ABBA‘s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) is thumping away, though it’s still only 11.45, and the joint is filling up. The décor, like the music, feels rooted in the Seventies and Eighties, which is reassuringly familiar for a codger like me, since that is the era when I came of age.
Not that anyone else in here tonight was around back then. The average age of those I talk to is 23, all of them enjoying exactly the same sort of night on the town that once appealed to their parents – or their grandparents.
You can chronicle the modern social/celebrity history of London through its nightspots, as they rise and fall with the fashion tide. Once the in-crowd might have flocked to the West End to party at Annabel’s (think Charles and Diana) or Tramp (Andrew and Fergie). The William and Harry generation leaned more towards the 151 Club or Mahiki in the Sloane zones of Kensington and Chelsea, or popped over the river to the Ministry of Sound near Waterloo.
These days, the vibe has shifted from West to the edgier East and North, to places like Clerkenwell and Camden.
Yet through it all, down in suburban South London, one nightclub has kept on going regardless. Infernos has never really fallen out of fashion – because it was never in fashion in the first place.
One of the adjectives most commonly used to describe it is ‘cheesy’, in an affectionate way. Like Aesop’s fable of the tortoise versus the hare, this place – with its cruise ship ambiance and shag-pile carpet – cheerfully plods along safe in the knowledge that every Friday and Saturday up to 1,500 people will suddenly decide they’d quite like a drink and a dance and, well, there’s always Infernos in Clapham.
And some of those people, it turns out, are rather famous. Earlier this month, there was huge excitement that Lola Tung was in town. Miss Tung is the star of the smash hit Amazon Prime TV series, The Summer I Turned Pretty, which producers are now going to turn into a movie.
Edgy this place is not, writes Robert Hardman (here on his night out). That, again, is part of the charm. One of the staff tells me the overall aim is to be neither retro nor hip but ‘feelgood’
And where was Miss Tung at the very moment le tout Hollywood was talking about her? New York? Cannes? Beverly Hills? Actually, she was to be found down in Clapham, bopping to bygone hits here at Infernos.
A gobsmacked clubgoer had spotted her on the dancefloor and Miss Tung cheerfully posed for a selfie. As one of the staff tells me: ‘She had to queue with everyone else. You check your ego at the door here.’
Another A-lister who has been known to swap the red carpet for a night on the booze-soaked carpet of Infernos is Margot Robbie. The star of Barbie (for which, as a producer, she received an Oscar nomination) was recently listed by Forbes magazine as the highest-paid actress in the world. So what would draw her to this converted cinema on Clapham High Street?
‘Everyone is wasted and so sweaty. Everyone looks a mess,’ she told an interviewer, explaining that until recently she and her Surrey-born husband lived just round the corner. ‘By the time I make it to Infernos, I look so revolting no one’s going to look twice.’
No one strikes me as particularly wasted or sweaty when I arrive, but the night is young. The core clientele seems to be twenty-something worker bees, plus a few students from the better-off end of the spectrum.
Some Infernos-goers are rather famous. Earlier this month, there was huge excitement that The Summer I turned Pretty’s Lola Tung was there. Another A-lister who has swapped the red carpet for a night on the booze-soaked carpet of Infernos is Margot Robbie
This place is not madly West End expensive but it’s not cheap either. Entry is £13 (£12 if you arrive before midnight). Drinks start at £6.60 for a beer, £7.95 for a small vodka and tonic, £12.90 for a margarita, and £25 for a round of five shots.
Not being entirely au fait with the current club scene, I’ve enlisted my nephew Tom, 23, and a gang of his friends to give me some insights. In return, I have splashed out £50 on a ‘VIP booth’ for them, which gets us our own table above the main dancefloor (you even get a velvet rope) where things can get pricier.
The waitress service here includes Grey Goose vodka, £195 a bottle, with mixers thrown in. It makes the champagne (£95 a bottle) seem a bargain.
