MikePadgett.com

Club nasty: a night to remember (other nights)

— Getting fleeced by crap nightclubs is a rite of passage as a youth, but it doesn't have the same appeal at thirty.”

I used to frequent the After Dark club in Skipton years ago. Even if you don’t know the After Dark, you know it by another name: Aqua, Bliss and Crystals; Club Klass, Club Uropa, Club Hedonism, Club Meds, Club Wow; Escape, Eternity, Evolution; Faces, Flex, Frontier and Frisco’s; Karma, Kinky, Kiss and Kudos; Majestyks, Maloneys’, Millionaires, Miss Molly’s, Miss Fitt’s, Mystic and Mister Craig’s; Palladium, Po Na Na, Prague and Pulse; Roots, Rumours, Ritzy’s and Rawcous; Shadows, Sloanes, Smokey Joe’s and Sounds; XLs, Xtremes, XFest, XS, Zest, Zoo and Ziggy’s.

Every town’s got its own Friday Night Fire Hazard, where you can while away the post-pub, pre-smoke hours watching out for the Z-List ex-celebrities, tragic (and very public) lovers’ tiffs and falling bottles.

Havana Club

Brussels’ Havana Club (absolutely no relation to the famous-name rum) doesn’t stoop quite so low as its British kin – there are no pickpocket cloakrooms or lysteria-ridden kebab vans outside, for example – but just a whiff of the good bad old days is enough to send me careening for the cab rank.

Of course, I ought not to have been so surprised. After all, this is the country that brought us such extremes as René Magritte, Franck Vandenbroucke and the city of Charleroi.

The Havana Club is ridiculously overcrowded, full of sweaty young men and a flock of those vaguely uncomfortable bookworm girls in which Belgium seems to specialise. There’s not a sniff of latin music. Within minutes I’m setting a new personal best for the number of times I’ve been stepped on and jostled around in one night at a club. Last time this happened so blatantly was, and painfully I remember: the After Dark.

Toilet turnaround

One reason for the ladies’ discomfort is probably the toilet facility. Past about eleven – the hour when tiles traditionally turn into a skating rink and paper towel mountains start to collapse in a sort of taupe mudslide – even these genteel women are sufficiently emboldened and/or hard pressed to gain entrance into the gents loos.

It’s a fact that, though alike in unsustainably stained hygiene and just as spatially inadequate, Nature endows the gents loo with a quicker turnaround. Intelligent women have long appreciated this crucial difference; so indeed have less intelligent women too, their presence interfering with the golden arcs of many an otherwise confident fellow.

And if the loos are spectacularly unreminiscent of Havana, then the opening bars of I Will Survive hardly compensate for the lack of tropicality. Ms Gaynor must still be raking in the royalties accumulated from a million flaccid attempts to inject life into crowds all across the globe.

(A lethal) cocktail

It must be said that the Havana Club’s swollen crowd needs little encouragement. Eyes are all agoggle with happy hour cocktails: buy one Old Spice Breezer and get another free. All the unopened spirit bottles on display are fine brands indeed, but it’s the under the counter stuff that you’re actually drinking, the stuff you couldn’t even get on prescription for your laryngitic dog. Cue all the memories of Mental Fridays and Two Bottles For Two Hours: those were great times because we didn’t yet know anything else, anything better.

As I’m leaving, the bouncers demand a tip. It’s tough work opening a door and staring at girls, but someone’s got to do it. I remember that some things never change, but I guess I did.