“How VIP do we gotta get?!” Upon
being refused entry to the rapper Tyga’s Grammy aftershow party, an indignant Paul McCartney peers at the faces of his companions, baffled. The doorman, with a doorman’s unique and innate infallibility, won’t budge. Paul wrote Eleanor Rigby. He wrote Yesterday –
while actually being asleep, for goodness sake.
Never mind that Macca had turned up at the wrong party – he was supposed to be three miles down the road at Mark Ronson’s, presumably equally swanky, after-party. And it is certainly too little too late for Tyga to pass the blame on to overzealous doormen, claiming he would have been more than happy to have invited the Beatle in. This was the world’s greatest living songwriter, with a net worth of £820m, but on Monday night none of it mattered. Paul was just a 73-year-old man who, for the first time in at least 54 of those years, was finding that his best chance of getting in might be to nip behind the bins and change jackets with one of his mates.
Surely this is it – the final straw for “the club” as a desired final destination on any night out. The rest of us have been putting up with “Your name’s not on the list” or “No trainers, mate” for decades, but Macca? No. Not him. Clubs have gone too far this time. Yes, his situation was different from ours: his mates were Beck and Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins as opposed to two idiots who sank a bottle of pinot each because “Wethers is so cheap you’re sort of losing money if you don’t”, and the party he was trying to get into was Tyga’s, not
Tiger Tiger. Nevertheless, if even the man who redefined rock with Helter Skelter isn’t good enough to get in to a club, the time has surely come to conclude that clubs are not good enough for us to actually want to get in to.
I’m not talking about dance connoisseurs’ nightclubs here – ones where “club” is used as a verb. They’re different. They’re fine – full of happy, dancing people there to enjoy music. No, I mean the inexplicably snooty, cocktail-y ones. They play Jason Derulo a lot. Or Drake. Blasted so loud it renders conversation impossible without yodelling into your victim’s ear – the point, incidentally, at which they discover a damp waft of saliva down the ear canal does little to reduce the agony of a perforated eardrum. Sometimes you can get a pint in these places, but chances are you’ll pay full-pint price for a bottle, which – last time I checked – is just over half a pint. Utter, meritless nonsense.
Pub licensing laws have changed and clubs no longer have a monopoly on wee-hours boozing. So what exactly is the point of them? Why are people still queueing up for 40 minutes to get into one, needing to urinate so fiercely that all the capillaries in their eyes have burst?
People go to clubs on the pull, for one thing. This is fair enough, understandable: clubs remove any possibility of conversation and promote boozily confident dancing – handy for people, let’s say, whose best feature is their looks. Clubs also often have an enticing, velvet-roped-off VIP area, inviting you to wonder what exclusive delights might lurk therein. Let’s put this one to bed right now – I’ll tell you what lurks therein: my mate sneaked into one in Ibiza once and all she did was snog Dean Gaffney and nick Michael Greco’s hat. The best you can hope for here is a fleeting appearance by Dane Bowers or Arg from Towie. You don’t imagine you could have a prolonged debate about the best book in the His Dark Materials trilogy with either of them. In fact, you get the distinct impression that, whatever you said, eventually one of them would end up crying.
Clubs are rubbish. They were rubbish when we were all 18, and they’re rubbish now. They’re a relic of a time when people wanted a fleeting taste of D-list celebrity for the price of a thrown-together mojito. Now we’re older and wiser, and paying £8 to get into a place where the staff treat you like a minor irritant seems wildly unnecessary. It’s time the club, as a notion, died, and we all found a half-decent late-opening pub instead. The over-zealous doorman at Tyga’s after-party undoubtedly saved
Paul McCartney from an awful, awful night.
My local pub stays open until dribble o’clock. It has no DJ, but a vinyl deck with a panoply of records for use by anyone, many of which have Paul McCartney on them. There’s dancing. Darts. Chatter. A smoking gazebo. It has two fat, non-judgmental dogs in it, and a cat that sleeps in the nut tray. And, most importantly, because it’s not 1996, it has no doorman with a face like the back of a fist telling you your money’s not good enough because your shoes are wrong and he doesn’t like your hairdo.
If you’re in the area, Macca, walk past the clubs and come down for a pint. Join us in 2016. Mine’s a pale ale.
