I HATE CLUBBING

Dog Latin's Time-Travel Adventures

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I really never go to clubs unless there's a band I want to see playing - I don't really know what to *do* otherwise. Now thanks to this post, I know!

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Clubbing on weeknights or small places, (i.e. no Bridge and Tunnel type crowds) where you're a regular, and having a good time dancing and jumping about to music you love with people you like is pretty classic.

Clubbing as in the sense of superclubs, door queues, dress codes, all that freaking velvet rope nonsense... Jesus Christ! What the fuck could possibly be behind that door that actually justifies the fuss? In my experience, the VERY few times I've done it, absolutely nothing. I'm glad that those superclub cattlesheds full of white high heels and boys in shiny shirts exist, though, because it keeps them out of the sort of places that I would want to go.

Feh.

Enrique, luckily I let the Carwash et al slip me by - as you know I never really had a whole lot of friends I could go out with in Cambridge. But I did see a few bands in that place.

What does "Bridge and Tunnel" mean, Kate?

a month or so ago my friends girlfriend KEPT asking me to go there and was being sort of sweet about it in her efforts to persuade me or see why I didn't want to go. But it was actually quite a rigorous interrogation in the end, I think I muttered something about liking to go to clubs where the clientele didn't make smart-ass comments about your hair or clothes and then I appeared all sensitive and offended as opposed to just picky.

YOU CAN'T WIN, I guess is the moral of this rambling story. Actually also I just hate going to a club where twats you don't even know will be all "I heard about you" the next week if you so much as talk to a girl, small town crap, grrr.

It's more the disrespect and total disregard for anyone else, residents or not, that makes B&T so awful. Don't behave in someone else's neighbourhood in a way that you would not behave in your own.

What do you think the chances are that I would be arrested? Quite high. SO WHY DO PEOPLE BEHAVE LIKE THAT IN MY NEIGHBOURHOOD AND THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT?!?!?

Mark, FUCK YOU AND THE HIGH HORSE YOU RODE IN ON.

Not to the people that live in those central areas of cities, it's not. They're for living in.

Well, no, central London is not for the people who live there. At all! It's a fucking financial and cultural (and, once, industrial) capital -- people come to it from all over the world. Were you born within the sound of Bow Bells? No?

Kate you ignorant moron. Exactly the same behaviour happens in Wimbledon every night at 11pm. Come down here and check it out and for once in your life have a fucking clue about something you're whining on about on ILX.

Jesus. Has one person ever been so full of sanctimonious shit???

Actually I tell a lie, there's a place in Hitchin that used to be famous for all the teenie boppers and townies to go to. It cost about £8 to get in and then about £3 for a drink and it was SO SHIT! It closed down for about a year and then a big fanfare was made that it had been taken over with loads of money being poured into it and it was definitely NOT going to be like before, with talk of decent proper dance nights and even maybe gigs and things.
So we went to the grand opening because we'd heard it was free entrance. It cost £10 to get in, £4 for a drink and the music was atrocious, I mean really really bad - it was like some kind of Now Dance compilation from 1997 - the newest track they played was that Tori Amos Armand Van Helden remix. We left after 25 minutes of hurriedly necking 330ml bottles of Grolsch and looking sorrowfully at a quarter-empty dnacefloor.

The bar / pool hall I was in last night had a dancefloor. The DJ appeared to be operating out of a time portal from 2001.

ROCKIST!!!!! OMG!!!!111

-- Ronan (ronan.fitzgerald6NOSPA...), July 16th, 2005. (later)

Me!

putin looks like he is going out on the town in a couple of hours, prob destiny in watford

Except for Up Middle Finger.

Reviving this old post to say I went to London mega-club Drumsheds this weekend and it was.. kind of dismal?

The whole thing is situated in a big disused IKEA with all the resplendent warmth and personality that might have to offer. Three gigantic echoey rooms with high ceilings joined by an extremely noise-filled link of overpriced bar areas.

Overzealous security (I got whisked away to a mobile cabin and interrogated on suspicion of carrying drugs (which I wasn't). And when they couldn't find anything on me, they tried to confiscate my (empty) personal water bottle for some reason. When I explained I had brought it for my 3 hours journey from Bristol and that it was going in the locker I'd hired at extra expense, they arse-ily conceded.

The toilets are in a single block complex on the lower floor, which meant that any time you wanted to go to the loo, you would need to leave where you were, negotiate crowds, cross the link, go down three flights of stairs, queue up, then come back.

Drinks were something stupid like £7 for a 330ml can of 4% lager. Unfortunately, as it was a several-hour day party I got into the mindset of "maybe if I have another drink I'll start having fun". Now I daren't check my bank balance.

Also, despite a fantastic lineup with Four Tet, Yung Singh, Blawan, The Bug, Kode9 and many others, the music sounded pretty awful. Maybe a gigantic reverberating metal room isn't the best place to hear dance music. Every beat and sound was smeared with so much room echo it hardly registered as music. The Bug's set was practically unlistenable.

And looking around at the punters, I didn't really get the impression that people were having an awful lot of FUN. There was something grim and "getting-along with it" about the general atmosphere.

NOTE: Unlike twenty years ago I don't hate clubbing. Once I'd discovered the power of intimate spaces for dancing, my opinion flipped away from my experiences at mucky mershy provincial nights. As a DJ I spend a lot of time in clubs, and being on a dancefloor or behind the decks makes me very happy.

With the closure of something like ten London venues a week, we need MORE clubs. We need small and medium-sized spaces that can nurture and showcase new talent. A ginormous mega-venue in the middle of a commercial area represents a Wetherspoonsification of clubbing in my view: You know, when all the family-run pubs in town have to shut and you're just left with one giant Tim Martin-owned building, soulless and selling the same beer as all the rest.

That sounds nightmarish.

I think I've developed an allergy to big concerts and clubs (and I was never a festival person). I just want to see jazz in small rooms and occasionally dance in small clubs or parties w/good sound.

Never been to the UK but on the No Tags podcast they talk a lot about these mega clubs (and the money behind them) and the overall club ecosystem.

I’ve never been tempted by Drumsheds v2. I went to the previous incarnation for one of the Hydra parties with Jeff Mills etc - it was this cavernous great building with a ceiling maybe 7 or 8 stories high and equally huge doors to the outside always open. This was in the directly post Covid era so it was as close to being outdoor as you could be, while being sheltered in a rave in winter.

I got similar vibes about the ‘enduring it’ vibe from a decent amount of punters but you never quite know nowadays whether it’s just that everyone’s stuffed to the gills with coke. Or holding out as long as they can before ordering another £11 ‘hard seltzer’.

The idea of going back to an enclosed and even more expensive version doesn’t really appeal although I’ve never really warmed to London clubbing compared to Bristol.

xp I've been enjoying the No Tags podcast as well Jordan. It is very London-centric of course. Luckily Bristol still has a fair few middle-sized spaces still going. But no, this is the last time I attend a big club like this. Funnily, I generally like dance music in big festival tents - feels more vibey

Willl, yeah I hear you. Other than this, and a similar thing at Printworks earlier in the year, I haven't been clubbing in London for a long time, and I can't rmemeber the last time I danced in a medium-sized London club. From what I recall of going out to gigs and club nights in London before I moved over here, people were generally a bit more reticent about dancing - a bit more reserved - but I'm sure there are exceptions to all that