Here's Everything That's Going to Happen in Club Culture in 2017
Illustration by Joshua Hanton

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Music

Here's Everything That's Going to Happen in Club Culture in 2017

We've gone all Mystic Meg and worked out exactly what's going to go down this year. Spoiler: it'll involve club closures, Dinner Date, and the biggest all you can eat buffet imaginable.

This post ran originally on THUMP UK. A year ago to the day we made some pretty bold predictions here on THUMP UK. We owe you an apology. Skream never got his teeth fixed, people seemingly preferred to stay in with lager and Storage Wars rather than go clubbing, and for reasons that'll never be explained, Mo Farrah got the knighthood nod over Route 94. Mo Farrah! He just runs around a bit! Anyone could do that! Hell, Route 94 could do that and he can DJ, too!

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We fucked up, but don't online dance publications deserve a second chance? Go on, trust us this time. The following things are all definitely going to happen in 2017. All of them. Definitely. They'll all happen.

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1. Nightclubs will carry on closing. The finger will be firmly pointed at Janet Street Porter and the rest of the Celebrity Storage Wars team.

2. You'll tweet about a club you've never been to closing—"a fucking disgrace!" you call it—and then never think about it ever again.

3. A tech-house DJ will post a horrifically misogynistic meme on Facebook and his legions of fans will absolutely love it. Within the hour 12 different music websites will have reported on the "news" causing said DJ to remove the post and issue an apology, and said DJ's fans to comment on every "news story" saying "um, it's a fucking joke, get a grip."

4. A major-label American rapper will hire some unknown UK electronic producer to work on his album and we'll all pretend this is the most impressive thing to happen since Picasso started ripping off Sub-Saharan sculpture.

5. New nightclubs will open and you'll go to those nightclubs and they'll be great nightclubs and you'll forget about the dearly departed ones and everything will be incredible because 2017 is the year that changes everything forever!

6. Someone calls themselves DJ Josef Fritzl and we all have a right laugh—funny DJ names are wicked!

7. Calvin Harris will marry Joan Collins.

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8. Jeremy Spake pulls out of a PA at Taboo Night Club in Bracknell. He is replaced by a local man famous in the area for his uncannily accurate impression of Rob Brydon's utterly brilliant "small man trapped in a box" voice. He goes down a storm, and is immediately offered a weekly residency. Taboo becomes the destination for serious clubbers.

9. Elrow will attempt to include fire-breathing jugglers in their stage-show, not banking on the flammability of confetti, resulting in The Second Great Fire of London.

10. The big night you've been excited about for weeks—the big night that Jack's coming down from Liverpool for, the big night that's going to be so big you've booked Monday off work, the big night you've been seemingly been waiting for your whole life, the big night that's going to be bigger than every other big night out you've ever had put together, the big night that's so big up there in your head that it feels like the whole world's invited—is shit.

11. At the end of that aborted big night out, you'll find yourself sat on a near-stranger's sofa, holding a can of room temperature cider. In your hand is a cigarette. You don't like cider, and you don't smoke. Everything has become, in an instant, in a second, in a toke and a sip, terrifying and deeply sad. You don't want to do this any more. You don't want this life. This isn't you. Swimming and salads and Swedish detective fiction—that's who you really are.

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12. On Monday morning, the Monday you booked off for the big night, you rise early, fizzing with a restlessness, a desire and determination to do something different, to be the change you want to see in the world. You have visions of parks and brunches, train journeys and crosswords, matinee performances and moonlit strolls. These remain just that: visions. In reality, you spend the day listlessly looking at Twitter, masturbating, and buying tickets for Richy Ahmed's set on the Friday coming.

13. Micky Flanagan goes to Berghain.

14. Shaun Sampson, a 23 year old plumber from Solihull, goes viral after he inadvertently causes a club to overflow with literal shit. Sampson, a regular at the club in question—The Alamo—is delighted with his new-found notoriety. His proudest moment comes when he sits on the big red chair on The Graham Norton Show and avoids being plunged into the bottomless pit in Graham's studio, bypassing becoming yet another rotten corpse on the Irishman's ever-growing pile of maggot-mangled flesh.

15. Someone writes their Master's thesis on deconstructed club music, but tragically fail their course after posting it as a comment on a FACT mix by Tarquin rather than handing it in to their tutor.

16. Jackmaster makes a surprise appearance at an after-party in New Cross on Valentine's Day. He is physically chained to the decks by merry-makers and not released until New Year's Eve. His tragic plight is later turned into an Oscar winning film directed by Ben Wheatley, with James McAvoy playing the famously up-for-it Scottish selector.

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17. Having met at a DJ Harvey gig in Ibiza last summer, Gerd Janson and the bloke who played Tinhead on Brookside strike up a friendship, resulting in the pair of them going B2B at several major European festivals.

18. A 48 year old newspaper columnist who hasn't been clubbing since he was a roguish fresher in the 80s will write an incendiary newspaper column about nightclubs being "hellish cesspits populated by walking lobotomies, run-down pleasure palaces for dunderheaded dullards who've stuffed themselves silly with the remnants of a particularly potent pharmaceutical stew," in order to sell papers and generate clicks and you and everyone you know will be FURIOUS about the disrespect on show. Thinkpieces follow. The columnist, a man paid to have controversial opinions, doesn't read them, for he is too busy penning a piece about modern art being "horseshit of the highest order," for the Spectator.

19. A DJ will make a sub-sixth-form comment about politics and be hailed as a visionary.

20. A young clubber is rushed to hospital after passing out from embarrassment after overhearing a smoking area conversation about lo-fi house.

21. Just for banter, Eats Everything attempts to literally eat everything at an all you can eat Chinese restaurant in Bristol. Over the course of thirteen hours, he consumes an incredible five stone's worth of chow mein, lemon chicken, and ice cream. He is rushed to hospital immediately after finishing the final bowl of sweet and sour pork. His condition eventually stabilizes, and with a big smile on his face, he tells the assembled throng of journalists that the long-term physical damage he'd caused himself had been worth it because it "made people laugh and at the end of the day, that's what it's all about."

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22. Villalobos will play a one-day festival at 2PM, only to be booed off by a stag party from Rhyll. The stag party will then be labelled uncultured swines by all your favorite music magazines.

23. Carl Cox will release an autobiography about life before and after Ibiza, called Space to Breathe.

24. A 19-year-old from Swindon gets "Sesh 2K17" tattooed on his arse in Croatia. The full weight of this decision won't hit him until a cold November night 32 years later, halfway through an episode of Dinner Date, by then on its 434th series.

25. Dixon wins the RA DJ of the Year poll.

Josh is on Twitter and so is Angus.