21 May - Troy vs Tiga

Compare and contrast: you go to a club night on Saturday with T. someone who you know won’t really enjoy it…you arrive an hour too early for the start of the set of the DJ you’re really there to see but that you don’t know, you’ve come on the hot recommendation of a friend. I mean you’ve gone to a movie, driven slowly and got there at 12 o/c but the organisers have billed him at 1.30am as it’s in their interest of course to keep the audience there as long as possible and using the bar. This means you’re killing time till 1.30am not really enjoying much, the venue is slowly filling up and everyone seems a bit dour but primarily you’re not having fun because you’re with someone who finds this not an improvement on his Hacienda days in the mid 80’s. And clearly these are not because he’s not his 20 year old self. So you leave at 2am having deemed the evening boring, though you’ve noticed that even in that short space of time, the DJ was actually building his set up and would no doubt have hit his peak by 3am. Though Troy plays minimal house so your friend’s criticism that there are no songs is a bit like accusing Shostakovich of the same thing and he doesn’t write tunes either.

The following Monday you arrive an hour into the set of the DJ you really want to see. You bypass the queue of people outside who will not make it inside ever as it’s full. Tiga hasn’t played in London for months and though it’s a school night he’s obviously worth going out at 9.30 for. You walk in and your ears are bleeding straight away and the room is low ceiling and the kids are jumping. You go straight to the thick of it and gaze at your beloved DJ. Ok, he’s nothing to gaze at, short and wearing a baseball cap, looking like an 18 year old despite the fact he’s a dad, and not making eye contact – that would be bad. Gone are the days of Norman Cook excitedly smiling at his adoring crowd (well with all that vodka and orange under the decks and sometimes Zoe ball stroking his leg and the rest he had something to smile about, but it was just his stile to punch the air and Tiga is a bit more serious than that). At some point he drops some of his own tunes which you know well and even the chorus of some Depeche Mode old hit (Everything counts in large amounts) and D is so overjoyed at finally witnessing the DJ in action (she’s a fellow fan) that the glass of red wine (her own) which ends up splattered all over her white shirt merely raises a shrug of I don’t care. She carries on dancing happily, perhaps it’s also because of the married man sex she’s been having, this morning in fact. The grateful sex of someone who says he hasn’t come with his wife for four years. Not sure how much I believe but I do sometimes get the tales of woe some of the BF’s men friends tell him and clearly there are lots of unions where there is no conjugation, just a roof. We leave before midnight having had the same total club time as the Saturday but an experience that we will refer to for days. Which begs the question, does your companion significantly affect the amount of fun you can have?

Troy by contrast did a harder thing… minimal house. There are no vocals, there are no melodies, you cannot hang your journey onto anything recognisable and that’s why he’d take longer to draw you in with no easy crowd pleasers to throw your way. Would he eventually have been satisfying? Now I’ll never know. But I blame the ‘failure’ of Saturday on the high ceilings and the lighting (too bright) and the fact that I shared T’s beer at Troy whilst at Tiga I don’t know if my vodka was actually a triple- as I still felt it when I parked the car outside my home. Was Tiga’s the equivalent of having overloaded your ‘date’ with expectations and getting to orgasm all by yourself? I may put this all to the test in a week’s time as will go to top electro night out with D, but may also bring T along. Whose enthusiasm or lack of will affect me the most?