Why Do

In this life of uncertainty and constant upheaval you can still rely on a few things: lager will always taste nice on sunny afternoons, Del Boy falling through the bar will always be funny, and now it seems, that somewhere in the world there'll always be an orchestral performance of club classics taking place.

This time round, it's that man Pete Tong again, plonking himself in front of an orchestra and letting the lads in waistcoats get busy while he sits and counts the cash. On the 1st of December Tong'll be joined by Jules Buckley and his 68 piece Heritage Orchestra for a night of Ibiza classics at the O2, and your dad can't wait. He's already got tickets for the Blickling Hall show, he went to the Proms last year and he'll be damned if he misses this one!

The trouble is, what we're actually hearing every time some hoary old has-been rounds up a few blokes with cellos to run through "Sunchyme" or "Strings of Life" or some old DJ Slugo B-side is the armchairification of club culture. By that I mean, well, just that: as the original Ibizan mystics edge ever closer to bus passess and big cardigans, they seem to have a perverse longing to present a wholly sanitised version of the clubbing experience. An experience that you can sit through, with a nice bottle of London Pride ale and a bag of posh popcorn, as you watch your youth zoom down the plughole—along with your hair and hopes and dreams.

There are a few reasons for this retreat into the world of the concert hall. Firstly, there's the unarguable fact of ageing. Everyone gets old. Everyone loses vitality. Everyone stops being able to bosh pingers on a Friday night and stand up for eight hours because, eventually, all of our knees are ground into a fine paste and all we really want to do is sit in a nice chair all day long, with a nice cup of tea, flicking through a magazine that specialises in telling us about things we already know about things that remind us of our days of wine and roses. Getting older means you aren't as young as you once were and when you start to creak and ache and everything stops making sense in the way it used to and you find yourself listening to Moneybox Live and reading the obituaries in the local paper, you don't want to stand around in dingy clubs anymore. But, you don't want to sever all ties to the past. Hence the rise of the orchestral club experience. It gives you what you want on both counts — tunes you recognize, to be enjoyed in big comfy seats. You could fall asleep and no one would notice.

Secondly, the DJs are as old as these aged ravers as well. Do you think Danny Rampling wants to be hunched over a pair of Pioneers all night long? No. He wants to run a vineyard and pass out to the second segment of Newsnight. Paul Oakenfold, our sources tell us, spends his weekends "pottering about," often spending a few hours in garden centres without any intention of ever buying anything. Dave Pearce was last seen emerging from the Colchester branch of Past Times clutching a rotary telephone, looking haunted and sad. A Murray Mint fell from his pocket but he declined to pick it up for fear of giving his back any more "jip." They'd rather let an orchestra do the work these days, truth be told. Frees them up to finish that tricky arroword they started last week, you see.

Finally, and most importantly, these kind of events aspire to an authenticity, a respectability, a sense that dance music is acceptable and OK and part of the cosy cultural canon which takes in "Jerusalem" and Crufts and Sebastian Faulks novels. That certain parts of the club community aspire to being welcomed by the weekend supplement reading middleclasses is both an oddity and, sadly, totally predictable.

We all want our renegades to stay young and beautiful and lithe and bronzed and toned and fucked forever. No one is afforded that, though. None of us get to live in 1987 any more. There no more massive, free outdoor parties. Youth culture's dead. Clubbing is commerce. We've swapped potentiality for VIP hospitality packages at one day festivals headlined by the same DJs who were headlining festivals in 1995. Club culture isn't just stagnant—it's ossified.

So, in a way, it makes sense that Pete Tong will be dragging an orchestra to a massive arena where you can eat a Nandos before you sit down to watch Michael McIntyre or Little Mix. This is where we're at. This is culture doing what culture does: rapidly turning possibility into easy cash, before spluttering its way into the grave.

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