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September 17, 2001

Blue notes

I really needed last night: an out-of-the-blue trip to Blue, appropriately enough, in Minami-Aoyama. It's a great little club, although I always have reservations about the music on a Saturday. It's generally just plain odd - drum'n'bass for five minutes, then suddenly a bit of salsa, then jazz, then drum'n'bass again, then acid jazz, then eighties power-chord rock. Nice enough for background listening, perhaps, but hardly easy to dance to - though at least if you don't like it you can wait five minutes and be pretty sure it'll have changed. It is, essentially, a club for people who don't go clubbing; compared to most of the crowd on the dancefloor, I actually resemble far less of a badly coordinated crash-test dummy than usual - everything's relative, after all.

Still, last night the DJs surprised me. It was, indeed, mainly a bizarre mix of jazzy trumpets, LTJ Bukem-style, mellow drum'n'bass and plodding Bon Jovi-esque drum lines, but thankfully they couldn't keep it up for long and went instead for a couple of extended periods of drum'n'bass and even (gasp) techno near the end of the night. UFO playing straight-ahead techno? What's the world coming to? Well, whatever it is, I hope it happens quickly.

We met a few JET teachers from Saitama, the prefecture just north of Tokyo where I used to live and work; one of them was, in yet another coincidence of earth-shattering proportions, from Harrow, and worked in Watford (my "home town", for want of a better phrase). We went for breakfast with them afterwards, and they seem like a genuinely nice bunch of people, so hopefully we'll meet up for some more clubbing in the near future.

If it sounds like a bland night, devoid of racy encounters and lacking watermelon-smashing in the street or police intervention, then that's because it was. A nice night. Nice club. Nice people. Nice breakfast. And not in the bland, ineffectual sense of the word, either - just, you know... nice. Alright? Good.

Posted by chris at September 17, 2001 03:09 AM | Permalink

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