Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues review – dizzying dancefloor days

Dave Haslam’s rousing tribute to Britain’s club culture and its place within the nation’s psyche

For me, it was a dark room in Swansea, white clouds misting the air from cheap fags and a smoke machine. The carpet was alcopop-sticky, the dance floor reeking of White Musk, body odour and vomit. But the music, and the volume, and the darkness, turned Barons into a dreamland. The Breeders’ Cannonball, the Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold, Jane’s Addiction’s Been Caught Stealing pouring out of the speakers, and the noise of us – teenagers laughing, flirting, almost bursting – slowly becoming ourselves.

One of Dave Haslam’s places was a huge room separated by pillars, buzzed diagonally with black and yellow stripes. A DJ who played Manchester’s legendary Haçienda nightclub (that hotbed of primary-coloured postmodernist architecture and, a few years after its institution, revolutionary dance music) 450 times, he is also the author of two books inspired by his own cultural heritage (pop city memoir Manchester, England and DJ history Adventures On the Wheels of Steel). He is well placed to write Life After Dark, a research-heavy journey through the worlds that exist beyond the velveteen rope, the bouncer, the cloakroom.

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