Eternally Yours: Enter London's Most Exciting Club Night

London gets shittier by the day. A formerly thriving metropolis that offered endless pleasures is currently little more than a hollow string of shit flats you can't afford to live in, pop up jerk chicken carts run by smug cunts from Sussex that you can't afford to eat at and atmosphere free pubs that make a big deal of not showing football before unashamedly charging the best part of a tenner for a pint of Amstel. The multiple crises that have seen a city fall to it's knees burying it's face in triple cooked chips and imported cereal are too numerous to go into without making all of us want to give a marble sink a going over with our foreheads.

The nightclub, that place both real and imagined, that unique space which provides entertainment, release, solace, community, comfort, support, is as threatened as everything else in Boris Johnson's soulless, Keep Calm and Carry On Watching Dr Who city. As venues shut willy nilly across the city, we're left with little more than coffee/bike repair shops, Garfunkel's, and huge branches of Boots. Nights out increasingly end when the bell rings in whatever Nicholsons pub you've sipped flat Stella in. You make it home before the overground's stopped running. A city stuffed with overdrawn, withdrawn psuedo-adults sat semi-pissed in front of Newsnight hoping to get a tenner together for some tuck shop weed.

That's not to say that all is hopeless: oppression begats resilience which begats action. As clubs face closure and the remaining spaces become ever more constricted and restricted, promoters are forced to assess the city as a space for nightlife. New avenues are opened up for exploration, old haunts repurposed and revitalized. The previously abandoned and unloved is instilled with purpose. Thus we end up with nights like Eternal.

Eternal is a club night that sets out to do exactly what club nights should. It's intimate. Everyone dances. No one texts on the dancefloor. It drips. It steams. It doesn't take card and it sells peach wine.

Taking place once a month at Peoples, a Caribbean club on the Holloway Road, a club, incidentally, that also faced closure this year, it's a gimmick free affair. There are no drinks promotions, no corporate hashtag action encroaching on the party, no swimming pools or branded sunglasses. Just a heaving, low ceiling room with the likes of Oneman, Terry Farley, Jamie xx, Mssngo, Evian Christ, Boothroyd or How to Dress Well behind the decks. It's the most exciting thing to happen to London clubbing in years.

Why? Firstly the venue is unreal. This cannot be overstated. Peoples is a resolutely unflashy environment. Everything is built and designed for pure functionality. Clubs need bars: they've got the most unspectacular you've seen this side of a working man's club in a Warrington suburb. The smoking area feels like a grim necessity rather than a hang out option. The DJ booth's perfectly positioned to the side of the dancefloor meaning that the dancers actually engage with one another rather than standing stock-still, gormlessly gawping at the person playing records.

Secondly the music's great. No rote fucking Now That's What I Call Deep House shit here.

Thirdly, the crowd consists of people who actually want to be there. This, obviously, should be something that's true of every club in every city in every country in the world. But think about the nights you've spent this year alone stood about waiting for that moment, idly passing the time till it's late enough that you can leave early without looking like a cunt. I watched DJ Sprinkles with my coat on for christ sake, and ended up missing most of her set because a stranger decided to talk at me for three hours about a recent trip to Poland. A good club night is a communal sharing of collective joy, a temporary negation of the backbreaking drudgery and life-sapping boredom of work that leaves most of us feeling like we exist rather than live. Eternal makes Thursday nights feel like Saturdays. Fuck your job. Get there with your mates, bosh a few Budweisers and pretend that you don't have to be up in three hours to sit in an office full of people you despise, doing a job you hate to pay for a room in a flat that disgusts you. Pretend that this dream is forever.

What London, and UK clubbing general - the whole country is seemingly sinking into a low level malaise, a period of slight stasis - needs are more Eternals, more nights that feel like something special, where going out is more than just going out, clubs where the unexpected is expected. Let's fuck off the snifffer dogs and the shutter shades and the nine quid vodka and a lemonades and the Gorgon City and the smartphones. Let's pretend the last twenty years of British clubbing never happened. Let's take it back to where it was, where it could be, where it'll always feel eternal.