At the Door of Maestro’s by Andrew O’Hagan

i entered my adolescence with two columns of agitation, written at the back of a school jotter. The first listed all the nightclubs I’d certainly never get into (because they were in New York or London, respectively 3,204 and 437 miles away, and there was no late bus). The other column described all the nightclubs I would probably not get into (because they were in Glasgow, 25 miles away, but I was 12 years old and had no money). In my active imagination, I was being wafted past the red ropes at Studio 54 or the Blitz, but in reality I was tea-leafing my mother’s eyeliner and waiting for hours in the rain outside some (literally) godforsaken ex-church off Sauchiehall Street, hoping the Giant Haystacks-alike on the door would mistake me for every member of The Pretenders. It never happened.

Before the joy of nightclubs, there was the hell of being turned away from them. The danger was always very real — too high and too short (a local condition), and, just for the record, “We don’t accept school uniform”. Being underage, one would soon forget, was once a burden beyond endurance. In the frozen north, we tried to combat this debilitation, I remember, with various ageing techniques, which usually involved turning up at the door of Maestro’s wearing a combination of pink national health spectacles, a threadbare cardigan, a hair net and a loudly malfunctioning hearing aid. “The Smiths’ Night is round at the Variety Bar, ya daft wee diddy,” said Haystacks II, his dome lit with neon.

Bet they never said that to Bianca Jagger or Truman Capote. But my love of nightclubs would survive the humiliation, and thrive on it, in fact, surviving every torment, and turning it into the beautiful spun gold of belonging. When some people speak about nightclubs, they’re thinking about the international jet set, cool guest lists, superstar DJs and private areas with flaming vodkas and a gangster aura, but that never took hold for me. When I think of nightclubs, I now think of those Aramis-haunted joints halfway down the shopping malls of the UK, hard against an exhaust-fitter’s depot in Salford, or under a railway bridge in Paisley. They were always called things like Amanda’s or Jilly’s or The Glamour Lounge, and, since the 1980s, they were heaving with self-invention and aspiration.

Though I loved indie music, I never loved indie clubs: too self-conscious in the wrong way, and too fearful. The greatest British nightclubs were for joining together with young people whose behaviour, and character, couldn’t quite be predicted, and the clubs themselves were palaces, dirty and sticky and slightly plasticated, for people into trying and into pretending. There’s a huge impulse towards conformity in youth culture now, towards tribal purity, but I recall a Saturday night festival much more disrespectful of social and class norms.

I still remember my first royal entry. I was a veteran of knock-backs, aged 13, when finally they opened a nightclub in our town. It was 1981 and the place was called Flicks. Blue Rondo à la Turk, now more or less forgotten, were due to play there and I marshalled my forces and my friend Heather’s makeup bag. My mother worked as a school cleaner and had a collection of old overalls and I found a metal bullet-belt at a jumble sale and a pair of black velvet Tukka boots and a Humphrey Bogart-style hat.

Reader, I think my face was silver and blue.

When I arrived at the door of the nightclub it wasn’t my age that was in question so much as my basic sanity. Leaving sniggers in my wake, I floated into the nightclub like a VE Day hovercraft. I drank several pints of snakebite and blackcurrant and had a girlfriend before the support act had finished its set. Oh, the glory of nightclubs. I smoked a cigarette on the balcony and thought I was in the movie Angels with Dirty Faces.

But it was small-town Britain in the middle of a recession: the mines were closing, there were strikes in our local factories, the old style of patrimony was breathing its last, and I was staring through the brim of a borrowed hat. Fantastic. I would soon be a regular, in tamed garb, admittedly, at other venues and other places, the Sub Club or Fury Murrys, then the Wag and the Marquee on Wardour Street in London, or — when dance music took over our lives — the Fridge in Brixton or Turnmills in Clerkenwell. It was the world we made. If I was going to those places on a Saturday night I’d be excited from Tuesday. And during lockdown I started dreaming about them, as if they were Manderley.

All romantic nonsense, of course. But aren’t the nicest things? As the father of a teenager now, I sometimes wonder where young people might go to test their social self, to find their imaginative equals, except, of course, online, which is a steaming nightclub where only the overheard comments matter, and where even the unreality isn’t real. Summer is a time of clubs and cold drinks and dancing, to my mind. This year, more than any other, I want to lose myself in a sea of strangers, with or without foam. With my wife and child, and all the friends who still think of themselves as romantic, I imagine going on a driving tour of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, stopping each night at The Glamour Lounge, making our own sweet festival of belief and transportation.

It’s funny what images remain. I’m 53, and, several times a month, the image comes into my head of a night at the Haçienda in Manchester, a night long ago, when we found out that dance music and choppy guitars and endless beers could seem (if only for a night) to push back the authority of terrible governments. That feeling never ended. True, many of the nightclubs closed, and cynical governments thrived, but a clear idea of togetherness remains, and it remains solidly, pulsing still to an ageless beat.

One should never be too old for a night like that, as used to exist in the Ministry of Sound, let’s call it one night in particular, when people passed round huge slices of melon on the dancefloor, and looked after each other, as if tomorrow could only be a brighter version of today.

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