There’s no club like Spiders, my grim hometown club

Ask somebody to describe Spiders and even if they have been there multiple times, they’ll usually just mumble something about a cocktail called the zombie and the men in bondage gear who stand in the walkway on Saturdays. This is because everything they know about Spiders is based on what other people have told them. They might remember entering Spiders, but find me a person who remembers leaving.

Cutting edge design

It’s the sort of club you go to the first time you go out and spend the next two weeks thinking is amazing because you don’t remember being there and have never gone anywhere else. It made a lot of my friends believe for a while that £1.50 drinks were the norm across Britain and you could order toast and pints of cocktail for under £4 at Revolution.

The downstairs is like a cross between a sex dungeon and a pub that still serves pork pie and mushy peas. There’s jail bar partitions and sofas the colour of vegetable soup. There’s usually a guy with a pink mohican walking around in a corset, and the walls are dimly lit by the kind of red lighting normally reserved for brothels in Amsterdam.

They were allowed in

You can jump off walls to Slipknot downstairs on your own and nobody will care, just don’t dare to ask the DJ to play Jamie xx or you’ll get thrown out. As Spiders’ website declares menacingly in capitals, it “HAS ALWAYS, AND ALWAYS WILL HAVE AN ANTI-DANCE THEME IN ITS MUSIC POLICY”. Soul and funk is permitted upstairs, where the numerous mirrors on the walls (why?), allow you to watch yourself dancing to James Brown and contemplate why you’re spending your Saturday night here.

Other stuff prohibited by the club includes, “TRENDY CLOTHES”. And take a minute before you start putting on your Adidas jacket and Nike Air Max. In a seemingly good intentioned if not anarchic effort to put off pre-2010 chavs from attending, all clothing of “A SPORTY NATURE” is also forbidden.

How much did that drink cost?

So what can you wear? Well, mankinis seem to be allowed from what can be seen from the photos on their Facebook page. Other than that just apply eyeliner and lipstick like the emo kids did at high school and try to look too young or too old to be at a night club. You’ll fit right in.

After most people have left town and gone to uni, they never go back to Spiders.

Even though they might joke about a nostalgic reunion there on group chat from time to time, but they’ll never actually do it.

“You got a problem?”

Spiders might have a niche kind of legendary status, that means it gets a mention on Urban Dictionary, as the “the epicenter of Saturday night amnesia! a dungeon of air guitarring and lechery.” But the key word there is “Amnesia”. But some things are better off left as nostalgic memories.