Dom's Rambles

I went to my first house club in Sheffield and way back in the summer of 1995 - the now legendary Wonderland which ran at Kiki’s on a Saturday night. Within half an hour of passing through the door I’d managed to (ahem) get myself into the appropriate frame of mind and come chucking out time had to be peeled off the ceiling.
I would never look at my social life in quite the same way again.
Shortly afterwards, and by an incredible stroke of good luck, I found myself sharing a flat with a guy we’ll call Ali who worked at - and was the emergency stand-in DJ for - one of the big clubs in the city at the time. Thanks to his innumerable contacts, Ali was able to get me and a gang of mates guest listed for practically any do we wanted to go to. On Friday and Saturday nights we would go swaggering to the head of gargantuan queues, skip the body search and save a small fortune in door tax. In fact for all the time we shared that flat I don’t think I paid in a club more than a dozen times. Even though Ali and I parted under a cloud, and on considerably less than friendly terms, I’ll always owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude for providing me with so many opportunities to wallow in the dionysian bacchanalia of what was undoubtedly the house scene’s golden age.
But parties, as a great philosopher once wrote, aren’t meant to last and eventually it all comes to an end. For me the curtain fell in the autumn of 1999 shortly after I read an article in the local paper concerning that year’s student intake and their perceptions of Sheffield as a place to live. When asked about the city’s nightlife one of these bright young things had commented,
“It’s really good, well, apart from all the last chance swingers you get in the clubs.”
I spent a minute or so digesting this before asking myself, ‘Last chance swingers - is he talking about me?’
I was a couple of years older than the crew I went clubbing with and they were all a couple of years older than most of the other clubbers - which was something I always had been uncomfortably aware of. After reading this article I became so neurotic about it that I couldn’t even going boozing on West Street for fear of doing something unbecoming a person of my years. And on Millennium Eve, instead of going to Gatecrasher at the Don Valley Arena, as I was planning to, I opted to attend an old pal’s house party.
Even so, I was determined that before I hung my dancing trousers up for good I would have one last wild and loved-up house night and to hell with what anyone thought of me – but as the months became years and the years became a decade that opportunity never seemed to present itself.
Not until the last Sunday of 2009 when those good folks at iloveoldskoolhouse.com threw their Sheffield Reunion event.
Some things were noticeably different from back in the day; the DJs arrived carrying laptops rather than flight cases of 12” singles for a start. The crowd, not surprisingly, was noticeably older too (the one exception being Allister Whitehead who, for some inexplicable reason, looks younger now than he does in a photo I took of him in 1996), consequently I didn’t feel at all self conscious about my age and was able to relax and get into it. Indeed, by the time the esteemed Mr Whitehead had dropped the third tune it was like I’d never been away.
The best night out of my entire life, which I will go misty eyed to recall until the end of my days, was the Boxing Day 1995 Love to be… bash at the Music Factory (as was) in Sheffield. At around half three in the morning I was in the middle of the packed dance floor, with that indescribable rush of orgasmic electricity surging through my veins, when one of the guys I’d gone out with had leaned over and yelled in my ear,
“Do you realise, that apart from going to refill our water bottles, we’ve been on the floor for five hours?”
As I looked around at my 1,200 or so like minded peers and struggled to take in the sheer awesomeness of it all I caught some lad’s eye who gurned back at me and gave the thumbs up sign. The tears of joy came streaming down my face and I was convinced that if the euphoria got any more intense then I’d turn into a fucking supernova. ‘I never want to leave this dance floor’, I thought to myself. ‘I want to stay here forever!’
I felt that same magic 14 years later.
Oh my God how I felt it.
And you know what? I want to feel it again.

posted by Dom  # 12:16 AM