Hello, happy boozers! This month’s column has been helmed by Daniel Cooper because Andy Morgan has gone back to the mother country on a potato-peeling holiday. Before he left we did have some time for a few cold ones.
87, Conrad Hotel, Wireless Road, 10:30pm
After a few precatory Leos at Chez Andy (his apartment is much closer than Chez Dan) we set out to investigate the enigmatically named 87. The goal of the mission was to cover the first night of Groovealux’s Thursday residency but of course what we were really looking for was drink, loose women and adventures by night. The first challenge was to communicate to the taxi driver where we wanted to go, another Mr Magoo-style escapade.
87 was suprisingly well-appointed for a club in a hotel. If you’re like me you probably avoid hotel bars and clubs like sin as they’re usually full of lonely old men and tarty slappers. 87 breaks the mould with tasteful, subtle design and an excellent use of plasma, flat-screen TVs, and looping video ‘art’. Trez trendy.
Waltzing up to the bar Andy and I each handed over Bt250 and turned to survey the room. Yes, that’s Bt250 for a Heineken ladies and gentlemen, ice cold if you please. Quite a change from last month when we were scrambling around Khaosan swilling Bt40 Changs. At those prices we must have been drowning in luxury!
The music was great – happyhousebeattripdub or some such (Andy is the electro-music aficionado of our team) – but a live sax player really brings out the groove in a DJ’s performance. A nice touch is that when the DJ starts and finishes a curtain opens and closes before him, just like at the movies. A pair of dancers did a few spins and leaps to add to the spectacle and soon the place was filling up with lonely old men and tarty slappers. I always thought that really expensive prostitutes would be ultra-glamorous model-types but judging by a few of the faces there I must be mistaken.
Rapidly approaching the end of the drinking-night’s budget we headed to Bed Supperclub for something very special.
Bed Supperclub, Sukhumvit Soi 11, 12:13am
According to Andy, Bed was having a special night of early ‘90s British club music, to celebrate the showing of 24 Hour Party People at the British Film Festival in Bangkok. The aim was to recreate the feeling of the Hacienda, England’s most infamous warehouse club. Andy explains via the wonders of Email:
They were trying to recreate a club in Manchester called the Hacienda – one of the most famed clubs in Britain during the 80s and early 90s. The club was basically a big warehouse and was at the height of the Northern club scene and ecstasy/dance music explosion. Known for euphoric atmosphere – lots of hands in the air, people dancing on podiums, e’d off their faces, etc.
Thanks, Andy. Again I show the depths of my ignorance of music, the result of growing up in rural Australia, but when I heard “early ‘90s club music” I thought of early trance or old-school techno or some such. I mean, The Prodigy were releasing singles in 1990 weren’t they? Instead it was Joy Division and Frankie Knuckles falling on my cloth ears. Oh well, nothing for it but to get pissed, I mused.
Although the club was very crowded I managed to secure a seat by the bar and scowled at the crowd. Late ‘80s music is definitely not for me. And I wasn’t the only one apparently; at the other end of the bar the crowd surged in that particular way which can only mean a fight is underway. Oh ho! A bit of biffo! A scrap! A punch-up! An intense exchange of opposing points of view! Fisticuffs! There’s nothing like watching a fight in a trendy nightclub, seeing the beautiful people mess each other up. This one had already skipped the shoving stage and was right into head-butting territory. Then they crashed into the bar, breaking a pile of glasses in a most spectacular fashion.
By this time there was a waitress in a faux-nurse uniform and a skinny barman trying to break them up. Ha! Where was the gorilla bouncer? Doesn’t every club have at least one? For a super-hip club the complete lack of security was shocking. Not like the crappy little club I visited in the back-blocks of China where they had soldiers in steel helmets keeping a close eye on things. Eventually they turned off the music and broke up the belligerents. Turning off the music seemed to do the trick, because it worked when they started punching each other again, and the time after that. Eventually the police turned up and kicked everyone out. Andy picks up the story of the Hacienda again:
As the club/rave scene became more about money and the peace and love thing turned sour all sorts of shady characters and gangsters started to get involved – fist fights, intimidation and some shootings at the Hacienda eventually resulting in its closure. Hence the parallel with Bed.