People who are utterly undiscriminating in the kinds of places they're prepared to go for a 'night out'.
Last night I went for a drink with a couple of guys from the place where I started work just over a month ago, both of them pretty intelligent and generally engaging and interesting to talk to. We started fairly late and had only had a pint each by the time ordinary pubs were calling last orders. So my colleagues decide they want to find somewhere with some music playing, and my heart sank a little because come ooon, this is fucking Oxford, they don't 'do' music here. My heart sinks a good deal further when we draw level with the entrance to the Purple motherfucking Turtle and they want to go inside.
How much? "£3" What sort of music is it? "Everything!" Oh great, that's my favourite genre! There is no DJ. Turns out "everything" means assorted rock, indie, r'n'b and generic dance-pop hits from the last twenty-odd years, played quite literally at random. I mean, we're talking RATM followed by Kylie followed by Kaiser Chiefs followed by Rihanna followed by Hanson. Yes, Hanson. I'm starting to wonder if this isn't all a hideous practical joke. There is some small consolation in the fact that the PA is so knackered you can hardly hear what song is actually playing, although of course it's loud enough to make conversation difficult.
Inside it's wall-to-wall shitfaced 18-year-olds. Most of the punters are local working-class white kids with a conspicuous smattering of undergrads who've stayed on for a bit after their exams, including one rather self-conscious-looking lad who's wearing a dinner jacket and a kilt, like some sort of utter dick-end. The venue itself is ugly and squalid (I mean, not even the good kind of squalid) and smells bad. The drinks options are basically shitty lager or shitty vodka with a mixer, all served in plastic glasses that make it taste weird. Security goons, who are there in a higher concentration than any club I've been to outside of Lambeth, are moodily barging people out of the way, although I'm pretty sure no-one there is on drugs. It occurs to me that I've half a strip of Sudafed in my pocket and that I could probably flog them for a fiver apiece. Some obnoxiously bright flashing lights indicate what is meant to be a dance floor, where a few people are swaying arrhythmically and spilling their drinks on each other. When we eventually left, I was just finishing my beer as we were walking out the door and a fucking gorilla in a hi-vis imperiously gestures that I have to take it back inside. I show him that it's finished and leave it on a window sill in the little courtyard bit outside the entrance (still part of the premises, I think) and he commands me to take my empty plastic glass back in the club. I'm like, fuck that, I don't work here! He says something to another gorilla about "escorting this one" off the premises. It's OK officer, I was going anyway.
Now the weird thing is, my colleagues seemed to be having, if not precisely the time of their lives, at least a pretty enjoyable evening. They're younger than me but only by five years or so, which still made them at least five years older than 95% of the crowd. Granted, I don't think either of them has ever lived in London, but even so, I just can't see what either of them would have seen in the place that was enjoyable. Well, OK, there booze (such as it was) was almost insultingly cheap, and the girls were nice to look at, but my criteria for what makes a club worth going to extend somewhat beyond how cheaply you can get drunk while having a good ogle.
So I was stuck in this dilemma of, on the one hand, not wanting to go into this clearly depressing boozehole, and on the other, of not wanting to look like a snob and a party-pooper. It's like the attitude is: it's open, there is booze, there is music, what more do you want? Of course it's a small provincial city that's hardly famed for its night-life in the first place, so it's not like I'm disappointed because I didn't find myself in the Berghain, but is it too much to expect that there might be someone selecting tracks that kind of go together, rather than filling a multi-CD player with I Heart The 90s compilations?
Has anyone else been in this situation? I remember Rich telling me about being in a similar-sounding place with some colleagues or friends of friends, who were perfectly happy yelling into each others' ears over some ghastly generic pop in a bar with all the visual charm of a McDonald's. And yet these are people who aren't stupid and have individual tastes and opinions about books and films and food and whatever else. It's utterly bizarre.
