Dirrrty : Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 2)

Jack Cullen looks at how the club's iconic playlist was a lot smarter than it at first seemed, and how cheap prices led to cheaper thrills.

Once security waved you in, there was a flurry of activity - the two pound pay desk, Dante’s cloakroom, your wrist bands were cut and they stamped you with a large, whelky, branding iron dripping in permanent ink that said [G - A - Y] as big as a human wrist would allow. This would find its way onto your bedsheets, sofa arms and sex life, a painterly subdivision of the club’s inescapable marketing.

The cloakroom, essentially two Billy bookcases, would be declared full around midnight before most people arrived, and so a ziggurat of TK Maxx man bags, Himalayan pashminas (vital accessories), and a few UCL computing and coding manuals for good measure, would begin to assemble in the main space. People shoved bags down the backs of fruit machines, hid scarves inside mop buckets or stowed their chunky winter coats under dance podiums where they would immediately be thoroughly soaked in beer. I don’t want to shit talk G-A-Y Late, but a fair word to describe the set up would be - imperfect.

Waltzing into G-A-Y Late was like entering a space-themed panic room, it looked like someone had tasked a struggling Year 10 art class with making the inside of a shoebox look like “the millennium”. There was something nostalgic about the prom lighting, reminiscent of early Drew Barrymore films, and there was something unnerving about it too. No windows, low ceilings, screens everywhere and the smell of Joop masking bleach masking vomit. It might have been the recreational limb of a hot new death camp, or some sort of condemned youth centre from a late night Channel 5 documentary. The glitter-effect walls held more TVs than your average Currys. They all showed exactly the same music video, a kaleidoscopic vista of Kelly Clarkson’s bricklayers’ mouth. It was like being inside the head of a giant spider and then scuttling to the edge of Alexandra Burke’s bath tub - There she is! 48 times! After a while you began to feel like you had climbed into the files of iMovie itself, trapped in a stop motion multiverse of Samantha Mumba’s braids.

If you had to create G-A-Y Late: The Fragrance, like on an Apprentice task, you would probably pour in strawberry Mirinda, off-brand Jean-Paul Gaultier, a melted Solero, Sure deodorant, McDonald’s sweet and sour sauce, a colony of flying ants, green jelly babies and tar. You could chew the air in this heady, hard-hitting, uncompromising, funworld. But we loved it. Youngsters need constants in their life, and G-A-Y Late was constantly open and deranged. As gay orphans we knew that no matter how bad a day was, we could go there, it would be open, they would be playing Wrecking Ball, and we could sway across the sticky floor to a brand new tourist’s face and say “Hey! I love your Vivenne Westwood brooch!” and they would say “Oh my gaaaad, geeee, thank you. I bought it today. I love Vivienne Westwood! I love London! Have you met Kate Middleton before?” - “Yeah, we meet for fish and chips all the time, at Big Buckingham Tower” and three hours later you’d be having sex behind a bin.

G-A-Y Late was L-shaped, with a tiny front-left dance floor and a way-back dance floor, both of which you stepped down into. It was only one step, but a step nevertheless, and some nights that step could be a struggle. But falling over didn’t matter too much once you were inside, in fact, nobody really cared if you died. Hmm. What would happen if you died in G-A-Y Late? The twinks would probably pull a River Island coat across you, place wedges of lime over each eyelid, and then form a circle around your already forgotten corpse and carry on singing “The rest is still unwrittennnnnn”

From the bar, while waiting anywhere between 10 and 90 minutes to get served, you could scan who was dancing at each end of the club, and make your pulling plan. If you fell out with someone, which was quite often at G-A-Y Late, you could keep a distance by ruling polar dance floors to each other, the far back dance floor being the preference because it wasn’t constantly eroded by toilet traffic. Occasionally you might crane your neck - disguised as a little pirouette to Toxic - and check how your arch nemesis was getting on down there - hopefully they struck listening to a teary straight girl’s drunken rant about Megan Fox isn’t technically pretty and yet her boyfriend said she’s perfect.

Getting served wasn’t the easiest. You’d have twenty people lined along the bar, holding out wads of cash, all trying to make sure their elbow was one centimetre in front of yours.

