Hothouse of young talent must stay open
EVEN if it has passed from your grasp I am sure you might still remember it: your youth. Perhaps you can remember how much fun it is to dance in the very small hours of the morning, bumping arms and backs and occasionally mouths with strangers. How light it feels to stop for a few hours in the smog of tricksy lights and elegant base line to shake it all off.
Unless you are recently spilled from the belly of a night club, the results of an evening of dancing can be infuriating for a bystander. Staggering, shouting, a melee of hot chips. You can imagine the douce local residents, those who like quiet yet inexplicably choose to buy property in the heart of a city, rolling over, sighing in their half sleep and pulling the duvet to their eyebrows.
The douce snoozers will be just fine with the decision by Glasgow City Council’s licensing committee to restrict the licence of The Arches, threatening its future as one of Scotland’s, and certainly Glasgow’s, most creative, inventive and outright fun arts venues.
It is part-subsidised by Creative Scotland and part propped up by the income from the club night. To lose that income, runs the worry, is to lose the venue entire.
I am unashamedly fond of the Arches: it’s the only club where you can have your face painted and take part in interactive theatre. I sang for a time in the Arches Community Choir. Its restaurant is the backdrop to annual Christmas dinners with friends and the worst date I’ve suffered. I was tangentially involved in creating a piece of modernist art that was displayed there; I loaned them a knitted duck.
Everyone outraged by the threat to this venue has a sentimental tale like mine; everyone in agreement has probably never stepped foot in the place.
The venue gained a place on the police’s watchlist last year following the death of Regane Maccoll, a 17-year-old girl who collapsed and died after being in the Arches and who is thought to have taken an Ecstasy-like pill. Instantly the venue gained the addition of “controversial” to its name in any mention in the press.
When Police Scotland and Glasgow City Council began expressing concerns about the club and it looked certain that it would be closed should any infractions occur, the venue issued an online appeal to patrons to avoid illegal substances. The Arches had also requested policing interventions in an attempt to stay on the right side of the law, but it claims these requests were used against it at licensing committee meetings. The Arches said that almost all the police complaints stemmed from staff alerting them to drugs finds.
Where is the incentive in this for other nightspots to cooperate with police or be candid about goings-on? You may be of the opinion that the wider drug problem in Glasgow has nothing to do with those who choose to dabble recreationally and those who cannot function, who slip from fix to fix in unmasked desperation. It is folly to think that those who take drugs when they go dancing will cease to take those drugs. They will take them at house parties or in other venues less well policed. It is not preferable to disperse a problem otherwise contained.
This venue is not a town centre, sticky floor disco. It is a hothouse of young talent, a community hub, a cultural hotspot. If it closes it should not be a relief to those who tut about the noise and exuberance of its patrons: it should be an embarrassment to Glasgow’s claim to be a modern, avant garde city of culture.
I am unashamedly fond of the Arches: it’s the only club where you can have your face painted and take part in interactive theatre