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Queens of Noize smash up Camden

Dress to excess: glam fun rules on the Smash and Grab dance floor at Proud

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Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock without access to celeb gossip magazines, you must have heard of Smash And Grab at Punk. You know, Thursday night Soho parties packed with cool kids in a bijou basement where you can’t move on the dancefloor without crashing into Daisy Lowe, Kate Moss, Agyness Deyn, Henry Holland or tousle-haired members of MGMT or Dirty Pretty Things.

Ruled by DJ duo the Queens Of Noize, S ’n’ G quickly became the hottest ticket in town, with paps outside to prove it. But after 18 months of Smashing And Grabbing, the Punk party’s over. Yet S ’n’ G lives on, bigger and better than ever, in Camden.

“We’d loved Punk, but we outgrew its size, plus in summer you want to be able to go outside,” says Mairead Nash, half of the Queens. “And it’s all about Camden right now,” adds partner Tabitha Denholme.

Smash And Grab’s new home is the generously proportioned Proud galleries. So last Thursday, we headed up the Northern line to help them throw one hell of a moving-in party.

On a sunny spring evening, Camden’s coolest venue was awash with giggling, hip-wiggling indie-kids, fancy-dress madness, giant games of Twister, twinkly fairy lights, songs about love and live music. Reams of live acts are lining up to perform. Florence And The Machine trod the boards the other night and Juliette And The Licks will play there soon. And unlike one-room gigs, here partygoers can skip between the main room, the alfresco terrace and themed stables where DJs from Modular and Platform Magazine spin records from every imaginable era.

“We wanted Smash to feel more festival than club,” the Queens tell me. “Rob da Bank, Bestival’s boss, is a good friend and we always play there. It’s the same spirit as Smash And Grab — being silly, dressing up and snogging.”
There are eight cosy stables in Proud — one a liberally stocked bar — offering round-the-wall seating and various fun ’n’ games. We plumped for a central stable with a low, flashing podium complete with a pole, around which, after four rounds of tequila, we swung ourselves with gusto.

Each stable is individually themed. There’s the giant Twister game stable where I accidentally threw the giant dice at a girl in leopard-print leggings before wrapping my right leg under a boy in a tiger-striped waistcoat. Then there’s the love shack with the Board Of Love where I pinned up a note to the scrummy hottie lookalike for Bret “Flight Of The Conchords” McKenzie (alas, by night’s end I’d lost him).

At the shore leave shack I found my playmate Rachel just in time before she had “I Heart Camden” tattooed on her forehead. From there I whisked her off to Hot Breath Karaoke to squawk through It Must’ve Been Love.

And there was the Extreme Beyond Retro Dressing-Up Box, where every item was less than a fiver. It took me three minutes to cobble together a new outfit made mostly of neon spandex.

Not that I stood out. Smash And Grab draws the most attractive young scenesters in the most outlandish clothes. It’s like one giant episode of Skins: a pink pompom here, polka-dot braces, jodhpurs and a tutu there. In fact, the entire cast of Skins, old and new, has, at some point, graced Smash’s dance floor.

Although in reality the Queens call London Fields home, Camden is now spiritual home to their party. “East London’s great but it’s all a bit ironic and serious. We wanted silliness,” they said. And silliness, in Proud, is what they’ve got. They actually had to rein things in on opening night when someone’s idea of having the sort of films Jacqui Smith’s husband might appreciate playing in every stable raised eyebrows. “That was a bit of a mistake,” giggle the girls.

Risqué movies aside, Smash’s new home is a treat, particularly as the gigantic, drink-friendly terrace means you can sip and smoke as you like.
“It’s great out here,” say the girls, waving Lucky Strikes round their new queendom. “More like a festival field. ‘Hey, shall we share a cigarette in a deckchair under the stars?’ is a much better line than ‘Fancy a fag in the road out in Soho?’ Don’t you think?”
●Smash And Grab, every Thursday, Proud, The Horse Hospital, Stables Market, Chalk Farm Rd, NW1 (020 7482 3867, atproud.net), 7.30pm-2.30am, £8, £5 until 10pm. Tube: Camden

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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