Sun
23-Nov-2003

antiworld

Michal, Dan M, Al, Jim, Andy, Matt and me all went to SE One at London Bridge last night, an enormous 4000-capacity Thameside merchant storage house venue, for a psychedelic trance night. It was an interesting night, with good and bad elements. We drank blended magic mushroom and orange juice before entering the place, and things got quite confusing and weird from that point on.

The promoters had monstrously overpacked the venue, to the point where the entire thing was a seething mass of people. The 'chill-out' area was too packed for anyone to sit down, and the music in there was too loud for it to be a chill-out area anyway. At the beginning, there was something like an hour-long queue to the cloakroom, and all through the night, people were constantly pushing past each other, wandering around, restlessly looking for some space to be able to enjoy themselves.

The only way to deal with it really was to embrace it like a crowded rock concert and just leap around bashing into people and fighting for your own territory. The mushrooms made everything that much more strange. I like the crispness of everything when you're tripping, the way you reflect upon things you observe, but in this case the environment was so extreme you had to be quite resilient to cope. I got the impression that we were travellers thrown amongst a horde of archaic hominids. People's faces looked brutish as their jaws behaved strangely under the influence of ecstasy, and they seemed to stoop forwards as they foraged around the club, occasionly stopping to shake their bodies around violently to the music.

The music was fab, and near to the end of the night, as all the unhappy tired people who'd taken perhaps too many drugs, or taken them the wrong way, left, and spaces opened up for dancing, and I got that lovely morning coming on burst of second energy, bouncing around as other true music lovers bounced about too, spurring me on.

Beyond all that though, the promoters cannot be forgiven for selling so many tickets. It was laughable and only plausible if people filled up the corridors and toilets to cope with the lack of space. I won't be going clubbing to this kind of event again without checking with Tom H first I guess. It was great as a crazy one-off. It was like descending into a crazy rock-underground bestial hell, and when we emerged into the tunnel outside, it was a kind of smoky, half-outdoors, apocalyptic environment with mashed up clubbers slumped against the walls - all very cool. But not worth £20!