Found a great post on a web forum and to me it just about summed up clubbing. I must be getting old!
It’s Saturday night. You’ve finished your work for the week, you’ve watched something during the day on TV – a football match or an old film, for example – you’ve just eaten a fairly easy meal, and now you’re ready. For what? Why, to go out. Out into the anonymous streets (all with generic high street chains and plenty of fast food places) to find something to do your friends. Pub? Too crowded. Meal? Well, you’ve eaten, and to sit there whilst everyone else is having chicken in a white wine sauce or seafood pasta is a bit off-putting. So where do you go. Only one option – clubbing.
Yes, the c-word, and not the one you usually think of. This is the phenomenon that has been going for years with steadily increasing popularity, particularly during the 90s and the Nu Rave movement (no, it’s not cool to spell “New” correctly, and yes, I’m a killjoy), and is now a regular feature of people’s lives up and down the country. As you can guess, I am not a fan of this feature. I would quite gladly find a semi-comfortable seat in a pub and have a quiet drink with somebody and put the world to rights, as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore often did back in their sketch show. But clubbing is a different animal entirely.
Firstly, you have to pay to get in, and it is always guarded by an extra from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I’m sure they are very friendly when not on the job, but come Saturday, you wouldn’t go near them even if your mother asked you, nay, demanded you to pick up your baby sister’s prized doll which was accidentally thrown from her pram and landed by their feet. But back to the first point – you have to pay? Why? We don’t pay to go into most other public places – pubs, shops, restaurants, even banks for goodness sake. Well, the reason why is because as soon as you enter one of these nightclubs, you are bombarded with so many things that you need perhaps 10 minutes to register what planet you are on. It feels like a Disneyland attraction gone wrong.
The music is probably the worst aspect. It is so loud that it can cause tremors to be felt as far east as Kobe in Japan (maybe that’s what caused that earthquake…). And it’s relentless because it is the same pounding beat over and over again for 7 minutes before it “effortlessly” fades into the next equally irritating remix. A headache is as bad as this – you wouldn’t want to dance to a headache, would you? But as well as that, the lighting is all over the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if an octopus on LSD was operating the rigging up there. Blue over there, green on his T-shirt, red against her jeans, purple on the DJ…just not white, because, you know, you don’t actually want to discover where you are exactly.
Accompanying this nauseous atmosphere is the sheer number of people, packed in like sardines in a tin. In a clown car. In a phone box. That’s how cramped it is, and that’s what makes it highly probable that you will inevitable lose your phone, prompting the creation of yet another Facebook group dedicated to re-discovering 70 of your friends’ numbers. But wait, you could always ask your friend there where it’s gone to, couldn’t you? No, that option went out the window long ago (if there is a window there), because they have not been deafened for the rest of the evening, as have you. The result of this should be that you each act like Wile E. Coyote and hold up wooden signs to communicate what you’re trying to say, but since no timber is available in the facility, you soldier on like a trooper, randomly shaking your arms in a fashion similar to someone suffering from an epileptic fit, and simultaneously sweating more than a pig in a sauna so that you produce body odour which will stink out not only your seminar the next afternoon, but every other room on the same floor.
So how do you combat this? By drinking of course! Not just drinking, but drinking so much that you can’t utter a single word without foaming at the mouth or vomiting down your front like a cheerful baby. Now admittedly, I am not a heavy drinker, but of course you can still have fun with just a couple of drinks every now and again. So why does someone insist that they will be getting “sooooo wasted tonight”, just to ruin your evening? There’s always one, and it’s often your friend’s friend, because they’re only young once, so they say. True, but I, for one, don’t want to spend my younger years being the subject of several embarrassing blurry photos where I was unstable, both physically and emotionally, and possibly responsible for ruining a nice friendship. But I am not this person, and this person being akin to someone playing dead in front of a grizzly bear, they need help getting back to their house.
Thus, you head for the car park, filled up by the endless streams of taxis awaiting these unfortunate, misguided innocents, all eagerly accepting the fare to take them halfway across town to their required destination. Since they’ve already attempted (and failed) to find a drain by the side of the road, just out of sight of the police car, to throw up in, they need help getting back safely. The friend is held over your shoulders, and whilst you wouldn’t find shoving them through the letterbox in the front door, they somehow fumble in their pockets and produce the keys and fall inside before crawling slowly up to the safety of their bed, where they will be sick even more. Finally, mission accomplished, you find your own way home, drag yourself upstairs and collapse in bed. Somehow, I’m not so sure the phrase “it’ll be a right laugh” can lend itself to what you have just experienced.
Obviously, I’m biased. I would much rather enjoy a night in with the company of a pizza, ice cream and a good long film. It’s relaxing, and if you didn’t order the pizza, it’s free. You can hear what another person is saying, the light is stable, and you don’t end up so drunk that you might contract liver disease. But I couldn’t possibly convince some people. They like letting their hair down and just having “a laugh”. Well, if that’s their idea of a laugh, then I’m very sorry, but I don’t find it funny. Maybe just funny to look at.
