Night clubs are places of wonder for me. Not the usual ones where people wear ordinary clothes and dance in an ordinary way. The legendary ones have atmosphere and enough resident characters to encourage ‘muggles’ to become magic folk, for a night at least. A good club isn’t just about drinks with a few mates. Most have about the same shelf life as art movements: a few years if you are lucky. I began with Heaven about 25 years ago. Taking the train from a boring college party I’d not even been to a gay bar. Walking in from what was a dingy alley below Charing Cross station, I passed into the fairy hills, from a drab straight world,  to a place full of light and treasure. Like Doctor Who clubs are reincarnated with new personalities and Heaven had been a disco called Global Village. The new Heaven ‘Ultra Disco’ was certainly new and improved; it was the best, the newest and the sexiest club, throbbing with energy. The club lights we take for granted now were a revelation then, better than anywhere, even New York. The extraordinary thing was that it was gay: for once we had the best place to go: not the usual dive or a club  on a slow night.

One of Heaven’s secrets is the flow through one space into another. Different music, different atmospheres, and lots of places to stand and watch, or be seen. Heaven still has the smaller Cellar Bar; then it was a dress code space for New Romantics and my friends and I had to reinvent ourselves to get in. Off the peg would not do, imagination was the key to entry. We scoured charity shops, Great Gear on the Kings Road, and Kensington market for ingredients to transform into Birds of Paradise. Pretending we were special, conjuring outrageous fortune you could cross over into Alice’s looking glass world. The competition was fierce and like the Moulin Rouge there were Jane Avrils to compete with Boy George, Marilyn and Philip Salon took doses of exhibitionism that, as Quentin Crisp said, would kill ordinary people. Steve Strange and Salon were masters of ceremonies but most of all I remember the famous door whore Scarlet, a fierce but wonderful looking hatchet faced woman with shark’s fin hair, who guarded entry to Cha Cha and patrolled the Asylum.

The flash money of the eighties, the rot of heroin and coke, destroyed the peacock clubs like Camden Palace, Pyramid and Taboo. Kinky Gerlinky was a brief bonfire of every costume going but, if you hadn’t grown up and got a proper job, those of us who still wanted fantasy found it in the fetish bars. Some people think they are mean and moody places but I never see them that way. If the fairy hills of Heaven were full of light then Backstreet, and the old Coleherne were filled with dark steely reflections. Backstreet is not big but it has atmosphere and deviants abound. The dark moves - bodies have an oily shine - and a dance of a kind is taking place. Sometimes the eye is full of mischief, sometimes malice. Binding spells are cast below the boot strung ceiling (like the feet of the hanged or resurrected), and wishes and curses are fulfilled.