Moving on and embracing the way things are, 2012 - 2013

Okay, so I've got over it.  The way clubbing has changed I mean.  I did go back to Godskitchen, only this time with different expectations and a new attitude.  And I'm glad I did.  I've seen both Oakenfold and Paul van Dyk in Birmingham this year and both were excellent.  Both events had very different feels though, with the Oakenfold crowd being much friendlier for whatever reason.  My girlfriend made a great observation at the van Dyk gig that there were far more lads at this one, many taller than me (therefore 5 11" or more) and many of them who are well into their weights.  Music was great at both events though.

Anyway, I'm now a regular down in Digbeth and familar with the nights down there.  The big difference compared with the north is that it is definitely more house than trance based down here, which isn't my favourite type of electronic dance music, but I suppose you have to move with the times.

I have seen a couple of funny things down here got to say.  The first one of these was after the van Dyk gig when I went for a kebab afterwards and a group of three lads had a go at my girlfriend and I.  Nothing came of it in the end and they fucked off without anything getting out of hand, but in hindsight I think their comments may have been racially motivated (we are an inter-racial couple) and I hate to say it, but the music I love is very, very white (as am I).

The second funny thing that happened was at another well-known Digbeth house music night. I was on my own at this one and found a good spot on the dance floor next to the enormous floor standing speakers where I could dance without anyone bothering me too much.  So there I am, dancing away minding my own business when two girls in their early 20's walked towards me and pushed past me to get between the speakers and the wall (they are angled).  Anyway, after squeezing against the wall right next to me, they proceeding to start getting off with one another, then one put her hand up the others skirt, pulled her knickers to one side and well, the rest writes itself.  So this is going on right next to me, it was my first time in this particular club so I'm thinking "Is this the norm here?!?".  I turned around to see what the people behind's me reaction was and all I can say is that the girls stood on the stage behind had looks of complete and utter shock, and even the lads were in disbelief, that is, apart from the older ones who just shrugged their shoulders and carried on dancing. 

Anyway, after the girls had finished they just mingled back in to the dancefloor and the evening carried on.

And no, I haven't been back to this particular night again.  It's only on every three months and this was only two months ago...

See you at Tangled in September for the 20th anniversary!

Godskitchen Oct 2011, Birmingham. And The Emperor's New Clothes

So it’s been around a year now since I started going clubbing again when I saw Guido Schneider whilst living out in South America.  Since getting back to the UK, I went to Tangled 18^th birthday and kicked on from there.  Now, 9 months on from going back to Tangled for the first time in a decade, I’m living in Birmingham  and I’ve carried on clubbing, though only three times.

So what’s changed?

Well, let’s start by taking things in chronological order.  I started my clubbing experience in Birmingham at Godskitchen at Air Nightclub in Digbeth on 22 October 2011.  Getting up there to an old industrial area certainly brought back memories, however the £20 entry fee I had to pay to get in left my eyes watering. Upon getting into the place, it was already fairly busy inside what is a decent club venue, however I’d made the mistake of bringing a coat. I say mistake as although it was freezing, the cloakroom charged £2 for 20 seconds of work. That's more than £300 an hour. Think about it...

Anyway, after negotiating the queue I had a look at the main room and what I noticed was that firstly that the stage in front of the DJ is enormous, giving an impression of the DJ being well above the crowd (literally and possibly metaphorically) and secondly, although it was packed in there, no one was really dancing.  In fact, it was more like a gig, where people stand cock to arse (it was a predominantly male crowd in there) and people were just sort of moving one arm towards the DJ and swaying a bit.  So I went right to the back where there is another stage and some space to dance.   

However, I also noticed that at the back there were quite a few people pissed out of their brains, one who fell off the stage and had to be carried out by the bouncers, and others who were just stood at the back watching whilst supping a can of red stripe.  There were a very small number of people actually dancing and I got the impression that no one actually knew how to dance in there, save one girl who looked like she was from Eastern Europe and was bouncing around like crazy which made me smile.

When I started dancing, other people were walking past and some even pointed.  Anyway, after that I went upstairs to one of the other rooms were the music was better.  The room was a bit more intimate but again the same issue of a lot of people just stood around on the dancefloor having conversations instead of dancing.  And there was nothing wrong with the music, but I did feel a bit self conscious dancing next to people who are stood around as if they’re in a social club waiting for a game of darts.

Anyway, after a while someone chose to interrupt me “’Scuse me, d’ya know who is on at the 

moment?”  Now to be honest, I didn’t know and frankly, I didn’t know who was on the entire night either as I’m not a part of the DJ worshipping generation. I’d gone there for the genre, not the names. The truth is that the best times I ever had were listening to the resident DJs at The Phoenix as this was generally when the best crowd were in, by which I mean those who had gone there for the right reasons rather than to say they had seen Berty Big Bollocks that weekend and it was fantastic, not that many of them could have told the difference between the DJ they’d gone to see and one of the residents had they had their eyes closed and not known who was actually on the decks.  Sorry, too much Emperor’s New Clothes for my liking. Anyway, so when I said “Sorry, I don’t know who it is,” the 19 year old who’d asked me the question looked slightly taken a-back and gave me a look of mild shock, as if I should have known.  Seeing that, I added “Not only do I not know who is on now, I don’t know a single DJ who is on in any of the rooms tonight”.  This pushed him over the edge and he gave me a look of downright disgust.  So I explained “Listen” I said, “I’ve only just moved to Birmingham and I haven’t been clubbing for about ten years so I don’t know who is who anymore, however I don’t see why that’s important so long as I like the music”.  He didn’t really grasp what I was saying so I changed subject.  “So I hear Gatecrasher has moved to Birmingham?” Now this I knew was true as I looked into it before I moved here and was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was moving to a city with the new Gatecrasher club (RIP the Crasher One in Sheffield).  He said “Yeah, but don’t go because it’s shit”.  I said “What do you mean?”  He said “It’s really expensive and they have a door policy and a girl comes down the queue with a clipboard and turns people away”.  Now that was a surprise.  So I pointed out “Okay maybe it is expensive, but the old clubs like the Hacienda went bust because they didn’t make any money”.  However, at £20 a head and about a fiver a bottle of beer I don’t see that happening to Air Nightclub in Digbeth nor Godskitchen.

