Doing their 'new wave-ish thing' - New Young Pony Club (image © Dean Chalkley)
The best London bars and clubs to listen and dance to the vanguard of the capital's 'new wave' music scene
Doing their 'new wave-ish thing' - New Young Pony Club (image © Dean Chalkley)
The problem
Stavroula ‘A friend will be visiting in early April and apart from the Portishead concert that we’ve already booked, we would like to listen to some ‘new wave’ in a bar/club setting, but I have no idea where to go! Any ideas? Central London preferred.’
The prescription
You’re in luck (well, kind of) as London is currently awash with pretty young things celebrating dour, miserable apocalyptic music you can’t dance to. In your requested club/bar setting, however, most of this stuff is alternated with the day-glo new rave and angular indie hits of modern times. To be honest, if you’re over 30, which as a Portishead fan you almost certainly are, you’re probably not going to notice the difference.
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You mention central London as a preferred location, but the real hub of new wavedom is without doubt Camden. Club nights such as Don’t Look Down (second Saturday of each month) generally offer a live band and hours of remorseless DJing with a focus on punky thrash and electro-faff, which are what new wave is all about. Of course, if you’re all dewy-eyed with nostalgia for nuclear brinkmanship and stu-stu-Studio Line hair products, your best bet for a dedicated retro new wave experience is Electric Dreams at the Purple Turtle in Camden. This is the captial’s longest running new wave/electro-industrial night, with a defiantly timelocked playlist. Think of it as a kind of School Disco for art students. The crowd is, as you might expect, a mix of those old enough, and certainly cynical enough, to know better and disaffected kids for whom ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a new experience.
If you’d like to check out some live bands, there are plenty of them doing new wave-ish things, such as punk-funk darlings New Young Pony Club or scratchy depressives XX Teens. ‘Post-rock/pop/no wave’ outfit Make Model play the Barfly on April 15, and ‘curiously sexless’ Raincoats/Slits devotees The Mentalists, play the Enterprise (Camden again, sorry) on April 3, and are very ace indeed.
Do you agree? Post your suggestions for Stavroula's night out.
Email your cultural problem to cultureclinic@timeout.com.
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