By One of the many tiresome things about The Ongoing Badness is that it's looking like it'll be a long time before anyone gets to go to the club. You can tell yourself that sticking an Essential Mix on in the kitchen to soundtrack another banana bread sesh is the same. It isn't. Cinema, though, can scratch those itchy feet.
There are a lot of bad films about clubs and DJs. They outweigh the good films about nights out by an exponential degree. Most of the time clubs in films are suspiciously quiet, or suspiciously empty, or just suspiciously crap, the kind of place you'd accidentally end up in after a staff night out because the bar you were in shut but you weren't ready to go home and no one could agree where to go, and now you're trying not to look at at the Rollover hot dog stand by the DJ booth.
To be fair, it's difficult job to try to capture something which is so much about physical sensations, be it a big sound system booting you in the chest or the whiff of CO2, sweat and poppers. It's even more difficult to lock something as ephemeral as a moment on a dancefloor into a camera's frame. Filmmakers who care tend to go one of a few ways: straight documentary; gonzo madness soundtracked by contemporary bangers; or a more circumspect period piece, balancing a soundtrack of legendary tracks with that horrid feeling that hits when someone opens the curtains at 8am and you realise you're three buses away from your own bed.
And people really do care. For 24 Hour Party People, an inch-perfect replica of the Haçienda was built. Regulars from its heyday who volunteered as extras reportedly burst into tears when they got on set and realised how close it was to the original.
Not clubbing is a necessary deprivation right now, but it's one that hurts. But that doesn't mean you can't still bring the club to you.
Climax (2018)
Gaspar Noé is such a self-consciously terrible sort of enfant that to say his semi-improvised one-shot Climax is tough going feels like giving him what he wants. Nonetheless, much of Climax is borderline unwatchable: a dance troupe decamps to an empty school to rehearse, get snowed in, accidentally drink LSD-spiked sangria, and a hallucinatory trip into the underworld ensues. Wait, come back! Because it opens with a 10-minute dance sequence in which the gang sashay in front of, with, around and on top of each other to a remix of 'Supernature' by Cerrone, as the camera spins around them and swings up and over their heads. That bit's completely joyous. Feel free to switch off once it's over.
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Mike Pickering and Dave Haslam cameo, and Steve Coogan's Tony Wilson narrates this comic retelling of the Factory Records and Haçienda story, probably the most dreamily mythologised parts of the most dreamily mythologised moment in 20th century youth culture. Coogan said at the time that he approached The Factory impresario as "like a leftwing, avant-garde Alan Partridge, although Partridge is a much bigger idiot", and barely any of Michael Winterbottom's film is verifiably true. But the Factory story is so unbelievable that veracity isn't really the point. The point is that 24 Hour Party People manages to capture the anarchy and exhilaration of being in a club and feeling like you're at the centre of the universe, and it's as good a filmic representation of all the half-remembered stories and escapades you've pieced together from someone else's sofa the morning after as there is.
Human Traffic (1999)
Fun as it ends up being, going out is an absolutely gigantic faff, and Human Traffic is all about that faff. Finding the party, getting the word out, the point where it all stops being fun and you just want to sit down for several hours: it's all here. It's a more overtly Gen X version of Trainspotting and not nearly as good, but Human Traffic does nail more exactly the trajectory of a weekend and, without moralising too hard, makes the point that maybe – just maybe – the characters might be less miserable if they knocked the old extra-curriculars on the head for a bit. It also remains, along with the Pinter plays and his exquisitely dumb DVD commentaries on bargain bin classics The Business and Outlaw with director Nick Love ("I've never seen no stars before... broadsheet cunts"), a Danny Dyer career highlight. All together now: "Nice. One. Bruuuuuuuvaaaaaaa!"
Eden (2014)
Mia Hansen-Løve's film follows Paul, a DJ who was right in the centre of the French touch scene during its early days, along with his mate Stan. Everything's going well, until a couple of other, younger, actually much better upstarts named Guy-Man and Thomas start turning up at their parties and melting people's brains with 'Da Funk', while another tragedy knocks him sideways. After a few years of full clubs and good times, everything starts falling apart. As much as it's a soulful, melancholy film about ageing and dreams, it's one of the very few films with club scenes which actually look and sound anything like being in a club, and which look and sound in any way fun.
Paris is Burning (1990)
Without queer club culture, there would be no club culture as we know it, and this landmark documentary is a testament to the drag balls of the late Eighties which have, 30 years later, gone from the underground of New York's queer scene to the broader mainstream. As well as the dancing and music, Paris is Burning doesn't gloss the bleaker aspects of the scene. Here the club is a stage, a soapbox and a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ people to build an intentional family at a time when the gathering storm of the Aids crisis was still being ignored by much of straight America. "It's about survival," director Jennie Livingston at the time. "It's about people who have a lot of prejudices against them and who have learned to survive with wit, dignity and energy."
Beats (2019)
Set back in 1994, Scottish teens Johnno and Spanner want to get into a rave, but with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act weighing heavy on anyone who likes fun, they have to get creative. It's a coming-of-age film at heart, full of indulgent warmth for these boys and their capers, and like any good coming-of-age film it's bittersweet. The euphoria of the rave is cut with the knowledge that these boys – much like the rave scene itself, the New Labour future the film hints towards, and indeed anyone at the peak of a great night out – will never be quite as free, united or exuberant again.
Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-92 (2018)
One of Jeremy Deller's artworks, 'The History of the World', is a spider diagram linking the worlds of acid house and brass bands via the KLF, deindustrialisation, the M25, civil unrest, advanced capitalism and Throbbing Gristle. This is the lecture version: a seminar about rave culture with young people in an A-level politics class, which places it at the centre of modern art. It was more than a musical and youth cultural phenomenon, Deller argues; it fundamentally changed Britain. Fascinating as it is, it also evokes that sense of growing panic you feel when you realise you've become trapped in the smoking area by a bloke – always a bloke – who seemed pretty sound when he asked for your lighter but has been talking about Maceo Plex for the last 25 minutes without stopping for breath. Deller is not that bloke, though. His theories pull Karl Marx, early Christianity, the battle of Orgreave and the Roland TB-303 together.
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