The long-lost nightclub that made Regent Street the home of Britpop
Trying to put a finger on what Britpop was is hard, for it was a vibe, a moment, a phenomenon, but for the clearest example to encapsulate it all, look towards the music video for Pulp’s ‘Disco 2000’.
In a four-minute and 54-second package, the videos go from run-down northern living rooms to classic cafes to laundromats, then roll seamlessly into hedonistic nightclubs. Each scene, though, no matter what, is awash with colour and energy. The director, Pedro Romhanyi, treats a guy getting his haircut with the same cinematic glamour as a model on a dance floor, and really, that’s what Britpop was all about.
It was about British culture, but not in a patriotic, Reform UK type of way. Instead, it was about celebrating social and communal culture like pubs, crappy parks, housing estates, kissing your first crush on a broken park bench, getting drunk on a weekend, and working on a Monday. Pulp hit the big time the second they started zoning in on that, filling their album Different Class with stories of the everyman, and ‘Disco 2000’ is one of the best of them.
Crucially, those dancefloor scenes in the video, with the panels of red and blue flashing, were filmed at the scene’s favourite party spot, and just as the video seems to define Britpop, Smashing defined its crowd too.
Smashing used to exist in Eve, a club just on the doorstep of Soho. When the venue first opened on Regent Street in the 1950s, the crowd was high-class. As a members’ club, it was full of rich diplomats and the likes of Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland, but by the 1990s, the changes in culture were reflected in the changing crowd and the switch up of the sound system.
By that point, a different scene took hold as the new kings and queens of culture were no longer the Rat Pack, but boys in bands and artists in drag.
That was reflected in the eclectic nature of Smashing, a club night that happened each Friday. At the time, journalist Alix Sharkey called it “London’s fabbest, silliest, unlikeliest and most exhilarating Friday night”. After paying their entry and getting their hand stamped, the crowd truly never knew what to expect as it was hosted by Matthew Glamorre, a collaborator of Leigh Bowery who brought the artist’s energy to the room.
Bowery was a regular, and so, naturally, the venue leaned towards the weird, the wonderful and the wild. People dressed up for the occasion, making it a perfect spot for Jarvis Cocker and his love for colourful, sharp suits, but for the rest of the new rock scene, it was the mish-mash playlist of rock, pop, punk, rap, acid house and beyond that brought them in. Smashing had no one sound but had the sound of the 1990s, as it was playing all these bands’ niche influences, and feeding them new ones in real time.
On the dance floor that provided the setting for ‘Disco 2000’ were Blur, Suede, Oasis, Leigh Bowery, Pete Burns, drag queens, rich kids, art students, and rockstars, and crucially, the venue was a ten-minute walk from Bar Italia, where Cocker would stagger in for an early morning coffee, begging in his anthem for the afters, “Two sugars would be great, ‘Cause I’m fading fast and it’s nearly dawn”.