This twenty wide queue was three deep at all times, six deep on the corner. But while it was craziest on the corner, you would get served quicker there because the bartenders’ service territories overlapped. In a normal pub bartenders might say hello to waiting customers, assure them they’ve been seen, but this was impossible at Late where the staff were blinded by revolving lights and working in a reverse-vacuum of Calvin Harris at 110 decibels. In Late, bartenders avoided eye contact with everyone and usually served tall people in white tops first. If you managed to get served, news would spread around the club and your friends would appear, cheerily piling on their drinks orders, exasperating the wait for other customers as you asked for “two beers, and eighteen Jager bombs please, oh - and another beer, and two vodka cokes, and a beer, and two beers, and four shots of tequila, and three beers”. You then rolled your eyes at the bartender as he struggled to understand your demands which were bordering on spoken word and even you couldn’t remember. Then you would carry your drinks precariously above your head sending a clear message for people to get out of your way or get drenched in Malibu.

DANCE WIV ME

There was a two-tiered stage block podium between the dancefloors, and a pillar-wrap podium down the far end. Straight girls love podiums. Sometimes they would forget to dance on them and just scroll their Blackberries while scowling, but even then they were still having a great time if they were standing on a podium. Gays on podiums…. Aha… there’s not enough liability insurance in the world. If you thought rugby lads on a stag do were wild, wait until you see twinks on a podium when Don’t Cha drops. I wouldn’t be surprised if a science documentary one day reveals that the earth isn’t spinning due to angular momentum after all, it was three rival twinks dancing to Lizzo on an upturned fruit box all along. Podiums were a good place to stash your fag hag while you got off with someone. Occasionally you would turn and wave at them, maybe squeal - “Yeah gurrrrl! Whooooooo! You do thaaaat!” - before turning back to kiss the shop assistant who was low-key fingering you behind a mountain of totes.

BILLS, BILLS, BILLS

Everything at G-A-Y Late was CHEAP, which gave us - the barely legal patrons - a joyous false sense of spending power. You know when small children have those pretend toy shops and sell each other plastic fried eggs for invisible money? Well we were the gay bar version of that, playing God with our £1.99 “Skittle Bombs”, ordering shots for the gay cast of The Lion King who we just met at a urinal tray.

God knows what vodka it was that they went with at Late, but it would run wild through your veins for about four days, spurring you on to make erratic chirpy conversation with strangers on the tube, until suddenly it failed you and you snapped at your Mum on the phone or collapsed in JD Sports. The prices didn’t make sense to me. It was cheap and yet the following day you would still be stung by how much money you’d spent, because Jeremy’s business strategy hinges on volume, not quality. G-A-Y Late isn’t somewhere to sip a Negroni and discuss Sophie’s Choice. Today, TikTok kids are looking for fancy things to film, they’ve been cultivated to constantly want to ‘discover’ and ‘recommend’ new things, they’re like a generation of Amanda Lamb gremlins continuously presenting A Place In The Sun except it’s A Milkshake In Brent Wood. We didn’t have this disease. Nobody was looking at us except Gary on Gaydar Chat and the old man in the corner. Consequently we could do as we pleased and look terrible while doing it. Each of us drank a small lake of vodka and Red Bull (or the G-A-Y Late approximations). I can still see and hear that satisfying fizzy plop as the bar boy dropped Jager shots into small grimy dishwasher-hot tumblers, and we knocked them back, one after the other, while shouting “They tried to make me go to Rehab - I said NOo Noo Noo”

Some people blame the NHS waiting lists on immigrants. Those people clearly never saw the carnage at G-A-Y Late. In a few years nurses will stand around my hospital death bed mournfully and say - “We took your bloods Jack, and the good news is, you’re going to live a few more weeks, but the bad news is - Alex Gaudino is still there - in your white blood cells - singing Destination Unknown”

GOING ROUND LIKE BOM BOM BOMMM!

I want to focus now on the music at G-A-Y Late, which was a maelstrom of Y2K divas, pop princesses, sickly commercial vocal-led drive-time dance anthems, girl group appreciation, and maximum impact earworms.

