As you may have figured out from my last post, I still have an inner raver. Yes, I know when you’re 29 the thing you’re supposed to be doing at midnight on Saturday is putting away the pipe and slippers and drinking a nice mug of warm cocoa before tucking in for the evening. But that’s not for me.
What I really enjoy every now and then is to listen to some good dance music, dance till my legs ache, with a whole bunch of friendly people around me doing exactly the same thing. It wasn’t hard to do when I lived in London. The End, Turnmills and Fabric when you picked the right nights were little pieces of electronic heaven.
New York City has proven to be more than a little disappointing on this front though, and it’s not just me. Several friends of mine who are NYC locals say ‘yeah, there’s no decent clubs here any more’. At the end of May I went to Cielo, supposedly one of the better clubs in the city, and was extremely disappointed. The venue was great, the music was so-so but the worst thing was the crowd – AWFUL! I like clubs where the people are there mostly to enjoy the music, and yes sure there’s always a bit of flirting on the side. But in NYC, in Manhattan at least (and concentrated in the Meatpacking district on the weekend), it’s all about ‘the scene’ – what you look like, how you’re dressed, whether you’ve got the greenbacks to spend on ‘bottle service’ (there’s a whole rant in me on that subject alone) and seemingly almost everyone is there for some kind of gratuitous mating ritual.
As you can tell, I’d pretty much assumed that my clubbing-life was over. That’s OK, there’s plenty of other things in my new home to keep me occupied. But little did I know that in a corner of Brooklyn a little spark of healthy rave-dom lived on…
I’d never come across Green Velvet before, but he’s a really rather good house / trance DJ. When one of my friends suggested an outing to Studio B to see him I was pretty convinced I was going to be as disappointed as ever by the New York party scene. But how wrong was I. Finally a good venue, GREAT DJing (when he dropped Blue Monday in the middle of an already wonderful sequence I thought I was going to cry) and *GASP* a crowd that actually wanted to be there for the music! An amazingly pleasant surprise and should I decide to keep the pipe & slippers waiting a little while longer, I’ll be making return trips.
The moral of the story? There are good parties left in New York, but you’re probably going to have to leave Manhattan for them.
Mike Roberts