Not thursday at the Bridge
OK, the heat is insufferable, the Godfather III-era bouncers are giving you shifty looks, and the fi rst few notes of “Who’s got the crack?” by The Moldy Peaches are beginning to play with a crushing inevitability. Yet there still remains a certain charm inherent to Wednesday evening in Baby Love.
Founded in 2004 with the ambitious objective of being “a club night that would avoid the clichés without courting obscurity”, Narcissists has become part of the furniture for the University’s alternative community. Every other Wednesday hundreds of music fans will crawl of out of the woodwork to colonise a corner of Oxford that for one night we can call our own. At fi rst glance it appears to be a den of razor sharp fringes, austere right angles and snobbishly raised eyebrows.
On closer inspection, however, it quickly becomes evident that there are few club nights this gloriously free from inhibition. Everything down to the bizarre unisex toilets, and the hardcore contingent of fi fteen or so connoisseurs who are the fi rst to start dancing and the last to leave, combine together to create this wonderful laid back atmosphere. It’s also worth checking out the one pound Love Potion shots..
The new DJ team, Tash and Matt, who took over in October 2005, have a religious faith in what they call “electro punk, garage rock and disco noise”. LCD Soundsystem, Patrick Wolf, Art Brut, and Soulwax are blended into a haze of beats, bleeps and riffs. Shredding your voicebox by screaming along to the chorus of Debaser by The Pixies is inevitable;.
There are many songs, such as Blue Skies by The Needs (that one that goes “to the left dundundun to the right dundunun”) which I’ve never heard, and would never wish to hear, outside the walls of Baby-love. Even the gruesome Fuck Forever by Babyshambles can have its moments in Narcissists.
4th May 2006