This nostalgic disco journey almost moved me to tears
Night Fever: Designing Club Culture
High spirits, collective joy, bodies moving as one: how poignant this all seems now
Think of it as the antidote to lockdown gloom. With parts of the world still crushed by coronavirus, V&A Dundee’s new exhibition, about the post-war evolution of the modern nightclub, focuses on a different sort of “fever” altogether: the ecstatic delirium of nocturnal revelry and release. There’s even a silent disco – though, with headphones on wires, any peacocking dance routines, a la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, may prove ambitious.
What I wasn’t prepared for was that something so potentially frivolous would move me almost to tears. High spirits, collective joy, grainy footage of roiling, sweaty bodies moving as one: how poignant this show seems, with its fragmentary images of frolicking – and freedom. Remember what it was like to be carefree and have fun? Frankly, we could all do with a big night out. Until then, this exhibition, luring in visitors with a pink neon sign, will have to do.
The central premise of the show is simple: nightclubs are places of immense but overlooked cultural significance, merging architecture, sound, light, fashion and visual effects to create a modern Gesamtkunstwerk. Surprisingly, given the earlier popularity of music halls, cabarets and speakeasies, their origins remain obscure – so, the exhibition starts with a bang: the sudden emergence of the discotheque during the Sixties.
Galvanised by avant-garde young designers who’d had enough of what was by then the bland, corporate, dead-end forms of modernism, Italy led the way. Its first discotheque, the Piper, opened in a disused cinema in Rome in 1965: a flexible, colourful environment, conceived as a giant pinball machine for youngsters, which hosted a ton of famous acts, including Pink Floyd. To modern eyes, it looks like a café rather than a den of bacchanalian excess. Still, the formula proved so alluring that, before long, similar dance clubs were popping up all over, from Munich to Montreal. And the designers behind these utopian, futuristic spaces – social spots, as much as places to boogie – let their imaginations run wild. Space Electronic in Florence was furnished with washing-machine drums, a parachute and (what else?) a vegetable garden planted on the dancefloor. Munich’s Yellow Submarine disco was surrounded by a pool filled with sharks. Cerebrum, in New York, required visitors to shed their clothes and slip into loose white gowns.
The concept of the “Fun Palace” was paramount: an adaptable leisure venue, conceived (though never built) at the start of the Sixties by the theatre designer Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price. By the end of the decade, Jim Henson, the puppeteer behind The Muppets, was honing plans for a multimedia nightclub inside a geodesic dome. Even Kermit the Frog needs somewhere to hang loose.
Judging by some of the photographs on display, of suited men with combed hair politely jiving with partners who wouldn’t look out of place at a literary soirée, the designers were light years ahead of their clientele. Profound social forces, though, were at play and by the Seventies, nightclubs were slinky, sophisticated affairs. This was the era of sequins and mirror balls, and the scene’s epicentre was Studio 54, which opened, with a notoriously strict door policy, in New York in 1977. Inside, at climactic moments, a neon sign would appear, of the man in the moon snorting cocaine from a spoon.
Other famous nightclubs play a starring role, such as the architect Bernard Khoury’s B018 in Beirut. Founded in 1994, this subterranean bunker, referencing Lebanon’s civil war, has a hydraulic metal roof that only opens at night. In Manchester’s Hacienda (1982-1997), Ben Kelly’s postmodern décor (hazard stripes, roadside bollards) subverted Britain’s industrial heritage, upending expectations that British nightclubs had to be sweaty black boxes with sticky carpets.
The final section, “Around the World”, after the 1997 Daft Punk track, documents the globalisation of clubbing in the Nineties and early 2000s, when superstar DJS became mainstream. A postscript examines Scotland’s underground clubbing culture. Of course, nightclubs have always been about more than music – and, inevitably, the show is devoted as much to fashion as product design. The most memorable exhibits are outlandish outfits: a pink-plastic zip-up top by the Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck, for instance, with special inflatable panels that mimic a musclebound torso. High camp’s flamboyance and wit is an omnipresent theme. Likewise, the idea that nightclubs are places for selfexpression, as well as having fun.
Yes, after the year we’ve had, this show feels invigorating, exciting. Snatches of thumping bass induce twinges of jittery excitement otherwise experienced outside a club. But the mood is bittersweet. For the exhibition is also profoundly nostalgic – and not simply because after-hours gallivanting has been off the agenda for so long. According to the curators, nightclubs were in decline long before the pandemic: between 2005 and 2016, their number in Britain almost halved. Why? For a host of reasons: gentrification, the rise of dating apps, festivals, the wellness industry.
This show, then, has the feel of a wistful BBC Four documentary about some bygone Seventies band. Mark Leckey’s ghostly masterpiece, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), a 14-minute video collage featuring snippets of footage from Britain’s underground dance scene, epitomises the elegiac tone. What happened to these easygoing ravers? All that optimism and sprightly beauty: now cold as any stone.
Undoubtedly, the exhibition will appeal to those in middle age for whom nightclubs were a big part of their youth. For abstemious Gen Z, though, the curious customs it evokes will, I suspect, seem like ancient history, as quaint as the lindy hop. Just look at the schoolchildren politely listening to the artist Jeremy Deller’s subtle classroom lecture on the history of rave and acid house in Everybody in the Place, a documentary screened at the end. Bemused.