Dreams of scenes of Saturday Night Fever – but the reality of clubbing wasn’t glamorous
COLUMNIST
BOUNCERS on the door, handbags on the floor…last night a gang of us were in nostalgic mood for the night spots of our youth as we attended the relaunch of The Philharmonic – one of the legendary venues of Cardiff After Dark.
We only ever knew it as The Philly back in the day, of course. Now, after a decade of semi-dereliction, its dungeon disco has disappeared and it has reinvented itself in tasteful hipster shades of teal and mustard, boasting on its website of “Three Floors of Quality Food & Drink in Cardiff City Centre”.
Back then, it was more “Two Floors of Boozing and Bopping in the Basement”.
The sights and smells of Cardiff night life in the late ’80s and early ’90s resembled a Heironymous Bosch painting with added snowwashed denim as bodies writhed, stumbled and fumbled in a fug of fag smoke and Impulse.
I was never particularly good at clubbing, mind. For a start, I was the only teenager in the valleys who wore a coat out on a Friday night. But having grown up watching Saturday Night Fever we imagined that one day we too would be a picture of glamour on a glowing dance floor, punctuating our moves with sophisticated cocktails adorned with paper umbrellas.
And then we went to our first 18th birthday party in Gingers in Pontypridd and reality dawned – there was nothing remotely glamorous about clubbing. That’s if you even got in in the first place. Growling Welsh door staff could make Cerberus look friendly.
Once inside, I inevitably lost my mates in the dimly-lit chaos and spent most of the evening trying to find them again – between overpriced Malibus and trips to toilets occupied by women who were either vomiting, weeping or weeing together.
Then there was the noise. I was always considered squarer than a patio slab for wanting to still have conversation at this stage of the night. That, of course, was a ridiculously futile mission. I discovered this at a nightclub in college when I asked the DJ was there any chance of lowering the decibel level a tad.
“Why don’t you try the tea dance at the town hall, love,” he hissed above his decks.
But post-university, my clubbing education took a fortuitous turn. When I was a cub reporter on the Neath Guardian, the kindly advertising reps took pity on my social gaucheness and introduced me to the hedonistic delights of the town’s premier night spot – The Dark Arch. Let’s just say I learned a lot.
By the time I had graduated to the Merthyr Express, the entire young staff of Celtic Newspapers would make a weekly pilgrimage to Cardiff’s Womanby Street to pull some shapes on the sticky carpet of The Dog and Duck. Here, with total disregard for health and safety considerations, the DJ appeared to operate from a disused lift shaft.
And there was still recognisable music on the clubbing scene at this stage. Actual songs, even. Then came rave culture and with it the kind of endless thudding beat I could have produced myself by simply pressing a button on my Yamaha keyboard for three hours.
Clubs also became more about drugs than drink at this point. This was another source of disconnect for me. The only narcotic I could drop was a Nurofen while ecstasy meant a lie-in on a Saturday.
The scene did provide some interesting Welsh cultural spin-offs, however. Like Human Traffic, for example. Written by Newport’s Justin Kerrigan, it was variously described as the Welsh Trainspotting, a “portrait of Britain’s chemical generation” and “the first theatrical feature to effectively represent the chemical-fuelled club unleashed by acid house”.
It had a Pete Tong soundtrack, cameos from Howard Marks, Nicola Heywood Thomas and Jo Brand, and was basically the story of a bunch of twentysomethings having a druggie weekend bender in Cardiff. It was also very funny.
Another great cult Cymric film of the ’90s featured a nightclub that holds an evocative place in the history of Welsh nightlife – not that Baron’s in Swansea would necessarily want to be remembered forever for that infamous karaoke urination scene.
It’s a venue that Guardian arts critic Jude Rogers still holds dear. “For me, it was a dark room in Swansea, white clouds misting in the air from cheap fags and a smoke machine. The carpet was alcopopsticky, the dance floor reeking of White Musk, body odour and vomit. But the music, and the volume, and the darkness, turned Barons into a dreamland. The Breeders’ Cannonball, the Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold, Jane’s Addiction’s Been Caught Stealing pouring out of the speakers, and the noise of us – teenagers laughing, flirting, almost bursting – slowly becoming ourselves.”
Rogers’ positively Proustian recollections of Baron’s come from her review of Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues by Dave Haslam. Released in 2015 it is a forensically researched account of the “world that exists beyond the velveteen rope, the bouncer, the cloakroom”.
Apart from a history of night spots that have their roots in Victorian dance saloons, it’s an examination of how clubbing has provided “lifeshaping moments” through the decades.
And the author doesn’t just mean the Beatles bonding in The Cavern. How many of us, for example, have parents who met at dance halls and discotheques (though when my culture mother told me she first set eyes on my father at Porth Rink I thought for years they’d fallen for each other while doing a triple Salchow rather than jiving.)
The habits of the current generation more used to hooking up with the swipe of a smartphone rather than a glance across a crowded dance floor have left us wondering what the future holds for the traditional nightclub.
In 2005 there were 3,144 nightclubs across Britain, according to the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers. By 2015 that figure had dropped by 45% to 1,733. Last year the Financial Times reported that half of all London nightclubs and 40% of grassroots venues had shut in the previous eight years – a picture predicted to be replicated UKwide.
Factors include 24-hour licences – clubs are no longer the only place for a late-night drink; the smoking ban;