Clubs

‘Choose your weapon.’ That’s the second most fun thing you will be asked to do at Scrap Club. The first? To obliterate everything in sight when the klaxon sounds. Annihilate that computer monitor identical to the one at work. Use a comically massive sledgehammer. If the mood takes you, hook it on to a crowbar and smash it against the wall. Double up with a fellow smasher and cause total desctruction with a slab of concrete. Be creative.
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Welcome to Scrap Club, one of London’s stranger nocturnal goings-on. PCs, pianos, washing machines, sinks, porcelain mannequins: they’re all fair game for the ten precious minutes each attendee is guaranteed. When Time Out paid a visit to the first event in April, we even spotted a cross-section of aeroplane backstage where the items are loaded on to a forklift then driven into the arena. Rousing beats and noises are provided (à la ‘Stomp’) by two musicians using power tools and a mic’d up cement mixer. It’s these noises and the cheering crowd that keep you going. Even if you’re going ‘Taxi Driver’ with two lighter hammers, you soon realise that ten minutes isn’t as stingy as it sounds.

But there’s more to this anarchic night than merely venting the everyday frustration that Londoners live with, according to Joel Cahen who, with Wajid Yaseen, promotes Scrap Club and creates the industrial soundtrack. ‘We decided that we wanted to share in the experience of smashing things up,’ says Cahen, who recreated industrial German music at the ICA in February, ‘and it developed into a whole philosophy.'

'There are plenty of reasons why you would want an event where you can smash stuff up beyond just venting. We’re surrounded by a massively increased amount of objects, all of the time. When they break, we just throw them away, they’re outside of the recycling bubble. Scrap Club is a response to mass consumerism and mass consumption.’

Be warned, though, there are hidden costs: black bogeys, grimy skin and sore arms. But reducing white products to a heap of mangled shells and fine electronic dust, like other clubbing experiences, is a group activity that can also be deeply personal. And it’s one that attracts an even mix of guys and girls. ‘Cheaper than therapy!’ one liberteenie offered, covered in dust and grinning like a nutter. ‘It’s revenge on these machines that suck your life away,’ said a scuzzy disgruntled worker. Happily, the compere doesn’t slip into such ‘possessions is a dirty word’ rhetoric, nor is he tempted to imagine the room as one big psychologist’s couch, or the site of a political happening. When the music stops, all thinking goes out the window. And when your ten minutes are up, it’s not intellectual anger or some primal catharsis you share, it’s euphoria.

Scrap Club is this Friday at Electrowerkz.