Everyone needs to get their kicks. The most obvious way to do this is to go to a dark room full of strangers, and enjoy a drunken reverie sound tracked to the music of LMFAO. Of course some people do not need, and do not enjoy having a good time; they’re called Tories, and they don’t like LMFAO, they much prefer Far East Movement. As a student you are hardly a stranger to a night on the town, a fundamental institution of your late teens and early twenties. You will see drama, tears, and at least one thing that disgusts you. Alcohol will be drunk, and dubious connections will be made. Here are the five universal truths of a student night out.
The Build Up
Every night follows a strict routine, one enshrined by an unspoken understanding of how getting drunk should work. First you pre-drink, probably in the glamorous surroundings of a student kitchen, where the frivolity of youthful jubilation is offset by piles of grotty porcelain and spent Cup-a-Soup sachets. However pre-drinks are important since the good feeling and tone established at home forms a sort of basis for the night to come, and hitting clubs stone cold sober can lead to fairly drastic side effects; like your collective realisation that Nicki Minaj is actually rubbish. Next you book taxis to ferry your contingent to whichever spot you’ve picked. You stand and queue outside. At this point you will either stonily ignore everyone else in the queue, or, as is more likely when alcohol is at play, delve into needlessly personal conversations with the medley of tittering pissheads about you, who are all too happy to interject. You will then hold some ID aloft to the bouncer. Bouncers all look alike; they’re all shaped around some variation of a big pink circle, and they always have that little fluorescent tag on their arm, like a Lollipop man with pretensions to joining the Sturm Abteilung . If the bouncer is satisfied then you are let into the nightclub, and are immediately presented with our next fundamental truth;
It Isn’t Actually Very Good
Despite all your effort and your best intentions to have a night to remember, it has dawned on you that actually, actually, night clubs are sort of, awful. When I was a plucky first year, with wide eyes and a silly haircut, I liked clubbing, and in a way I still do, if you have something to celebrate, like a birthday or a graduation. But if it’s a rainy Tuesday evening, you can’t help but feel it’s a bit pedestrian going clubbing. The plain fact is that beyond all the hype a night club is a dank, reverberating dungeon that reeks of hair spray and ball sweat; an acrid stench that hangs over proceedings like a greasy phantom. Your feet stick to the floor, as you awkwardly slide across laminate panelling covered by layers of spilt alcopop and congealed bile. There’s a reason you go there and drink; it’s to help you forget that you just paid money to come and smell other people armpits all night. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your average prole hole, or a cool place for posers who like indie music, or one of the clubs off the Scene. A nightclub has all the atmosphere of a flip-flop soaked in piss, and you have paid five pounds just for the privilege. And that’s not even mentioning that…
The Music is Terrible
The sun shines, grass grows, birds tweet, and nightclubs play bad music. It’s mostly chart stuff now, proper insipid sugary crap that makes you wonder if dunking the turntable in grenadine would get the message across clearer. Generally it’s whichever tragedy has been pooped out of the X Factor on any given year, but then there’s Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Beyoncé or any other range of inter-changeable shit-pop divas; songs that go ‘unce, unce, unce’ and are apparently intended to soundtrack shed-building. This is blared constantly so conversation is possible only by bellowing at your mates like the captain of a deaf synchronised swimming team. The resident DJ will have a fairly terrible name like DJ Organic or DJ Kiwi or DJ Sex-Offence . He spends his time selecting whichever idiot-anthem has the honour or joining his idiot-playlist, along with making occasional shout-outs to some leering tithead out on his twentieth birthday. Although most DJ’s seem to think they are tremendously funny as well, and make a regular habit of turning down the music to supply a few rapey one-liners every now and again. People say that they play better music in gay clubs, but truthfully more often the reverse is true. The plain fact is it’s all the same, no matter where you go. And the music isn’t the only thing that never seems to change…
The Usual Suspects
It is always the same people in a night club. You get lads fresh from the ‘beige-chinos-and-v-neck’ cookie cutter, you get girls in skirts better suited as belts, and heels so high you have to stop and check whether they’re even human or just a Gazelle smeared in fake tan and primed for the Discotheque. You get couples incoherently screaming at each other; though I can never tell if such people are bickering or whether they’re just avid Foghorn enthusiasts. You get guys who have lost their mates, who dart about the dance floor with that charismatic, searching gawp. You have that one creepy bloke who appears to not be with anyone at all, who stands by the bar all night leering at everyone. Then you have those people who have been inflicted by the return of sobriety, sat around the periphery of the dance floor, staring fixedly at their smart phone screens in an attempt to dispel the blatant reality that they look incredibly sad. But of course these people came here for a reason, the same reason, which leads us to our next truth…
Did You Pull?
Every generation has a cringey buzzword for fornication; in the 90s it was to ‘cop off’, and in this enlightened time, it is to ‘pull’, presumably as opposed to ‘push’. If this isn’t achieved then many boys and girls will regard the night as a failure. I’m as human as anyone else, but I can’t help but feel a good night out is about having a laugh with your mates rather than to go in search of various orifices to plunder. I feel a bit more sympathetic for girls in this case though, since boys tend to lose their manners fairly quickly and by midnight deem it socially acceptable to literally grab at a girls chest as she walks by. You can say it’s just ‘being a lad’ but it’s actually just unsavoury. Furthermore people seem to think that the atmosphere at a gay club will be different, preferable even, and there is some truth in this. A night on the Scene feels like less work than your standard night out, but, as anyone who has actually been to one will tell you, gay clubs can be just as rancorous as straight ones. Just witness the 3:00AM rush-hour at Mission on a Monday night; it’s like the final days of Gomorrah choreographed to Nicki Minaj’s Pound the Alarm. Nightclubs are just playgrounds for the careless lust of young men. And that’s true whether you are in Viaduct Show Bar or Shooters Sports Bar.