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Music

Here's Why Big Room Clubbing Is Sweaty, Stupid, and Secretly Brilliant

Partying with a crowd the size of the population of Burnley has hidden virtues.
Photo via Space

This article was originally published on THUMP UK.

Clubbing comes in a variety of flavors. There's the sugary sensation of your standard high street pleasure-palace, all alcopops, heavy petting, and mayonnaise-drenched fillet burgers. Then you've got the blacker than black basements tucked away in the trendier enclaves of everywhere from Berlin to Birmingham, the kind of places where you'll probably bump into someone with a Sex Tags Mania tattoo and a really good anecdote about the time they bumped into Palms Trax at a Kassem Mosse show. Somewhere between the two is an experience that, in recent years at least, has become much-maligned. Welcome to big room clubbing.

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What I'm referring to here is the clubbing that takes place in huge, cavernous, spaces, the kind of clubs where the kick bounces off the back wall over and over again, the kind of club where the reaction that "Full Clip" by Martin Buttrich or the latest record on Coccoon gets is akin to a home crowd watching a last minute winner slot into the top right hand corner. Think Space, Cream, or fabric. Think of sweaty hordes and white vests, shutter shades, and multilingual smoking area the size of a Tesco Metro. Think of the strange sensation that comes with submitting yourself to something utterly monumental, something far beyond you and who and what you are.

It's not a sensation that's loved by everyone, however. Even a recent Spectator article—expertly dismantled THUMP News Editor Anna Codrea-Rado—found fault in the idea of a night spent jostling for floorspace in a crowd bigger than the average League One team gets on a Saturday. And when the Spectator of all places are gunning for events which see huge swathes of people happily give away their sense of agency and submit to a furiously loud figurehead, then you know things are a bit off.

Despite what Durex might tell you, intimacy is overrated. While there's an undeniably huge amount of pleasure to be derived from a night spent in close proximity to the people you want to be closest too, to claim that it's somehow a more valid experience than watching a titanic techno mainstay thrash through the same records they've been mechanically playing for thirty years to a crowd the size of Burnley is quite simply wrong.

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If clubbing is, as we're often told, a truly inclusive experience—or at least one that purports to a kind of inclusivity not seen in many other places—then sneering at the kind of people who actively enjoy paying hand over first to fist pump to "big room tech house" makes about as much sense as proclaiming that anyone who enjoys trance steals knickers off washing lines, or that the House Lad we outlined here on THUMP last week is an inherently evil creation because he likes Eats Everything and leg days.

The blanket dismissal of anything is nothing but a tacit admission of fear, and the anti-big room brigade are an embodiment of thing that poses the biggest long term threat to club culture's future: snobbery. All of us are participants in the perpetuation of the idea that music—and just as importantly, the people who like it—can be judged in any kind of objective way. But you shouldn't need anyone to tell you that nobody thinks you're a 'better' music fan because you've decided that the kind of person who wants to go to Amnesia for Laidback Luke is inferior to your mate from the internet who plays acid down the local liberal club to a disinterested crowd of barely there pensioners supping on the cheapest pints on offer.

I understand that for many people this distrust of the big room night out goes beyond not wanting to hear hoary old records played by hoary old DJs who presumably owe someone, somewhere, substantial amounts of cash. I get that the thought of huge rooms filled with people in varying levels of chemically-assisted decay can be an uncomfortable, scary, unpleasant proposition. That element of chaotic congregation is occasionally incredibly off putting and as an experience can be the kind of thing that, done badly, would understandably turn clubbing from a pleasure to a dreadful chore. But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about here is the way that, for some people, the big room bash is nothing more than a vehicle for cheap and easy jokes about v-neck tees and muscly lads from Brentford pilled out of their nut during a Darius Syriossian set. Big room clubbing is much more than that. Big room clubbing, not to be too bold, is as close to communion as this increasingly fractured and fractious culture can ever get.

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Let me expand on that: we're all happy to harp on about how dance music is a way of bringing people together, content to tell ourselves that DJing is a form of direct non-verbal-communication with crowds that allows them to explore their own individuality within the context of a group. To, basically, attempt to elevate a form of entertainment into an artistic, cultural, and personal experience that's an affirmation of life itself, rather than a chance to piss money down a cokey urinal while someone plays a few records. And surely, if that's how we feel about clubbing and club culture, would we not also want as many people as possible to experience what we experience?

It's strange to me that so many of us look back on the halcyon days of the M25 raves, those notoriously vast assemblages of people crowded together in beetroot fields all raving under one roof, with the kind of rose-tinted nostalgia usually saved for royal weddings or world wars, but find the idea of thousands of revellers stood shirtless on the edges of Ushuaia about as appealing as sharing a bowl of jellied eels with Len Goodman.

An unceasing pining for the good old days plays a part, obviously, but it goes beyond that. The idea of the big room club was tainted irrevocably by the heyday of the superstar DJ. Visions of Judge Jules thrashing it out at Creamfields to what looks like a million gurners continue to scar the larger clubs up and down the country. They became an incredibly obvious (but still handy) visual metaphor for pre-millennial excess and the increasingly-corporate shift in how club culture was packaged and sold to partygoers. The big room was the literal manifestation of the excessive consumption that came with the boom period, and as such, it's viewed with (semi-justified) suspicion.

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The rave, on the other hand, was, or so we're told time and time again by the people who were there and the people who make a living from wishing they had been, a site of total communality where every song was amazing and every pill was a world class one and there was no mud or comedowns or dud mixes. It was nirvana in the outskirts of Manningtree, and the (alleged) diametric opposite to every cavernous nightclub you've turned your nose up against.

The spirit of the rave lives on, somewhere deep in room three of a club somewhere. Because in those big rooms, you're allowed to vanish, finally finding that transcendence we all reckon will magically lift us out of the 50 capacity pub-back-room in Taunton we're currently stood in while a friend of a friend's cousin's bastard son's ex-girlfriend's pizza delivery boy fumbles between tracks from a Hyperdub sampler. You're nothing more than a speck in the vastness of the universe. We can't ask for more than that. For a few hours individuality ceases to exist, let alone be a preoccupation. You feel yourself drifting into an incredibly seductive nothingness. This is the nothingness of self-abandonment, This is one becoming many. This is big room clubbing.

So this weekend, join me, walk hand in hand through the swarming seas with me. Let your shoulders rub against the shoulders of thousands. We'll have the time of our lives. I promise. I'll be down the front, surrounded by the entire population of Great Yarmouth, each and every one of us losing our shit to Dusky.

Josh is on Twitter