Nightclubs in Fiction - Part 2

Following on from last week's post, a look at some more of the most memorable nightclubs in fiction, from futuristic milk bars to Weimar jazz clubs...

Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Korova Milkbar where Alex and his droogs get ‘sharpened up’ before roaming the streets is probably remembered best for its iconic appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s film, but the description in Anthony Burgess’s source novel is just as worthy of attention. The reader is immediately plunged into this alien world, struggling to understand Alex’s nadsat slang, but the imagery is startling and vivid, painting a picture of a dystopian and violent future: the bar sells milk, surreptitiously laced with liquor, ‘velocet’, ‘synthemesc’ or ‘drencrom’. A shot of one of these would ‘give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg’.

Patrons dressed to impress, in ‘very tight tights with the old jelly mould fitting on the crotch... waisty jackets without lapels and off-white cravats and horrorshow boots for kicking’. Women wore bright wigs, black dresses and badges with the names of their ex-lovers. There was music too, an oldie, ‘You Blister My Paint’, but the droogs didn’t have dancing on their minds...

Broken Glass - Alain Mabanckou

Broken Glass is a disgraced former teacher who now spends his time propping up the bar at Credit Gone West, one of the Congo’s seedier night spots. The bar is staffed by Mompero, an intimidating figure with ‘eyebrows like a circumflex and lips like a sink plunger’ and Dengaki, who plays the diplomat but is ‘more skillful with a knife than a butcher-turned-serial-killer’. Between them, they make sure the bar is open 24 hours.

Broken Glass sits with his notebook, listening to the stories of the bar’s patrons - ‘they just pop up out of nowhere with tears in their eyes and a tremor in their voice’. The atmosphere is rarely rowdy - instead, Broken Glass spends his nights ‘dozing on my stool after eating kebabs... it was a fine life’. In this way, he hears ‘so many stories you couldn’t fit them all in just one notebook, I’d need several volumes to tell the tales of all these accursed kings’.

Needle In The Groove - Jeff Noon

Needle in the Groove follows the progress of Elliot, bass player in a string of failed bands, who finally gets the chance of success playing with a dance act who have discovered a mysterious new production technique. The music gets its first run out at Club Zuum, in Manchester. Like Born Slippy, Noon manages to convey the clubbing experience in a stream of conscious monologue: 'saturday night packed / enough to get the walls sweating / some kinda tingle skin-crawl / the noise and the lights and the lager and the shots and the too many lung-drags on cheapo ciggies / where's the bar, someone's moved the bar / and how come all nightclubs dissolve like this?'

The club is all confusion and chaos ('some dancer thrown by the music / all twisted sweated doubt like he can't believe what's happening to him') until the band's song is dropped into the mix, like a moment of clarity: 'the dancers lose step momentarily / arms rising upwards, fingers stretching to pierce the laser beams / as the records gel, you can hear the first tune being eaten alive by the second / great clusters of sound enveloping / where the lone dancers dance, finding each other in the crowd's hard stare / passing virus / it becomes a show, an exhibition, a parade of the strange'.

Half Blood Blues - Esi Edugyan

Like Christopher Isherwood, Esi Edugyan’s novel portrayed the jazz bars and cabarets of Weimar Berlin. Sid, the bass player, reminisces about The Hound in its heyday before it was shut down for ‘degenerate sympathies’: ‘running water backstage, tiled floors, grand lighting. Jacks walked up velvet stairs to a gallery of brass and mirrors'. The band, Ernst’s Hot-Time Swingers, would be on the stage, ‘in our shirtsleeves, smoking and drinking the czech’ while their trumpet-playing star Hieronymous Falk stole the show.

Later, the band flees Germany and washes up in Paris, but with the spectre of invasion looming, they are forced into derelict basements to play. They play with Louis Armstrong, but in these empty venues, with ‘the floor unlit, tables shoved aside and small piles of rubbish stood along one side of the room’ they cannot find inspiration, and the project fizzles out, leaving Hieronymous to pass into legend like a Weimar Robert Johnson.

The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

Returning to Berlin in 1950, the old cabarets have fallen into decline and been usurped by a new brand of night venue, 'distinguished by, among other things, their higher prices'. There is still something odd in the air though, exemplified by the success of The Onion Cellar. Like any good club, it is 'quite damp and chilly underfoot', and the stairs are 'dangerously steep'. The guests are an exclusive bunch - 'a cross section of the world which nowadays calls itself intellectual, with their wives, mistresses, secretaries, interior decorators and occasional male mistresses'.

As in The Golem, the music is rather rudimentary - the house band consists of a flautist, and guitarist and a dwarf who plays the tin drum. The real reason for gathering here, though, is to take part in the host's onion chopping ritual - a basket of onions is produced, which the guests 'chop smaller and smaller until the juice did what the sorrows of the world could not do; it brought forth a round, human tear'. The patrons weep together in this former air-raid bunker, rousing an animal passion within: 'a lady of ripe years tore off her blouse before the eyes of her son-in-law... another bared his swarthy torso... an orgy was underway'.

For a fuller description of goings-on in The Onion Cellar, see Suzette Field's excellent A Curious Invitation.