the label behind hits from Reel 2 Real, Vengaboys and Cascada. He now manages The Prodigy, DJ Fresh and Bad Company UK, and performs worldwide as part of Reach Up Disco Wonderland.
Andy Smith, formerly of Portishead, runs BBE’s The Document series and curates the BBE Reach Up LPs. He is known for a deep knowledge of disco that stretches from obscure 1970s cuts to 1990s classics.
They will be joined by Leeds duo Galaxians, whose live sound combines heavy percussion and analogue synthesisers; Golden Gate, a Leeds disco and house project; and Ian Ossia, representing the long-running local house and disco night Downtown Disco.
Tickets start at £13.50 including booking fee, with £7 tickets available for Under 30s Members. Doors open at 6pm, the pre-show Q&A starts at 6.30pm, and the music begins at 7.45pm. Those wishing to dance are advised to book stalls tickets, as the galleries are seated.
That last point is important. This is a night that understands the body as well as the archive. Yes, there will be history, stories and the names of labels that helped shape British club culture. But there will also be people moving. Which is, ultimately, where this music lives.
What links these three nights is not a neat genre label. In fact, that is the point.
Electronic music. Soul. Jazz. Hip hop. Cuban timba. Son. Salsa. Disco. House. Analogue synths. Improvisation. Industry war stories. Family tribute. Bank Holiday joy.
Howard Assembly Room describes HAR Late as “after-dark adventures for your ears” in the heart of Leeds, curated around ideas rather than genres. That might sound like wizard marketing language from the Opera North superstars, but this weekend makes a pretty persuasive case for it.
The best venues do not merely host culture. They connect it. They create unlikely adjacencies. They make space for the person who came for Nightmares on Wax to notice Leeds Jazz Festival; for the salsa dancer to discover the architecture of the room; for the disco devotee to encounter a city’s deeper music ecology.
And in Leeds, that feels especially right. This is a city whose music history does not sit in one lane. It has been punk and dub, goth and jazz, club culture and classical performance, Carnival and conservatoire, student basement and civic stage. Howard Assembly Room’s Bank Holiday programme does not try to flatten that complexity. It lets it breathe.
There is also something significant about the venue itself. A heritage room in central Leeds, attached to one of the North’s great opera companies, opening itself to late-night Cuban dance classes, hip hop improvisation, analogue disco, house, jazz and electronic memory. That is not a gimmick. It is what cultural frontrunners should do.
They should widen the invitation.
They should remind us that “high culture” and “night culture” were always false opposites.
They should make a Thursday night tribute feel like a city’s act of remembrance, a Friday night salsa session feel like a portal, and a Saturday night disco feel like a perfectly legitimate form of civic renewal.
By the end of the weekend, New Briggate may not look very different from the outside. But upstairs, in that hidden splendour, something rather wonderful will have happened.
Leeds will have remembered, danced, travelled and stayed up late.
Which, frankly, sounds like a pretty decent Bank Holiday.
DJ E.A.S.E With The Original Nightmares On Wax Band
Thursday 21 May 2026
Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
Doors 7pm; start 7.45pm
Tickets £21.50 including booking fee
In association with Leeds Jazz Festival
All profits raised go to the Chris Dawkins Estate.
HAR Late: A Night In Havana
Friday 22 May 2026
Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
Doors 7pm; salsa dance class 7.45pm; Eliane Correa y La Evolución 9pm; DJ Yersin Rivas 10.30pm
Standing and seated tickets £26.50 including booking fee
In association with Leeds Jazz Festival.
HAR Late: Reach Up Disco Wonderland with Andy Smith and Nick Halkes
Saturday 23 May 2026
Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
Doors 6pm; pre-show Q&A 6.30pm; music from 7.45pm
Tickets £13.50 including booking fee; Under 30s Members £7
With Golden Gate, Galaxians and Ian Ossia.