After that I danced a bit more but decided to go back towards the main room as the music was becoming a bit shit and I was getting tired of watching drunk people trying to get onto the podium in there, waving their arms around with a bottle of beer in one hand and posing for pictures on their friends camera phones to show that they had been on the podium at Gods, though the photos wouldn’t have shown that they had absolutely no sense of rhythm whatsoever.

Emerging from the corridor, I found a place to dance at the rear of the staircase above the main DJ.  I stayed here for a while but eventually got put off by two things.  Firstly, I was the only person dancing as everyone else was leaning over the staircase in front of me.  Secondly, the unrelenting flow of human traffic circulating around the club was becoming distracting.  It really was just people walking around the club, from room to room, no dancing, just being there because that was the place to be.

I got tired of that and went to look at what the hell the hundred and fifty people or so stood all around the staircase were actually doing.  Eventually I found a gap and leant over the edge to see what the marvel was.  Yep – it was the DJ.  People were actually stood above the DJ, just watching him.  They weren’t dancing, or even moving, just watching.  And worshipping.  At that point the guy next to me at the top of the staircase nodded towards the DJ and said “He’s clever isn’t he?”  I said “What?” “I said he’s clever, you know, good”.  Fucking hell, not again.  So I responded, “I don’t think it’s that hard you know”. The guy (this one about 38 I reckon) said “What?!?” I said, “I don’t think it’s that hard, he’s just mixing together two pieces of recorded music”.  He looked well shocked and responded “Well what do you do for a living”, I said “I’m an Engineer”, he said “Well what the fuck do you know?”.  I rolled my eyes and we didn’t speak again.  After a few minutes, as I was about to walk off, he tapped me on the shoulder and said. “He was just in the right place at the right time wasn’t he?”

So there was some recognition after all.  Now let me just clarify, I’m not saying DJing is easy because I know it isn’t, but at the same time I abhor the idea of standing around saying something is great if it isn’t.  And the DJ wasn’t doing anything wrong, in fact he was good, but he wasn’t doing anything to justify having people tell you how great he is, that’s purely people trying to fit in by talking about a subject they know nothing about.  And here’s a lesson – what is live music, or to put it another way, why is it better than recorded music?  Ask yourself now.  The chances are you’ll be thinking something along the lines of “more authentic”, “more genuine”, “more real”, something like that.

But that’s just bullshit, and here’s why.  Up until the Second World War, live music (which wasn’t called live music in those days) was played in the dancehalls were people used to go out and socialise pretty much as they do today.  However, owing to the war they stopped using musicians and for the first time ever, they switched to using records.  But people still went out to dance, still went out and had a good time and this is where the whole DJ thing really started.  Post-war, things began to pick up, however not for musicians, since as people had now got used to going out to recorded music, the dancehalls refused to hire musicians anymore since it was cheaper to use records and they had no trouble filling the places just by using records.

Enter The Musician’s Union, who launched one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time by creating a concept known as ‘Live music’.  By choosing the word ‘Live’, they gave the impression that music was indeed something living, something fragile, something that was here now but could be gone at any moment, something real and yet intangible and that had to be experienced in a specific moment of time.

The campaign worked so well, that ‘live music’ is now part of the international psyche in such a way that if you attempt to challenge the concept of live music being better than recorded music, you’ll be met by 99.9% of the population with a barrage of 60 year old rhetoric designed to get musicians back into work.  In fact, the propaganda is so embedded into society that people will be able to give you the rhetoric, but won’t be able to explain why they think that.  But actually, if you think about it logically there is a very good case for arguing that recorded music is better since this is typically the best effort of a song that a musician can produce.  Personally, I started thinking about this for the first time when at a gig a friend turned to me some years ago and said “Ahhh, you can’t beat live music”, which I instantly realised for me is untrue.  My best times were listening to recorded music and if you’re reading this, then yours probably were to.

The problem is, that no one understands this and in a perverse way, the way things are now is that recorded music played by DJs is being dragged through the ‘live music’ marketing bandwagon to make the masses think about recorded music as if it were live music.  It’s very clever, and very profitable, but definitely not for people who can think for themselves and see things for what they really are.

I’m not saying that I’m done with clubbing altogether and I will be going back to Tangled in Manchester for the 19^th birthday party in September and I already have my tickets.  Although the night will sell out, they were sent to me by the organiser, who didn’t charge me for postage or for a stupid fucking booking fee.  You know why?  Because the guys at Tangled are in their own way, Defenders of the Faith.  Not profit obsessed, but truly trying to keep the memory of the way things were alive.  In fact, ten years ago when Tangled was at its peak as Trance was too, on some nights you only had to show your bank statement at the door and if you were overdrawn then you got in for free.  

Try that at Godskitchen and see how far you get.

Football went down the commercial route some time ago and it looks like electronic dance music is now following it.  It’s not a change for the better, but that doesn’t matter to me because I was fortunate enough to come up when there was no bullshit involved in the music I loved. 

I won’t be going back to Godskitchen, and I’m sure everyone I spoke to the last time I was there will be happy about that.



 "The DJ is FUCKING amazing!!!!" Note the worshippers on the right-hand side of the staircase adoring the DJ just like they were on all three sides of the staircase.  The only things is, if you're in a dance music club, shouldn't you be dancing????