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Fancy a secret rave?
By Martha De Lacey, London Lite 25.04.08
Clash: dungarees and lace hold-ups were acceptable in the Eighties
Flashback: old skool acid house and Pat Sharp hairdos make a comeback at Mulletover's seOne party
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Some clubs seem to have been made with just one purpose in mind. Notting Hill Arts Club was built to queue outside of; Fabric for losing lifelong mates in Room One and making night-long pals on the stairwell. You go to Boujis to land a member of the landed gentry, while seOne, deep in the underbelly of the London Bridge arches, is, according to my friend Izzy, for “dirty great big fat silly fancy-dress raves”.
How perfect then that it was here we recently clinked our plastic glasses to the fourth birthday of Mulletover, London's staggeringly successful, secretly located, fancy-dress monthly warehouse mash-up.
The Mulletover parties kicked into life four years ago as the underground musical baby of Rob Hives and Stuart Geddes, two fine twentysomething specimens of the clubbing classes, growing increasingly weary with the suffocatingly pretentious London club scene. The duo fancied injecting a bit of the old silly-vanilly into dance floor days, so put on their wigs, fake 'taches and goggly specs, knocked their heads together and came up with a way of taking raving back to basics. And what's more fun than a surprise party?
To adhere to the ethos of ye olde days, when word-of-mouth raving was the only way to do it, the cheeky chappies decided not to disclose the whereabouts of their shindigs until the last nanosecond. It being 2008, however, they ditched word of mouth in favour of texting the location to ticketholders (£10 in advance on the website).
Mulletover has hosted techy-electro knees-ups in Shoreditch warehouses, on boats, in East End car parks, beneath Hackney train tracks, in Space (Ibiza, not “outer”) and even on mountaintops.
For their fourth birthday, Rob and Stuart thumbed through the fancy-dress back catalogue (masks, sinister Santas and rude reindeers, wigs, Valentine's, anti-Valentine's, January sale, tracksuits) and settled on an old skool acid house rave circa 1988.
My hand-picked group of appropriately shameless pals (who share my sense of childishness and relish every opportunity for a good rummage around Notting Hill's Retro Woman second-hand shops) and I received our location heads-up text that evening. With the boys heavily made-up, hair ferociously back-combed, pink Converse hi-tops laced and all of us sporting our finest Eighties neon, off we pranced to London Bridge, hitting seOne around midnight, when the fun really began...
The music quality at Mulletover is second to fun — I mean none. Big names on the underground technoscape have graced the hallowed DJ booths, including Damian Lazarus, Ivan Smagghe and Clive Henry, as well as new faces such as Simon Baker and Craig Torrence. The night we visited A Guy Called Gerald was spinning classic acid house 12-inches Voodoo Ray and Pink Lemonade — songs that sparked the movement back in 1988.
From under the London Bridge railway arches we burst into the cave-like, multi-roomed venue, twisting and bouncing beside girls in Day-Glo Lycra hotpants and off-the-shoulder smiley face T-shirts, in a sea of mullets to rival the tresses of Pat Sharp.
No matter how cool they are, shove a bunch of people in fancy dress into a confined space and suddenly all notions of arrogance vanish. They flail their arms about like lunatics, revelling in the music rather than in their next pose. At one point I bumped into a Rubik's Cube, then was caught by a wide-grinning geezer in a gaudy yellow shellsuit, who spun me in circles until all I could see was the Super Mario Brothers in hypercolour T-shirts. I glanced towards my friends: fishnetted Claire was robot dancing with Prince, while Benj and Ian big-fish-little-fish-cardboard-boxed with Bananarama. All of this to beautifully gritty acid house. Yum.
Mulletover operates a voucher-based drinks system: buy a roll of tokens and dole them out to the (superbly fancy-dressed) bar staff. Nice and simple for when the gin kicks in. Even better, every drink costs about £3, so there's no fiddling about with change or prices.
About 1,000 people rock up every month and, judging by the grins on the faces of the thirtysomethings smoking on the naughty step outside, once you've sipped from the Mulletover fountain there's no going back. “Where else can you dress in pyjamas one week and a gas mask the next?” shouted a yummy-looking bloke in, er, leopard-print drainpipes.
Indeed. Tomorrow, it's Rio Carnival. Mullefeather me up.
The next Mulletover is on April 25. Dress Code: Carnival Party. mulletover.co.uk
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