Army of clubbers
”Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.” As Sympathy For The Devil was blasting through the speakers, Mick Jagger’s voice was soundtracking one of the most iconic moments in nightclub history - when Bianca Jagger, then his wife, took the opportunity to mount a white horse, riding it in style across the dance floor. This was all pre her human-(and animal)-rights involvement, before she fended off an El Salvadorian death squad by the Nicaraguan border with nothing but a fiery temper and a camera to free a group of hostages. In fact, this was at her 30th birthday party.
The most notable fact about this charade, is that it actually happened within ten days of Studio 54 opening, and the hordes of press photographers who covered the equestrian event with a barrage of flashes were probably more part of some PR-stunt rather than covering a celebrity birthday bash. Anyway, whatever way it happened, it certainly worked. From then on you had to be outrageously famous, rich, beautiful, well-connected or just plain outrageous to avoid standing in the huge line that serpentined from the doorway into the street past a long line of funky Ford Pintos and Mavericks along the curb.
Fast-forward from the disco era to the late ‘80’s when the arrival of house and techno coincided with the emergence of widespread club culture. What clubs mattered naturally depend on where in the world you were. If you were British, Manchester’s Hacienda was without doubt perceived as the centre of the world, complete with bucket hats, whistles, 808 State and Richie Rich’s Salsa House. Ever the early adopters, Stockholm quickly got in on the fun and, early ‘90s, a time when Sweden saw its worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a carefree club culture exploded. Whatever troubles existed were danced away, and during all this there was one man, and one man alone, who had the wherewithal to document the debauchery. He was, and still is, called Stefan Holm Mardo and even if he cannot pinpoint a defining moment of someone riding a white horse, the fun, and supposedly vague, memories, are collected into a new book called No Limit, Stockholm Clubland 1992-95.
We couldn’t resist devoting a full 15 percent of these pages to the wild era when anything and everything seemed possible.
Peter Steen-Christensen