London

Nothing quite prepares you for the queue for the Torture Garden cloakroom. I’m not talking length, more the view you get from standing in it. The cloakroom is located on the top floor of the cavernous converted church that is Brixton’s Mass. Which means that, once the cream of London’s perverati have deposited their coats and outer layers, they’re forced to walk back down past everyone else queueing on the stairs. Which makes this narrow spiral staircase the most spectacular and jaw-dropping catwalk on the planet. Feature continues

In the queue all of 30 seconds and I’d already seen the following five sights troop past: a perfectly proportioned naked woman sprayed head to foot in gold paint; a middle-aged man wearing nothing but a metal thong and a stuffed eagle on his shoulder; a Caprice lookalike in Doc Martens and flimsy Agent Provocateur underwear; a man dressed in a forensic officer’s paper suit with four dismembered toy dolls hanging from his chest; and a statuesque blonde whose leather bra contained a pair of gargantuan breasts (false), but whose transparent pants clearly contained a huge penis (real).

This went on for the next 15 minutes (the procession, not the transexual’s huge passing penis) while I stood patiently in line, nervously clutching my coat like an improvised protective shield.

Welcome to the world’s largest fetish club – and its eclectic mix of clubbers, fashionistas and assorted pervs. Conceived in London in 1990 by promoters Alan Pelling and David Wood, the monthly Torture Garden has become renowned as much for its hedonistic partygoers as its cutting-edge dance music and performers.

It’s also a thriving international business, having exported its unique brand of club pervery to the US, Russia, Japan, Croatia, Greece and beyond. In fact, with a range of CDs, DVDs, books and a fashion label to its name, this fetish institution is rapidly becoming a fetish corporation. Kink Inc, if you will.

But on a cold, October Saturday night in Brixton, this is the essential Torture Garden. A Halloween extravaganza where 1,400 TG disciples have flocked to a former church to dress bizarrely, dance madly and exercise their filthiest fantasies.

From the initial sights that pass the cloakroom queue, it’s clear this is no run-of-the-mill Halloween party. For a start, there’s not a pumpkin in sight. Unless you count your correspondent stuffed into a pair of leather trousers so dated even Jon Bon Jovi might declare them passé. In truth, among this outlandish crowd, I feel as hip as Boris Johnson. My female partner (also a fetish club virgin) fares no better. Attired outrageously, or so she thought, in a short kilt and sports bra, she looks so overdressed she might as well have worn hiking boots and a fleece top.

But be warned, the TG atmosphere is strangely infectious. As we near the cloakroom, my partner suddenly decides to nip to the loo only to emerge minutes later, minus her bra and with the words ‘MEDIA WHORE’ scrawled in lipstick across her naked chest. ‘Bollocks to it,’ she says, checking in her bra with her coat. ‘Everyone was staring at me in that top so I might as well give them something to look at. Wait till you see what I’ve written where my knickers were!’ And all this before we’ve even reached the bar. Something tells me this could be a long night.

Twenty minutes later and I’m beginning to wish I’d come here when I was 18. Because quite simply, until you’ve been to the Torture Garden, you can’t claim to have been clubbing. A never-ending parade of barely decorated flesh, it’s a visual extravaganza like no other. And if S&M isn’t your bag, with five rooms spread across three floors, it’s big enough for you not to see any. But if spanking and nipple tweaking is how you get your jollies, wild horses probably won’t drag you from the dungeon playrooms.

The music’s damned good too. Loud enough to melt internal organs, it varies from disco punk to glamour trash and retro house – with a constant backbeat of the thwack of leather on buttock.