OPINION - ‘We danced every night and hydrated with vodka’: Why 1990s London club culture was better than today’s

Like every 20-year-old in the 1990s, my schedule was as predictable as it was immutable — I went to a different club every night of the week. Sundays were not so much sacrosanct as a thrillingly vacant possibility which meant if there was a sudden secret pop-up somewhere, off I ran. The fact I had a regular job (I worked on the dealing floor of a Japanese investment bank in the City with a daily 7.30am sharp start time) rarely encroached on my vastly more rewarding nightly activities. Oddly, I never thought of myself as a clubber. None of us did — it was simply part of the collective tapestry that dictated our lives. The idea that anyone would sit at home watching hours of TV feels so hilariously puzzling it wasn’t even a consideration. That was what losers did. To understand the lifestyle I’ve just described, you need to see it in the context of what London was like in the 1990s: a magnetic cauldron of energy and experimentation, of label-free individualism and freedom, a place imbued with the thrill of never knowing where or with whom you might end up. Since time immemorial people of a certain age have harped on about how much better the good old days were. But hear me out. It really was better back then. Superficially, there were no smoothies, peptides, this or that-free diets, no gym diaries, no Oura rings, no mental-health time outs, no grievance lists etc… But above all, there was no internet or social media. Clubbers dancing at an acid house night at The Slammer, a club at the Red Lion pub in Gravesend, Kent, 24th September 1988 Getty ImagesBack then, there were so many avenues to go down, both literal and metaphorical. My weekly club diary read like this: Mondays: 151; Tuesdays: Crazy Larry’s or the Ministry of Sound; Wednesdays: Café de Paris or Subterania; Thursdays: Tramp, only Tramp; Fridays: L’Equipe Anglaise, Iceni or Titanic; Saturdays: Browns or Chinawhite. For clarity, the nights where an “or” is mentioned meant attendance at all venues listed. We gorged on Big Macs and KFC dippers, we hydrated with vodka, we chain-smoked Marlboro RedsHow the hell did we survive, because by today’s standards we were en route to armageddon: we gorged on Big Macs and KFC dippers, we hydrated with vodka, we chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, we might have occasionally taken Scarface-amounts of drugs, we hardly slept and we never exercised. I say that but we danced every night. We were ecstatically happy, injected with something more elemental than narcotics — a lust for life, an enjoyment of the moment, of the possibilities, of the encounters. I realise I am massively romanticising those years and I apologise to those reading this who were taken down by any of the above. Sadly, I know a few who were.The point I am trying to make is there were no distractions, no hours spent lying forlornly in bed on our own scrolling through a phone. Curiosity — not dictated or tainted by social media algorithms but instead born from instinct, word of mouth and happenstance — is what drove us. I met a panoply of human curiosities on my club adventures: artists, designers, footballers, musicians, princes (yes, that one), actors, chefs, drug dealers, seedy club promoters, dumbstruck blazer-wearing sons of multi-millionaire Greek shipping magnates, as well as hilariously pompous Italian, French and German aristocrats (all investment bankers), flower stall sellers, It Girls (the late, great Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, below) and nepo babies before they had a name.Tara Palmer-Tomkinson out for her birthday at Tramp nightclub in Mayfair in the 90sUK Press via Getty ImagesMemorable moments include the night sexy-as-f*** INXS frontman Michael Hutchence pushed me and a friend to the floor as he dived to punch a Danish man he thought was flirting with his on-off girlfriend Helena Christensen. He later sent the Dane some flowers to apologise. On another night, this time at Iceni just off Piccadilly, a friend and I caught sight of Brad Pitt, his long blond hair cascading over his shoulders (he was filming Interview with the Vampire at the time), as he leant against a wall observing the crowd on his own. We invited him to a pretend party we were supposedly throwing the following night — my friend, who worked at Vogue, scrawled her address on the back of her business card and handed it to him. Of course he would come, he replied. He never showed up, I say never but we were out clubbing, so who knows. Still, he was cutely smiley — and possibly a little high. Mind you we all were, so recollections may vary. We were committed to the moment, not lost in itBut mostly I met people who became friends. Today, we endlessly discuss how sorry we feel for our children living in this strange world, while sentimentally regaling them with our stories (minus the Scarface moments). Somehow their friend and romantic-possibility pool feels so much more restricted than ours was for several reasons, the most glaring of which is the lack of random but nearly always joyful encounters that clubs afforded us back then. I bore my daughter rigid about how all it took was picking up our landlines, ringing friends, making plans and sticking to them. We were committed to the moment, I tell her, not lost in it. Well, occasionally we were.