‘It feels normal and weird at the same time’: inside UK nightclubs’ first night back

As soon as I lost my keys in the Uber, it began to feel like a real night out. Halfway down the queue outside Oval Space & Pickle Factory in Hackney, just before midnight, I realised the bunch I’d scooped off the floor wasn’t in fact the ones I’d dropped, initiating a frantic phone call to Richard (heroic Uber driver) who cheerfully volunteered to drive back to Hackney and return the original set to my frazzled self.

Half an hour later, stress forgotten, I was dancing in a swarm of strangers. It wasn’t a pilot event, or a socially-distanced halfway house, or even a fond memory – but a mini-festival split across two of Hackney’s best-known venues, constituting London’s first proper club night since March 2020.

In line with the Government’s lifting of Covid restrictions on July 19, with only temperature checks at the door – no “vaccine passports” or NHS-app signing-in – the doors opened at one minute past midnight this morning. (Have you ever imagined slamming ￡5 down on a bar and demanding three Jaegerbombs in the small hours of a Monday? Life is unpredictable.)

At a few minutes past midnight, in the purple light of Oval Space – a medium-sized, triangular-roofed venue somewhere between cosy and cavernous in size – people began to cluster together on the dance floor, leaking out in front of the stage with tentative enthusiasm.

But their hesitancy melted away when Opus Kink, the first of six bands to play across the course of the night, took to the stage around one o’clock. The raucous Brighton-based jazz-punk group sent energy bouncing across the room like a series of lightning strikes: my friends and I danced in and out of a mosh-pit that formed spontaneously in response, all to the exuberance and relief of a crowd of clubbers who hadn’t been allowed on a dance floor for nearly 18 months.

“It was bliss being up there,” said Angus Rogers, the band’s frontman, swigging from a can of Heineken backstage after their set. “You only realise now what you’ve been missing.”

“It was good seeing people doing what they wanted to do for a very long time. I’m glad we could provide them something to do it to,” agreed Sam (bass).

The punters I spoke to were just as grateful for the opportunity. “It feels normal and it feels weird at the same time,” said student Kit, reflecting on the return of a proper “night out”.

“Covid is still an issue – it’s still there, it hasn’t disappeared. But I guess at some point we need to learn how to live with it,” said another, Nico. “I’ve had two jabs, I don’t feel like a risk or threat to anyone.

“I’m happy to be around other people who are comfortable being in the same situation. I’m not about to go and start a rave at an old people’s home. It’s great to be around people my age.”

On the dance floor, people of Nico’s age were in plentiful supply. I’d forgotten what it’s like to shut your eyes and let your feet do the talking; to fling your arms to the ceiling in time with the bass-drop; to lock eyes with your best friends and remember, for a few glorious moments, how it feels to be young, and moronic, and utterly unselfconscious.

At 4am, I found myself sitting on the terrace that circles Oval Space, gazing at the circular gas-holder looming through the orange-flecked sky. “How would you describe the energy tonight?” I’d asked Opus Kink’s drummer Finn a couple of hours earlier? “Sizzling,” he replied. Gazing upwards at the metalwork cutting like a spaceship through the sky, and surrounded once again by sweating, tiring, ecstatic clubbers, I thought: he was onto something.