My First Post-Covid Weekend Out In Lisbon
This weekend, six weeks after the clubs reopened in Lisbon, I finally had my first proper big (ish) weekend out on the town since covid.
I warmed up for the first on Friday by playing records for four hours at Útero, a gallery that opened on my road earlier this year. I had prepared for a predominantly chilled sit-down affair, but the presence of two brilliant waacking / punking dancers meant that there was nothing for it but to go full Paradise Garage from early on: ‘Bourgie Bourgie’, ‘Do What You Wanna Do’, ‘Dance Sister’, the works.
It’s actually a wonderful feeling to play for dancers who really dance. There’s an added motivation to reach for things that may seem leftfield choices to most, but to a dancer will be both a challenge and a pleasure. I’m not a dancer myself but I do know what moves me, so it was exciting to find out if my own bodily connection to some of these tunes would translate to people for whom moving is a real passion. In amongst the more conventional choices we had a lot of fun with Velodrome’s ‘Au Velodrome 141’ and Poke’s ‘Digitalmente Afectivo’, one of my favourite Portuguese records.
Then there were more classics: the 1987 version of ‘Megatron Man’ to honour Patrick Cowley’s death 39 years ago, the 12” version of ‘Little Lies’ (that middle section sounding chuggier than ever), Mascara’s shimmying ‘Baja’. There might have been only about 15 people there, and the soundsystem might have been pretty bad, but I had the best time - simply because everyone was so visibly into it. I was in such a good mood that I finished with an all-time favourite, Jimmy Ross’s ‘Fall Into A Trance’, and then went home to eat some midnight spaghetti.
Then the first big night out.
This was my first night dancing in the Lux disco since 29 February 2020, a date I remember partly because it was a leap year, partly because Ben UFO played an incredible set that night, and partly because it was just a week and a half before the first covid lockdown. For anyone who hasn’t been to Lux, the best things about it are the sound and the people, and the worst things about it are the sound and the people. By which I mean: on a good night, the crowd can be diverse, friendly, and really dances, and the sound can be clear, warm and not too loud; on a bad night, the crowd can be homogenous, uptight and listless, and the sound can be unpleasantly loud and oppressive.
Most of the time you get a bit of both, and Friday night was no exception. When I arrived around 1am there was a queue of about 200 people at the door, but inside it was still pretty quiet. This is my favourite time in the club, because the sound is lower and there’s space to move around, dance and people-watch. I had gone to see Varela, one of my favourite residents, warm up for Octo Octa in the disco.
He was playing slow, chuggy and a little trancey, with long but unshowy mixes, building a mood at (in my opinion) just the right pace. The main word that came to my mind was ‘professional’, which sounds a bit lame but actually reflects how impressed I was with the quality of the set. The people around me were a nice mix, most of them taking advantage of the space to move around while dancing and not all facing the front. It felt like a happy return to the place.
So it was almost a shame when Varela sped up a bit and the system got turned up, because it signalled the filling up of the dancefloor and the loss of that precious connection between the early arrivers. But such is life in a club. Towards the end of his set Varela played a super funky hip house type number that gave my body (tired already) a real boost, ready for Octo Octa to start.
Her opening gambit involved quite a lot of scratching, which seemed from my perspective to be more of a warming-up tactic than actually for adding energy to the mix. The first record was a great skippy-but-driving house record that for some reason seemed to have a relatively quiet kick, which prompted someone somewhere to suddenly turn the system up a lot. This meant that the next record, when it arrived, was really loud, rather killing my vibe but causing everyone on the now packed floor to go crazy. You can measure the loudness of the Lux disco soundsystem by how much the toilet room is vibrating, and at this stage of the night it was almost taking off.
[Sidenote: any regular readers of my original blog from 15 years ago will probably be rolling their eyes right now. Yes I am still complaining about club sound being too loud. Not sorry.]
I also felt a qualitative change in the crowd. The early arrivers are obviously a self-selecting group who want to be there at that time. Some probably only because they don’t want to have to queue later on, but those people would likely be upstairs having a drink and waiting for what they think is the ‘action’ to start. The people who are on the disco dancefloor at 1am already are the people who want to hear the music, to dance around, to enjoy each other’s company. But by 3.30am when Octo Octa came on there was of course much less space and the crowd felt less inspired by the music than by the star power of the DJ and the spectacle of a club at peak time. The lighting person even turned on the strobe.
I enjoyed another few records before beating a retreat because I found the environment overwhelming. The tunes were great and I could have got into Octo Octa’s tricky/fun mixing a lot more if it hadn’t all been so overwhelmingly loud and flashy and busy in there. As I left she was playing ‘Glammer Girl’ by The Look (or something that sampled it at any rate), which is exactly the kind of music I want to hear in the Lux disco, but unfortunately for me my energy was spent.