Outside, there’s a queue stretching down the high street, though it moves along briskly enough. What’s the appeal? ‘I know it’s cheesy,’ says Andrew, 23, a trainee accountant, ‘but I quite like the cheese. At some clubs you pay for a particular night with a particular DJ. Here it’s always retro, even if it’s a bit repetitive. It’s not taking itself too seriously.’ Indeed not, given that its own website pokes fun at the carpets that have become part of the Infernos brand. While other clubs wouldn’t dream of covering their floors in the stuff (not least for practical reasons when it comes to spilled drinks), this place has pointedly stuck to the same swirly pattern it’s always had.
We are talking above the din of Cindy Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun, which I recall was in the charts when I was in my pre-university gap year.
Not being entirely au fait with the current club scene, I’ve enlisted my nephew Tom, 23, and his friends to give me insights. In return, I have splashed out £50 on a ‘VIP booth’ for them
Edgy this place is not. That, again, is part of the charm. One of the staff tells me the overall aim is to be neither retro nor hip but ‘feelgood’, adding: ‘We want hands in the air. So that means upbeat sounds from across the ages.’
‘It might feel more cheap and cheerful than some places. But it feels safe,’ says Izzy, 22, another trainee accountant. ‘It’s not creepy. In some clubs you might get sleazy men throwing money around, then hitting on you. This one is well-organised.’
The queue system works, it’s easy to get drinks, and the loos, while not a thing of beauty, are in a decent state. The staff are certainly on the ball, mingling nonchalantly in pink gilets but ready to pounce at the first sign of trouble – as they do when a man strips off his shirt. It’s hardly a breach of the peace but a couple of pink-vested heavies bundle him off in seconds.
At around 1am, I wander upstairs where there is another dancefloor (featured in the 2011 film, The Inbetweeners) and signs to the ‘Smoking Area’. I am somewhat astonished such a thing still exists. There, I meet Phoebe and her trans friend, Cameron, both up from rural Surrey for a night on the tiles in their little black dresses and both echoing the fact this is a place where a girl can feel comfortable.
‘As a trans person, I find this place non-threatening. It’s chilled,’ says Cameron. ‘There’s no trouble.’ She does have one complaint, though: ‘It feels a bit young.’ How old is she? ‘I’m 24.’ In which case I should probably be hurled into the street, though everyone is too polite to say so.
It is all so Eighties my young posse demand I take a turn on one of the two podiums. I expect to be roundly booed by the dancefloor below but I even get a few cheers
Back in our VIP booth, my nephew’s gang point out an actual celebrity. Freddie Browne, a star of reality show, Made In Chelsea, is here as an ‘ambassador’ for Infernos.
‘When most of these people left home earlier tonight, they hadn’t actually planned to come here but they’ve ended up here anyway,’ says Mr Browne. ‘And celebrities like the fact it’s a club where you come not to be noticed. We had the entire cast of a Netflix show in the other night and no one bothered them.’
By now, ABBA has come back round again (Voulez-Vous) and a sudden blast of dry ice heralds a balloon drop. It is all so Eighties that my young posse demand I take a turn on one of the two podiums. I expect to be roundly booed by the dancefloor below but, aside from the baffled looks, I even get a few cheers (whether they’re ironic or sympathetic is hard to tell).
But then, Infernos is now comfortably middle-aged itself, as are its owners. Indeed, this year marks its 40th birthday as a nightclub. Built as the Majestic Cinema in 1914, it survived two world wars before being converted into a recording studio in the 1960s.
The Sex Pistols and Brian Eno were among those through the door in those days before it became a nightclub called Cinatras in 1985. In 2003 it was bought by Mint Group, a fledgling bar and club business set up by a couple of young ex-public school entrepreneurs, Olly Bengough and Alex Rutherford, who are still in charge 22 years later.
As I leave (with a rammed dancefloor jumping around to Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off), I ask one more trio of clubbers what has brought them here.
‘I don’t really know,’ says charity worker Louise, 28. ‘It’s a place where you just end up. But you know you’ll be back again soon enough.’ And so will those incognito celebrities.
It reminds me of the time Hollywood legend Harrison Ford took his family on a canal holiday in North Wales in 2004. No one bothered him because no one imagined that the bloke steering a barge down the Llangollen Canal could possibly be Harrison Ford.
Remember that the next time you see Taylor Swift on the dancefloor at Infernos.
