My Night at London’s Worst Nightclub
The air around me is about 1% actual air and the rest is Lynx Dark Temptation and the odour of desperation.
My feet keep sticking to the floor, which is extra disgusting because I’m standing on carpet. A man in a full three piece suit has just tried to fight me, then hug me, then dry hump one of my friends. This can mean only one thing:
I am in Infernos, London’s worst nightclub, and it’s Saturday night.
It is sometimes easy to forget that places like this exist. You’ve walked past them in Leicester Square or here in Clapham, but you’ve never actually met anyone who’s gone there since fresher’s week. And yet, the line outside Infernos this Saturday is long. In fact, it’s across two streets to the free food at a new pop-up long.
I queue outside so that you don’t have to. You stay safe at your Hackney poetry pub quiz whilst I navigate my way, David Attenborough style, through the masses of ass-cheek-bearing skirts, dirty animal onesies and men who won’t take off their jumpers no matter how hot it gets.
(Side note: seriously what is up with those guys? Always so sweaty but so unwilling to do anything about it)
I am here tonight because I am intrigued. Surely, it can’t be as terrible as everyone says it is? Even friends I know who were regulars at everyone’s favourite strip-club-by-day-nightclub-by-night Moonies hate Infernos.
Even people who go to Walkabout or fucking Tiger Tiger and I needed to know why. I needed to know whether or not it is so terrible that perhaps it has the potential could go all the way and become the best place ever.
It is even more terrible than that. If I wanted to spend £10 to stand in a room of terrible sexually frustrated men I would go to a gay sauna, and at least there I wouldn’t find that disgusting smell everywhere. You see, most of Infernos is carpeted, and decades of spilt beer, Neanderthal precum and jumper sweat have combined to create bacteria and odours previously unknown to science.
This smell and the extortionate entry prices aside, the real shame in Infernos is it’s not at its heart a bad nightclub. Its kitchy, ‘70s décor, tiki bar and giant disco ball could make it fun in a Bunga Bunga sort of way, as should the generally good cheese being played by the DJ. Pitch it as campy and ironic and you could actually have a good time there.
However, the exact problem is that it has a clientele that seem as totally resistant to irony and camp as they are to taking their sweaters off. As such, it just becomes a cattle market, only with less dignity than actual cattle…and that includes cattle who roll around in their own shit.
That said, just as every meat eater should have to see how burgers or sausages are made at least once, every clubber should be made to visit the club. If nothing else, you will never complain about another event again, and you will always know that no matter how hard your life in London gets, your life is not as tragic as the life of a guy I saw outside the club who had somehow managed to vomit into his own shoes.
This post was categorised in Archive.