Get your groove back at The End

Lately I've been feeling a little SAD. And my SAD takes a very particular form: LOFAD. Lack Of Festivals Affective Disorder. And it really hurts. I can't concentrate on work, food tastes like soot, I stop calling my friends and can't even muster the strength to crawl out from under my duvet.

I can't wait another couple of months for the festival season to kick in for real — I might not last that long. But there is a light. I saw it last Saturday and it's bright like neon love.

Tom Findlay and Andy Cato of Groove Armada began their summertime Love-box weekend festival in 2002 and watched it grow, necessitating a move from Clapham Common to Victoria Park in Hackney and then over to Dublin. But they still weren't satisfied. They realised that one London-based GA festival per annum is, quite simply, insufficient, so they set up Bang The Box, a bi-monthly night at The End.

"If you take your career as a producer seriously you must be involved in club life," says Tom. "I don't see how you can write music for dance floors if you're not prepared to put yourself on them. Plus, I genuinely believe that London club culture has seldom been better, with amazing parties like Mulletover, secretsundaze and those in Public Life."

When I told my clubbing playmates I was paying £16 for a ticket and braving London's Saturday night spring chill to pretend I was flip-flop raving in a field in mid-July, they joyfully leapt to attention to join me on my Holborn jaunt. There are plenty of pre-club bars in Holborn and Covent Garden, but why schlep when AKA, The End's little brother bar, is connected to the underground club by a rain-free corridor and has its own dance floor?

AKA hosts DJs of a similar calibre to those spinning vinyl below so you can pretend you're skipping from tent to tent across festival pathways.

After a Chinatown chow mein (not a patch on Mr Wong's festival noodle van), my friends and I darted into AKA for warm-up double G&T's (£6) against the musical soundtrack of Shapeshifters, giddily churning out their own happy-clappy house DJ kicks.

From the balcony above AKA, we saw the dance floor wobbling under a sea of raised arms and decadent grins, a mish-mash of twenty- and thirtysomethings all downing tequila shots (£3.20).

When The End's adjoining door creaked open around 10pm, we slid into the dark basement in time to catch the Lovebox Allstars mixing up a frenzied bag of sunsoaked house favourites. I'm not going to lie: my sunglasses may have been donned at some point. The party atmosphere was infectious — and the balloons, strobes and disco balls added to the joy.

In the outside smoking area the festival feeling continued, where I had the sort of random, hilarious conversations with strangers that are usually reserved for queues for the portable loos at gatherings in Somerset or on the Isle of Wight. But we had come to see two people and two people only. Well, actually, one person only since Andy Cato was tied up elsewhere, apparently in Barcelona, unable to attend his own party.