I HATE CLUBBING

2. Get yourself frisked by the bouncers who will invariably insult your appearance and intelligence. These cockfarming monkeymen will ID you even though they let all the pretty 15-year old girls without so much as a disparaging look, probably with a bonus wink thrown in for extra creepiness.

3. Gawp and exclaim "HOW MUCH?!!!" to the woman at the counter who is trying to convince you that £15 to get into the fiery depths of plebian bullshit is actually a bargain deal on a student night. Gawp once more at the overpriced yet obligatory cloakroom tariff. You are also guaranteed to have lost your coat ticket by the end of the night as they are designed to disintegrate on contact with your wallet.

4. After much cajoling and more frisking, you are in there! Scratch head trying to work out why everyone's getting so excited about the music they've been listening to on the radio at work all day, but since you're there you may as well try and have fun.

5. Spend thirty seconds "dancing" awkwardly to the latest pop drivel, then realise coming here was the worst idea of your life. A stiff drink is in order - preferably a cool glass of beer, or if not a stiff shot of spirits - after all, it's going to be a loooonngg night.

6. Cue at bar for twenty minutes with all the other twats. I would like a pint of beer please. What's that you say? No no, I thought you just said £3.50. What? It is £3.50?! This isn't even a glass, it's a fucking plastic cup! I can't even put it in my mouth without the rim going all squashy and spilling it all over...

7. ..."OI! Watch it you CUNT!" So sorry mate, it's this plastic mug thing they've just given me. "You fucking prat! You owe me a drink!" No mate, I'm sorry- *spy 7ft stature, prison tatoos and coke-habitted eyes* - would you like a cigarette? "Look mate, I'm gonna give you ten seconds to get me a drink or I'm gonna fucking break your face". Walk towards bar - then pelt like hell through the crowd, ducking and diving Indiana Jones-style. Spend rest of night looking over shoulder.

8. I think he's gone now. *Phew!* But where is everyone? Spend an hour looking for someone you know. Find them. Try to engage in conversation, but the effort is wasted due to the ear-achingly loud rubbish vomiting itself out of the speakers. Eventually give up and go seperate ways, looking for someone else to shout at.

9. This sucks. Now I need the toilet. Spend next thirty minutes queuing whilst being thrown around by bouncers and abused by townies.

10. Resign oneself into checking out what the ladies are like here, after all this place is supposed to be a proper meat market - you're bound to pull. Take one look at the dancefloor. Go back to bar. It's going to take more than one overpriced drink to trick my brain into chatting up this bunch of asshats.

11. Learn from past experience and get some kind of coloured bottle containing what appears to be liquid sugar with added tartrazine. It tastes like the foulest thing you've ever had in your mouth, but all the girlies lap it up so there must be something to it.

12. Die of a combination of heart failure, self-loathing, pure and utter despair, and a hefty blow to the back of the head. "WHERE'S MY FUCKING PINT YOU CUNT?!!!!" you hear as your head hits the floor. Then get unceremoniously dragged out of the club by your lips and kicked to shit by the bouncers for "starting a fight".

13. Walk home in rain, bloodied and sans coat.

I hate clubbing. It has to be THE shittest past-time since sucking the farts out of bus-seats.

It's true, it's true.

Sod raves.

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/3892/doglatinenjoyingtheclub.jpg

*dies happy*

as i say - stream of consciousness. then i went back and checked it all. then i accidentally posted the draft. DAH!

Dog Latin's Whistlestop Tour of the World

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/8825/doglatinateiffeltower.jpg

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/3848/doglatinatrushmore.jpg

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7585/doglatinatstonehenge.jpg

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/7301/doglatinatthesphinx.jpg

Dog Latin's Time-Travel Adventures

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3773/doglatinandoswald.jpg

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1128/doglatinmeetsdinosaur.jpg

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/3280/doglatinlandsonthemoon.jpg

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/310/doglatinbeingcheekytotheromans.jpg

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!

http://www.symphony-homes.com/boy%20thumbs%20up.jpg

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.

sorry, this is the one i was looking for. i dont like the attitudes expressed in this thread, and i think its a shadow that hangs over this one, and others, also

Not as good as the "bag of chips" comment though. I love it when people remind me of things I should never have forgotten.

To be honest, in Oxford you can pretty much avoid the problems described initially on this thread by DL by avoiding *one particular* club.

Matt otm re chips.

!

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