A Refresher on How to Behave in a Nightclub

Josh Baines loves dance music but hates everyone. We asked him to pick apart everything he thinks is wrong with the way people behave in nightclubs.

Night clubs, like bingo halls and porn cinemas, are unique spaces—zones of proximal pleasure and potential transcendence. A club should forcibly tear you away from the stress of working a shit job for shit money in order to live in a shit apartment and occasionally do shit drugs. It should plunge you into sweatsoaked darkness and spit you out into the early morning light a different person.

But it's rarely like that. As with everything in this wretched, miserable life, expectation always trumps reality. Your big night, the night you've corralled all your friends into buying tickets for, the night you've declined an invitation to your grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary for, the night you've decided will radically alter your experience of life, is usually shit. It goes wrong before you've even got there: Friends quietly bail, you forgot it was a week until payday and you're already fretting about splitting a pill between four. The trains are fucked, the buses are fucked, everything's fucked.

You arrive and the queue is stuffed with the kind of assholes you came out to avoid. You know on sight that the frisking from the doorman is as close to a sexual encounter as you're going to experience. When you enter, it's cramped, it stinks, and the bar's too busy. No one's dancing. You spend your night sliding through your @s, leave at two, and are in bed by three. Not every night is like this, obviously. But for every sensational event where everything goes right you end up at ten that look like the club the Dunder Mifflin crew rolls up to on a Thursday night.

It shouldn't be this way. Every dark room should be pumped with joy. We want every club to feel like Smart Bar or Berghain or Tresor or Trouw. Here's everything that needs to stop happening so we can all start having a good time again.

A DJ—and I've DJ'd before, to like, 100 people, so I know my stuff—is in a state of deep focus and intense concentration. The night entirely relies on them. It doesn't matter how much the floor vibrates or how spacious the smoking area is; without the DJ being able to do what they do best, the night bombs. Concentration is broken when some jaw-swangin' prick stumbles up to the booth and tries to get in to tell the DJ how good/terrible/fucking amazing/fucking shocking they are. Or when that same gurner grinds out a desperate plea for a track ID.

As a friendly reminder: people who make requests in clubs deserve to be taken outside and shot. Instead, waste your data allowance on Shazamming it rather than hammering on the decks because you've just got to know what that effectively chunky house roller is RIGHT NOW even though you can barely remember your name.

DJs don't deserve being canonized. So don't inflate their already coked-up egos by fawning over them after they've finished playing two hours of rote drum and bass on a dismal Tuesday night. We can all see you. We can all see you and we're embarrassed. I bet you call the guy in the kebab shop "bossman," don't you?

Let's face facts. Anyone who still regularly posts photos of them and their friends on Facebook is an utter embarrassment. Imagine actually taking your phone out in a club and then asking your friends to pose for you. Imagine then looking at that blurred photo of a pout and a self-conscious smirk, and thinking, "This is how I want to remember that night." Imagine being that person. We could talk all day about belonging to a generation that's terrified of an undocumented experience and the attendant identity crises that arise as a result of this rapacious desire to curate a self-image… but let's be more succinct: taking photos in nightclubs is a cunts game. Have you ever met a club photographer?

I get it that sometimes the club can be overwhelming. That there are moments in life when you are filled with the overwhelming sensation of being a pure pleasure seeker. I appreciate that sometimes excitement and abandonment wrestle you away from self-awareness and societal norms. I understand that when DJ Harvey drops all 18 minutes of "I'm a Man" by Macho, the testosterone kicks in like you are 15 years old all over again, and all you want to do is tear your fucking top off and show the world your glistening torso. But I wholeheartedly condemn this practice for two reasons: 1) You're someone who actually engages in exercise and has a body that other people want to look at, want to touch, lick, rub, whatever, in which case, fuck you for that. 2) You're a shapeless sack of organs and undigested $1 pizza and who the fuck, in which case, who wants to look at that? Don't remind me of my own failings.

Your version of events: that pill just kicked in. You and your partner gaze at one another, bobbing slightly, hands brushing thighs, fingers on fingers. You're running on passion. The music throbs. You grab them, march through the crowd. You hold them close, tingling so much that each touch is a trip to another universe. You embrace. You kiss. You never want to stop kissing. You are subsumed by this kiss.

Our version of events: who are these idiots stumbling through the crowd sucking each others lips manically. We can hear them slobbing over the soundsystem. Go home and roll his pilled-up dick between your fingers ineffectively and have an argument rather than looking happy in the club. Thanks!

A brief but pertinent point: a nightclub literally just needs a decent-sized oblong dancefloor, a discreet bar that's designed for maximum serving efficiency, an elevated booth, a good system and some nice lights. Anything else gets in the way. Who wants dancers with torches in their vagina swinging over the hordes of vested-up Italians dancing to Marco Carola? Who wants to be doused in glitter? Who really wants anything other than the occasional strobe?

There's only two options when it comes to dancing in a club; you either do it properly or you don't do it at all. Not dancing at all is much more preferable than being the kind of person who's so embarrassed by their inability to dance properly that they resort to a sort of lumbering, distanced, pseudo-shuffle. They go to Night Slugs and throw out their worst Saturday Night Fever, they check out Chet Faker at Output and pull an affected sad boy pose, and they get dragged to see Coki and archly fistpump. They are a disease and they must be stopped.

Look, we're all unsure how to act when a potentially #problematic song comes on but gunfingering is the worst way to react. You look as awkward doing it as you feel inside about doing it, and that awkwardness seeps through the crowd. Everyone in the room will blame you for ruining their night. You will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

I don't know about you, but when I venture to a club, it's to escape the horrors of reality. The last thing I want to see at 3am, halfway through a Roman Flugel set, is an outfit that mentally transports me to the heart of Times Square on a humid Saturday. The shutter shades don't cover up the sallow, hollow eyes of your soul. The deep V is a window into your misery. Those acid wash jeans just show off a bulge of desperation. The Packo Rabone aftershave stinks of sourness and sadness. You've successfully shrivelled every dick and dried out every vagina in the room.

I know I said earlier that in a dream world a night out involves making the kind of friends you have one memorable blast with before retaining only the faintest memory of them, like a wisp of smoke from a badly packed rollie atomozing in the smoking area air . Then I remembered the kinds of people you meet in clubs. Heavy breathing goons who stink of sweat and stale Stella desperate to tell you everything and anything over the sound of a Funktion 1 at full blast. Desperate parasites who play on your goodwill and rinse you for drinks, fags, taxis home. Sweaty huggers who want to cling on you and splatter you with whispers. Dregs and dropouts. Loners prone to mistaking sympathy for empathy. Don't speak to anyone you don't already know—chances are they're a dick.

Follow Josh on Twitter: @Bain3z