It's not a 'Guilty' night but it's still a pleasure

10 April 2012

People often assume I must be far too young to remember the Eighties. Sadly, it's not true - I've just destroyed all the evidence to the contrary. Were you to flick through the Mulkerrins family albums you might notice that there is a dearth of pictures of me between around 1984 and the early Nineties. I burnt them.

Life is hard enough without knowing that in a cupboard in Derbyshire there exist pictures of your young self in cycling shorts, dungarees and, oh God, shell suits.

The Eighties have an awful lot to answer for - before we even get started on mass unemployment, the destruction of the Trade Unions and the dissolution of society.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There were some upsides to the Eighties: Wham!, Culture Club, being able to admit to liking Michael Jackson.

And ever one to spot a niche when others can't even spell it, DJ Sean Rowley, the man behind Guilty Pleasures, has started a new night. Digging Your Scene celebrates all that was great about the Eighties and brings Gloria Estefan out from wherever she's been hiding all these years.

And he has found the perfect place to do it in Punk, the recently renovated bijoux and intimate Soho bar/club, formerly known as Pop.

At the end of last year, Rowley hosted five weekly nights called A Guilty Christmas. The nights were a barnstorming success and proved that bigger is not always better. Rowley himself admitted that he enjoyed those nights so much he wanted to do something that small more regularly.

While the main monthly Guilty Pleasures nights at KoKo in Camden are still a huge hit, the venue holds thousands and if you lose your mates, you're unlikely to find them again.

Not so at Punk. Arriving about 8pm, we were delighted to find we were still in time to bag a group of antique sofas and chairs, where we set up base camp just beside the dancefloor. The boys were dispatched to the bar and quickly returned celebrating the glory of a bottle of house wine for £12.

We admired what they'd done with the place: chandeliers, glitter balls, antique-looking furniture, fancy glam bead curtains and big pillars lit with pictures of Eighties-style models. In all its previous incarnations, the club has never managed to feel sophisticated, until now.

And there, digging everyone's scene, just beside our camp, was Rowley, with his decks perched beside a fabulous orange lamp on top of a beautiful antique Chinese-style lacquered bureau. "I'd really like one of those for my house," cooed my friend Deborah.

The newly poshed-up Punk also features waiter service. Well, a tall, blonde, fearsomely cute surfer boy sporting a T-shirt that read Sex Slave came over and asked us if he could get us anything - we assumed he meant drinks.

Halfway through the second bottle of bargain house white, we were compelled to leave base camp to join the growing crowd on the dancefloor, who were grinning wildly and clearly having silly amounts of fun. There were after-work suited-and-booted types, as well as trendy young Shoreditch sorts throwing some shapes - there couldn't be less of a dress code.

And when you're shimmying to Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean, nothing you drape yourself in is going to save you from losing credibility anyway.

The tunes kept coming - Borderline by Madonna, Boy Meets Girl's Waiting For A Star To Fall, Misfit by Curiosity Killed The Cat, and even the theme from Ghostbusters.

The dancefloor was busy enough to have an atmosphere, but not so rammed that we couldn't show off our moves properly - there was plenty of room to throw ourselves around like fools to The Power Of Love by Huey Lewis And The News. It was around this point in the night when my friend Alistair grabbed me in a bear hug and told me: "This is the best club EVER!"

Meanwhile, Deborah and Olivia were being chatted up by Rowley, the friendliest and most unpretentious DJ a girl could ever hope to dance around in front of. He even bought them a drink - you don't get that in Ministry, now do you?

The fact that we could all remember the songs first time around meant we had to take regular rest stops to swig wine and revive our ageing limbs. The many lovely sofas and finishing time of midnight were clearly designed with us, the slightly tired-from-a-long-week-at-work generation, in mind.

As we wrung the last drops of energy out on the dancefloor, we vowed to spend the weekend looking out those A-Ha albums - and burning more photos.

Digging Your Scene, third Thursday of every month at Punk, 14 Soho Street, W1. Sean Rowley also presents I'm Not In Love, second Friday of every month at Islington Academy, N1 Centre, 16 Parkfield Street, N1

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It's not a 'Guilty' night but it's still a pleasure

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