80s Power Ballads – Scala

I decided to add a new category to my posts, ‘Alternative Nights’, as I didn’t feel particularly comfortable adding this post to ‘Raving Nights’. I will use it for anything that I don’t consider a rave…as from time to time it’s nice to change things up a bit. Especially with BerMuDa techno festival in Berlin only a week away, I thought I could do with a break from the normal ‘rave nights’. This night certainly didn’t fall into that category!

Every month, Scala hosts this night which is essentially a collection of the cheesiest music that you might expect to find at certain student nights around the country. The venue itself, which is often used for gigs, is a decent size and has a bar downstairs serving reasonably priced drinks…for London, and a main room upstairs for people to get their 80s groove on. There is a third bar on the floor above which is situated on a balcony overlooking the main dancefloor.

The music is the main selling point of the night, playing every classic 80s power ballad, some Atomic Kitten and the odd Glee remake or two. As you can imagine the crowd are an overall young, fun, and drunk bunch. However this was probably the area that most surprised me. I was expecting mostly rugby/football guys, completely smashed, barging their way around the dancefloor and a lot of confrontations arising as a result. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I was wrong.

There was a great atmosphere around the club, with about 80% of the punters making a decent effort with their fancy dress. As it was the Halloween weekend, there was an eclectic mix of the 80s style wigs, star sunglasses, inflatable instruments, with the fake-blood covered zombies, vampires, and ghosts. A few people had combined the two themes.

We turned up around 10.30pm with our tickets, there was no queue outside so we headed straight in and to the bar. The queue for drinks wasn’t too bad, despite the club bring pretty full already. The night was spent mostly on the dancefloor, which in true student-y cheese night style was unbelievably slippery covered in the spillages of many many drinks, mixed with the debris of the confetti cannon that repeatedly fired out an explosion of either metallic or multi-coloured pieces more than a few times throughout the night. There was also a stage that we managed to climb up on to, and obviously a good few hundred people, most of which had an inflatable guitar/sax/microphone in hand to assist them in ’rocking out’. As usual it would be hard to do justice to the night without a video clip:

I wouldn’t normally come back from a night like this overly enthusiastic but I have to admit I really enjoyed it and can definitely see why people would go back. It’s probably a good thing that it is only held once a month, since the play list can’t possibly differ that much each time. Would I recommend checking it out for the reasonable price of £7 and finding out if there’s a little bit of 80s hidden away inside you? Definitely. Is it good enough to justify the £20 New Years Eve bash? Ummm…no. See you on the dancefloor.