venta

When you present your membership card to enter a club, and the person on the door looks at it and says "oooh, old-skool" you know that you're not the newest member they've got.

On Tuesday night, Jo and I dusted off our mid-90s issue IMSOC membership cards, and headed along to their club night, Vertigo.

Back in the glory (ie my) days of IMSOC - which is the university Indie Music Society, for those too lazy to follow the link above - the club night "Panic" ran every week (during term time) at the Coven. I followed it through its various incarnations: Acetone, Safari, and Panic again while I was still a student. I Watched it move from the Coven to the smaller Latinos and back again, and ultimately drop down to once a fortnight.

(Incidentally, I always assumed it was "Panic" after the Smiths' song, and "Acetone" after the Kenickie song. Can anyone (

kauket?) confirm or deny this, and tell me where "Safari" came from ?)

In recent years the club night seems to have settled at twice a term, so I was rather expecting to find it a small, struggling, straggling club.
Wrong. Jo and I arrived at the Cellar just before 11, and squeezed ourselves into the completely rammed bar area. The last band (who really only registered on my consciousness as "loud" and "more industrial than expected at an indie night") were just packing in.

Several things rapidly became apparent: one, we really are old. The students are tiny. Two, indie kids have got a whole lot smarter since our day. Particularly the blokes. I blame all those pesky art-rock bands with their sharp blazers and perfectly asymmetric hair. Thirdly, student DJs still can't operate decks for shit. I actually don't think I've ever heard so much dead time - not even in Greg's heyday at Disturbapurgalivatory.

It's interesting to note which songs have remained on the playlist (presumably) for the past ten years. I have a very distinct memory of dancing in Latino's with PeteG to Radiohead's Just[*] c.1997, which suddenly sprung to mind as they began to play it on Tuesday. Laid, by James, and The Day We Caught The Train, by Ocean Colour Scene[**], however, weren't really songs I'd have expected to reach "classic" status. Then again, maybe they were being played with irony. I hear you can get away with anything these days if you do it ironically.

There was new stuff, of course, too. And surprisingly little in the cheese or nu-metal veins. Arcade Fire makes better dancefloor material than I'd have expected, and a song I didn't know really took my fancy. Subsequent googling has revealed it as by Iron&Wine - does anyone know owt about them ?

Oh, and by the way: don't believe the hype. Judging by dancefloor attendance, the Moldy Peaches are considerably more popular than the Arctic Monkeys. Which is odd, really, because Who's Got The Crack? is a natural floor-filler in the same way that molluscs are natural piano-tuners. I mean, you can jump up and down during the chorus well enough, but there's not a lot to do during the verses. Jo and I settled for throwing ridiculous slow-motion shapes and got glared at by some artistically-haired Doherty-wannabe for not taking it seriously enough.

It reminded me of a conversation with an ex-IMSOC president many years ago when he claimed that they'd held a special committee meeting to form an IMSOC committee policy on how to dance to Paranoid Android. "It does," he conceded when I expressed some doubt, "consist of lying on the floor for extended periods."

In a bid to acknowledge our age, we left at a sedate 1am. And reminisced happily about long, cold walks back from the Coven all the way home (in the nice warm car).

[*] Better known as "the one that goes you do it to yourself, you do"
[**] A band, who, owing to the persistance of a friend of mine many years ago, I can't help but think of as Ocean Colour Wank.

Irrelevantly, I was in Cargo (the posh house-stuff shop) at dinner time today. In among their reduced-from-Christmas piles they had a long, slim box of little candles. They were labelled:

Monday - it's blue
Tuesday - it's great
Wednesday - too
Thursday - I don't care about you
Friday - I am in love
Saturday - fun
Sunday - early to bed

Does that strike anyone else as bloody peculiar ? If you're going to make Cure knock-off candles (and sell them in Cargo!), do it properly. If you're not, don't look like you are.