“There's a club, if you like to go / you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go, and you stand on your own / and you leave on your own / and you go home, and you cry and you want to die.” Sound familiar? As well as providing the soundtrack for two generations of teenage angst, with these lyrics the group The Smiths also managed to sum up a ‘clubbing' experience that should be familiar to nearly everyone. Unless you've got the permanently sunny outlook of a children's television presenter, I'm sure that at one point during a Friday/Saturday night's entertainment you'll have been seized by such a feeling; a sudden realisation of just how shallow and soulless going out for the evening can be. Is this really as good as it gets? After slogging our guts out during the week, is watching people getting drunk in order to dance and talk to members of the opposite sex without feeling self-conscious really the height of what modern entertainment can offer?

In the nineties they called it ‘club culture' – which is kind of silly, because ‘club culture' is an oxymoron. Clubbing is a cultural wasteland which makes ‘Ciao Darwin' look blindingly intellectual by comparison. It's the distillation of everything that makes our egoistic, self-centred society so unpleasant. Single people go to clubs to boost their own sense of self esteem by picking up the prize of an attractive boy/girl for the evening. Couples go clubbing to show off their own success in the mating game, or to display a new handbag/limited edition Nikes. Puff out your chest like some ridiculous man-size peacock and reach for an overpriced cocktail – because going to clubs nowadays is all about showing off.

Rather tragically, clubbing started off as something vibrant and joyous that challenged this very kind of egoism that the 80s, the decade of excess, created. When house music really took off during the ‘Summer of Love' in 1988, it was all about love, unity, and breaking down social barriers. Instead of dancing in tacky nightclubs made by businessmen with mafia connections, people broke into empty warehouses, or invaded the countryside to dance - illegally, for free, and most importantly, together as a collective. By contrast to these collective orgies of dance, clubbing today is about as exciting as masturbating – boring, self-centred and something that you should grow out of getting excited about when you're a teenager.

If clubbing in general fills me with a sense of desperation, then Bucharest clubs in particular genuinely make me want to go on a killing spree. The only way I can stand to sit in a Romanian club without dashing my head repeatedly against a glass drinks table is by visualising randomly firing rounds of bullets into the assembled revellers. Thanks to Romania 's rather unfair class system, its clubs are full of businessmen that look like extras from the film Goodfellas, pretty young girls making the most of their charms, and over-excited ex-pats with bad breath who've never had a proper girlfriend before.

Thank Christ, then, that clubbing is out out out . Most of the UKs legendary ‘superclubs' like Cream and Gatecrasher have folded, and even the word ‘clubbing' sounds hopelessly outdated - the sort of word used by your granddad and laughed at by all your friends. In New York , the city-wide smoking ban has meant that people are socialising at each others houses, rather than having to deprive themselves of ciggies in a smoke-free bar. You save money, your own sense of self-worth, and don't have to suffer a room full of braying imbeciles – staying in is definitely the new going out. Everyone back to mine!

 

© Tom Wilson / Elle 2004