After reaching the age of 20, I feel like I’ve passed a certain threshold. Your slavish teenage years are behind you, you have flown the nest (for a while, at least), and you now feel like you are your own man, standing proudly upon your own two feet. And it is with this newfound emancipation that I think I can finally admit that actually, I don’t really like nightclubs. I never really did, it’s just now I feel it unnecessary to try and feel otherwise. It’s not like I became a pagan or anything, it’s just they don’t really do it for me like they once did. If you have something to celebrate; a birthday, a holiday, the end of the year, the beginning of the year, or, even payday, then a night on the town is certainly in order. But, if it is a rainy Tuesday evening, maybe you could just, not. And it doesn’t matter if you go to your average prole hole, an indie place, a gay place. Drink gets drunk, and dubious connections are made. These are universal truths.
Regardless of where you go, and who with, a night out will ultimately boil down to several key elements. You drink at home to save a little money, you go to a club, maybe a few, where any money saving scheme you may have hatched is irreparably dashed, and then finally you stagger home, kebab in hand, to sleep it off. That is the essential formula, which is replicated every time you decide to get your dancing shoes on. It doesn’t matter if you go to the palace or the grottiest sweat pit in the western hemisphere; although should you frequent the former, you will probably be trading in kebabs for quiche and scotch eggs. Your choice of venue may well differ though. No two clubs are the same, but few are startlingly different either. You will either go in straight away (if it’s a real dive) or more likely queue outside. You will either chat with your raiding party and stonily ignore any of the other tittering pissheads around you, or, depending on how much drink you have already consumed, you may well delve into unnecessarily personal conversations with the medley of unknown revellers in front and behind of you. You never really know. One time I wound up talking to a bearded bloke called Ralph, who smoked a pipe and told me he worked with robots. Then one time I nearly had my head kicked in by a bunch of indie types, who thought my trousers were ‘well gay’ (in defence of ignorance, they were sunshine yellow in colour). Like I said, you never really know. I owe it to my good friend for keeping my head intact on that one.
After this, you will dutifully hold some form of identification aloft, and try to look as respectable as physically possible, as it is inspected by a bouncer with an impressively shiny head. He looks at it, and then at you, before saying something depreciative of your character and letting you in. Sometimes they might call you by your name, after reading it off your ID, which is always nice, like you’re Angelina Jolie or something. But that is rare. And most people probably don’t enjoy it that much anyway. So the doorman lets you in and you walk into whatever classy spot you’ve picked to go revel. Somewhere like Oceana has all the atmosphere of a flip-flop soaked in urine, and the much touted 02 Academy isn’t much better, despite all the aloof, polo-neck wearing Alex Turner-ites, who insist it is the best. Regardless of clientele, the place you enter is a reverberating dungeon that reeks of ball-sweat and hair gel; the acrid stench drops on you as you enter, like a warm, soggy blanket. a familiar stink that hangs over proceedings like a greasy phantom. You jig in the near-darkness with a few friends and lots of people you don’t know at all. Everyone smells, makeup runs, sweat patches develop and sobriety ebbs away moment by moment. The music is terrible; mostly chart stuff, Lady Gaga and Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, some really bad RnB like professional on- going-joke Jason Derulo, and some 90s music to boot, because hey everybody loves music from the 90s as it is ‘nostalgic’ as opposed to ‘bad’. The music blares constantly, making conversation and coherent thought impossible. The resident DJ seems to split his time between making vaguely rape-y one-liners and some idiotic shout-outs to douches out for their twentieth birthday. Musical choices tend to be better advised in indie places or rock clubs (to the O2’s credit, at one point they played Shoot to Thrill, then Knights of Cydonia, and finally Black Betty; now that was a playlist). Go to popular skank buckets like Halo or Shooters and the music will be utterly terrible; such insipid sugary crap that you wonder if the DJ could save time by just throwing some grenadine on the turntable.
Regardless of where you go, you see the same sorts of people. You get muscle jocks in vests with fake tans and shaved sides, girls in skirts so short they seem to fold into themselves to reveal as much loin as possible, a couple arguing in the corner, the creepy guy with the piercing who stays standing at the bar all night, the two girls in the smoking area who have decided to be newly found BFFs. You get those boys looking for their mates, darting about the place with that fleeting look so charismatic of a party-goer who’s lost his group. You see someone you vaguely know, and are amused when you see they are quite overtly and desperately chasing some tail. As your sobriety leaves you, you wind up talking to people you really like but inevitably never see ever again. Then more than anything you see those people sat by themselves on seats or in cubicles round the edge of the dance floor, looking about sheepishly and tapping at a smart phone to try and dispel the illusion that they look sad as hell. I swear you could walk into a bar or a club anywhere in the country (except, maybe, Lincolnshire, land of the potato) and you would see this same class of stereotypes.
The consensus seems to be that gay clubs are somehow preferable to straight ones, because the music will be better or the atmosphere rosier, or maybe because the people there are better looking. However, as anyone who has actually been to one of these places can tell you, gay clubs are just as rancorous as straight ones. For a start the music is by no means better, indeed often it stoops to new levels of debasement; it would not be unusual to hear One Direction’s That’s What Makes You Beautfiul get played in excess of three times. The atmosphere is certainly different, but I don’t know whether you could call it preferable; you get douchebags on both sides of the fence after all. But there is less in the way of conversation in a place like Mission on a Monday night. There is a definite mandate for this occasion, and that mandate is generally that no one has gone there to make friends. Not like a night at Tiger Tiger is a place for balanced and intelligent debate. But the object of the night is at least somewhat concealed in places like that. Not so on a Monday at Mission, the subtly titled Homo. If you do not appeal to a person’s libido, or otherwise, are clearly not going to play ball, it is not anything special if someone were to stop talking to you mid-sentence and go talk to someone else. People go there to hook up, just like any other night out, but, unlike any other night out, many people consider this the sole objective of their exertion, with any other result equating to failure. Not like this is really a problem, I suppose. People can do what they like. It just isn’t quite to everybody’s tastes.
Getting totally trolleyed is so integral to life in this country, it’s practically a British institution. But I am getting a little sick of it now. It’s funny to think if someone told you that you were going to go into a sweaty, poorly lit room, filled with strangers, and listen to music you hated, you would presume the owner would be paying you to enter. Clubs are essentially the same, you will see drama, tears, and at least one thing that disgusts you. The music will be bad, but, then again, if you go to places like Halo or Fruity of your own free will, you’ll probably love the music that is on (and, also, probably be an utter tool, not worthy even of contempt). Nightclubs, at their core, are just playgrounds for the careless lust of young men, and that’s true whether you are in Viaduct Show Bar or Shooters Sports Bar. Everybody loves a night of excess every once in a while, and without them society might just teeter the other way to the point where looking at a ladies ankles would get you banged up. But there are better ways to spend an evening you know. Preferably ways where you don’t have to hear Pound the Alarm, even once.
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