On my way home I stopped by Ministerium, Lisbon centre’s other big capacity club which is housed in one of the old government ministry buildings on Praça do Comércio. I went to see Cleymoore playing in the main room and I also wanted to check the space out, since I hadn’t been in years and had always found it a bit sterile. It felt like there were some minor improvements to the ambience but the old problems remained: unfriendly door staff (that is, going beyond ‘professional’ and into ‘unfriendly’); minimal vibe; a real lack of diversity in the crowd.
It was this homogeneity of the place that struck me more than anything else, and even though I was enjoying the music Cleymoore was playing, the place had me starting to ask myself existential questions: “Who are these people? Why am I here? Do I even like clubs?” We all have nights like this of course, and I can have a good night out in less than ideal conditions, depending on the circumstances. But if I compare the joy I felt during Varela’s warm up at Lux, or at the gallery earlier in the evening with 10 people dancing around, to the tired alienation I felt looking down from the Ministerium balcony to the sea of same-looking people on the dancefloor…well, there’s no comparison.
Thankfully I have a good example from Saturday of a party where all the conditions had been established for a good time. This was at the new space of Nucleo A70 in Marvila, the home they moved to once Anjos70 closed. I hadn’t been before and was very pleasantly surprised when we arrived. It’s a very cool, vibey warehouse type space with a large and comfortable seating/bar/chill area and a club room. This latter space is a good shape for a dancefloor, has a nice high ceiling, a roof that will let the light in on the summer mornings, and a soundsystem that was impressively clear and functional for the space. The only big things lacking at the moment are a permanent booth setup with turntables (I played all digital) and more toilets, which I’m told is something they’re working on.
I was playing for a party called SUB, run by Bones, the owner of a record shop of the same name in LX Factory, and Robles, a Brazilian DJ and record dealer who used to be part of the Amor record shop team. Robles warmed up with boogie, soul, disco - Jean Carne ‘Was That All It Was’ reminding me of early Sunday evenings at Horsemeat Disco - and I came on at 2am. The room was already filling up so I had a fun time building slowly from a few of the same records I’d played in Utero the evening before, but with a bit of a punk edge - DAF’s ‘Pure Joy’ is a current favourite, for example.
The crowd was happy and dancing so I felt relaxed enough to just go for it. That meant my favourite kind of electro-pop-funk body music (Moonchild Sanelly’s ‘Bashiri’, Plus Device aka Jimmy Edgar’s ‘Plus Device’, the electro mix of ‘Down’ by Aaron-Carl) mixed in with the disco, hi-NRG and house classics that I can never resist playing in these settings (Ka Mandu’s superb but impossible to mix ‘New World Break’, Gino Soccio with his heartbreaking ‘Remember’, Precious Red’s huge ‘Think’, Huey Mnemonic’s edit of Zhane ‘Groove Thang’ once again).
I’d spent the week before the gig ripping many of these tunes from vinyl, and it was weird playing some of them off a CDJ for the first time. In the case of ‘New World Break’ it actually helped for mixing into it because I could isolate a reasonably stable drum section early on and loop it. But then mixing out was even more hair raising than it would be with the vinyl, cos I’m not used to riding the pitch on a CDJ. (Incidentally: that sexy leopard record sleeve is one of my all-time favourites, a very good reason to own and play this on vinyl.)
Throughout the set I felt none of the pressure or imposition that often forms part of Lisbon nightlife - people coming over to make requests, asking for faster/louder music or whatever. Sometimes even the people who are complimentary can overstep a boundary by interrupting a mix or insisting on using your time/space when you’re in a flow. This is a culture I rarely encounter abroad but is sadly quite ingrained in the spaces I’m used to playing at in Lisbon. At SUB/Nucleo A70 I felt appreciated by the crowd but also respected enough to be left to do my own thing. It might sound trivial, but it’s actually an incredible feeling in this city.
I suppose there’s no clear moral to this story of my weekend, other than that each space has its own quirks and conditions, and a lot of a successful night out is down to your own mindset as well as the settings you put yourself in. Everyone I spoke to after Lux on Friday said they absolutely loved it. And it would be a shame to never go to Ministerium just because of the above misgivings. On a good night with a good group of people (e.g. the upcoming Basic Moves showcase), and with the right attitude of taking it as it is, I know I can have a great time there, just like with fabric in the old days in London.
But I think there is a lot to be said for clubs and promoters trying to encourage more diverse and engaged crowds, partly through the setting they provide (be it the sound, the decor, the staff) and partly through booking policy and the image/values they communicate to the outside world. I’ll be curious to revisit Nucleo A70 and see if they achieve the same welcoming vibe on a variety of nights. And of course I’ll also be ready to go back to Lux for those early golden hours and - maybe, if the stars are aligned - a late one.