new nightclub opens in wisbech- very long

Saturday night i attended the launch party of a new nightclub called Summit in my home town of Wisbech.I was quite optomistic about the possibillities of the place having become jaded with the peterborogh club scene some months ago.
Unfortunatly the place in no way came even close to living up to the hype surrounding its pre-launch publicity.Suprising no,but quite frankly the place looks like a cowboy rush-job barn conversion not a multi million scratch built superclub.
The entertainers and club dancers and i use the word loosely were dressed in boiler suits and filter masks ala Altern8 circa 1992.

The night started encouragingly enough despite the delays in getting in, the crowd was in good banter, resoundly booing the improptue mime performance of the altern8 clones sent bravely out to entertain the crowd.
The first dj set in the red room the only real clubroom of three with any atmosphere was an uplifting progressive house set featuring live electrical guitar performance that could almost rival hendrix for its psychodelic riffs washed over seemlessly with funkadelic and latin beats.
The women were fit and jiggy the men were washed and non-smelly.Clubbers from wisbech kings lynn and peterborogh had overcome their traditional contempt for one another,and were generally of one mind that the whole east anglian club scene was basically in need of a good shake up and this could be the start of a new golden age of fenland clubbing,if only we all just beleived in it,we could build something unique and special.we had our dream,for a brief glorious moment,it was real,a vision of a world in which regional differences did not matter all that mattered was having the right attitude.It did not that you lived 20 miles down the road,all that mattered was coming together to have a good time.

It lasted till about 2am.

By 2am it was the lack of seating was apparent people had taken to sitting on the steps of the dancefloor, a habit not encouraged in even the most humble of dive clubs let alone a supposed superclub.people became over tired and irritable.
People had finally navigated their way to the white room,the third of the dancefloors,to find a tiny granny attic painted in one solid glaring tone of white so bright only a handful of people braved its clinical light most turning round and heading back as soon as they entered,trying to dance in such a sterile atmosphere was akin to the average person spontaneously breaking into dance in the middle of a busy supermarket.
People began to realise a number of the promised headliners were unlikely to appear,frustrations grew.
The local club dealers,expecting tight security and rumours of the police using sniffer dogs to vet clubbgoers had made even the most determined pusher only risk smuggling in very limited ammounts of pills.As their limited supply of drugs was quickly diminished the pushers began to notice their own punters asking around for alternative sources,amongst the known pusher faces from further afield,also drawn from their own patches by the allure of rich pickings.Every hand shake was met by suspicious glances from the three loose alliences of dealers,cautious about losing their own custom,on the look out for new trade and anxious to identify their new oppostition.Stooges were sent out to approach the unwary potential freelance dealers and ask for drugs.i expect a good kickin outside would be waiting at the end of the night had anyone been stupid enough to have offered to sell them some without adequate back up muscle of their own.And by 2am it seemed there was a disproportionate ammount of muscle in the club.even the 20 stromg team of bouncers were begining to look nervous.
the club rapidly began to empty out shortly after the bars closed at 2.10am,leaving perhaps 250 people out of the original 1000 to see out the remaining two hours.
Friendly greetings that had characterised the early hours were gradually replaced by sullen nods and grunts

Many people had brought along those hand sized neon coloured wands,glowsticks popular ,the ones that acentuate hand gestures and show the world how unco-ordinated your dancing is.a selection of which are illustrated here http://www.qlight.com/Products/products.html
The american manufactured product has according to the website passed US saftey regulations
http://www.qlight.com/FAQ.htm#T1
But that does not preclude cheap immatations using a different cheaper and potentially hazardous material.

Any way turns out some of these wands contain some kind of liquid/gas which burns/irratates on contact with the skin.
Without the outer casing to identify which brand it was there is little chance of trading standards being able to easily isolate the responsible brand from the hundreds of individual makers.
Well somebody wandered up to someone for some reason with one of these in his hand, turned round and burst it in front of the victims face covering him with a fine spray of gas/pressurised liquid .
I didnt see the attack and I am not sure what the gas is,or how the casing was pierced/shattered [though both victim and witness were adament it was no accident]but i saw the victim 2 hours afterwards and he had developed large red stain like blotches/burns to his forehead and temple.Thankfully it missed his eye but i am pretty sure it could have potentially blinded him.
.


unfortunatly the victim (with the very vociferous prompting of his so called friend) refused to report the attack to the management or even seek medical treatment despite my best efforts to encourage him to do so (which by the way is not easy when the friend is bellowing "we'll sort it ourselves" in an agitated manner over the top of your reasoning,(this friend BTW had earlier in the evening accused me of being a plainsclothes cop so it seemed in the sake of preservation not a wise idea to argue at great length with an agitated paranoid potentially violent criminal )
Without the victims personal account the management are unlikely to prohibit such items on the club premises so potentially this could happen again in the club with perhaps more serious consequences such as the loss of an eye..

The threat of a serious escalation of violence as the dealers establish their pecking orders,attempt to drive one another out of the club,and seek revenge.makes me feel i should probally be elsewhere for the foreseeable future.
Maybe things will settle down as quickly as they blew up,
maybe the summit will fulfill its potential as an alternative and unique clubbing experience away from the mainstream venues.maybe it will get a decent refubishment maybe turning the white room into a proper chill out room would be a start.
Then again perhaps in six months the whole place will burn to the ground and be gone as unexpededly as it arrived.

I guess the moral of the story is,if you build it they will come,but you might not like who "they" turn out to be.
........
Background info
http://www.wisbech-standard.co.uk/news/03_08_01/high.asp

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Summit would put Wisbech firmly on the clubbing map, to compete with the likes of Liverpool’s Cream, Sheffield’s Gatecrasher and London’s Ministry of Sound.

</font>

No it wont.it will be hard pressed to compete with Bingo at the local Empire Theatre.
Let alone ministry of sound,unless ministry deciede to relocate to somewhere with no rail links,with bitter and sometimes violent local animosity and paint the interiors of the three dancerooms individualy from floor to ceiling with three job lots of matt gloss ),forget to put more than a dozen seats in each of its two advertised chill out rooms though the term chill out corridor would be more apt,ignore and enforce its own dress code policy selectively and completely at random ,advertise big name acts that fail to materialise.And finally-place the club admission queue directly in the path of the police stations emergency vehicle entrance requiring two policemen from a seriously undermanned force to stand there using up limited overtime allocation on a busy friday and saturday evening just to make sure the entrance is unobstructed.