The club had a juke box that gave the impression we, the entitled twinks, were in charge. But Jeremy Joseph would appear every hour or so, login to the jukebox with his special magnetic key, and delete songs under the pretence of clearing out repeats, before inputting the songs that he wanted. In doing so he maintained an eagle-grip over his hard niche sound, while also making money. It’s a credit to Jeremy that he was present doing this. Many bar owners his age aren’t to be found anywhere onsite, especially on a week night. He is married to his product, he knew what worked, and he fiercely protected this. Good on him. Staying open in London isn’t easy, and as future decades would demonstrate - idealism doesn’t alway sell. As Cilla Black said to Dale Winton when he was fed up of Supermarket Sweep - “Darling, don’t quit the hit”

Occasionally a new song would be admitted into his club’s canon of pop music. There was a personal pecking order for artists, I sensed. Any old shite by Alexanda Burke would immediately rocket into the A List and be played twice in one night, but a more leftfield artist like Robyn, she had to really prove herself if she wanted a look in.

I Whatsapped a bunch of friends last week and said “Send me the song that for you defines a night out in G-A-Y Late”. This is the list:

Happiness by Alexis Jordan

Wings Were Made To Fly by Little Mix

Firework by Katy Perry

Work by Kelly Rowland [Freemasons Remix]

Starships by Nicki Minaj

Good Girl by Alexis Jordan

Notorious by The Saturdays

Tik Tok by Kesha

That’s Not My Name by The Ting Tings

Bom Bom by Sam & The Womp

Don’t Make Me Start Without You - Alexandra Burke

Destination Unknown by Alex Gaudino

I Follow Rivers by Lykke Li (The Magician Remix)

Play by Jennifer Lopez

1 Thing by Amerie

Call On Me by Eric Prydz

Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal

Commander by Kelly Rowland

She Wolf by Shakira

From Paris To Berlin by Infernal

Bad Boys by Alexandra Burke

Hot N Cold by Katy Perry

Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child

Scream & Shout by Will I Am featuring Britney

Please Don’t Stop The Music by Rihanna

Get Sexy by Sugababes

Beauty & The Beat by Justin Beiber & Nicki Minaj

Shake It Off by Taylor Swift

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a classic gay bar playlist. If a BBC sitcom does a scene in a gay club then they usually play I Will Survive or I'm Coming Out, or Man I Feel Like A Woman. But G-A-Y Late was a younger, more saccharine and synthy sound. Quite London infused, the music also gave a nod to tourists, and almost all of the songs are ones you can enjoy noisily singing along to with friends. Jeremy boldly carried the torch for girly pop when it was arguably in the long grass and he stayed loyal to acts who had appeared at Heaven. Perhaps because he employed so many young people, the club spoke our language, we too knew that Kelly Rowland was bliss and that Amerie was to be taken seriously. The fact that two people chose Alexis Jordan, a reasonably obscure (don’t shoot me) American bubblegum dance-pop artist, is intriguing isn’t it. It shows how G-A-Y Late had a soft spot for Pan-Atlantic Y2K divas. Good venues think carefully about their sound, and the best venues are bold enough to assert a vibe. It’s not immediately obvious, but Alexis Jordan is definitely a vibe, G-A-Y had their own queer identity in this way. If you asked people in Trafalgar Square to name gay icons, you’d be there for a several months before someone said Alexis Jordan. G-A-Y Late was discerning, and they knew their clientele well.

One day BRAT summer would rise, but for now, we had to make do with Cher Lloyd and Tulisa. Nowhere else in London would play such brazen trash. The whole ‘BRAT’ oeuvre is influenced by, and in part descended from these days, this heavily produced world of Blackout era Britney, Black Eyed Peas at their shallowest, Pitbull-powered J-Lo, and LMFAO. Yet today Charli would probably pitch her gay spirit animal as being an East London twink. But G-A-Y Late was giving Charli air and screen time from the Sucker album onwards. Boom Clap, Doing It, Break The Rules, After The After Party and Boys are all certified G-A-Y Late anthems. I think if the BRAT phenomenon had happened two years sooner, G-A-Y Late would still be open. My friend Ally runs The Clapham Grand and he told me that Charli has almost single-handedly revived bar culture - she’s inspired a new generation to get absolutely shit faced.

G-A-Y Late didn’t necessarily play ‘camp classics’, but golden oldies did also feature here and there - vintage Kylie, a bit of Gina Gee or Whigfield, some classic Mariah, and Whitney’s How Will I Know were all staples of a night in G-A-Y Late. In some ways the playlist acted as an aural scrapbook for Jeremy’s impressive credits too. This is a man who has hosted Madonna, Lady Gaga and Britney at his club Heaven. He has provided jugs of water, arranged snacks for, and given Westminster parking instructions to, some of the biggest names in pop! I like to think once you’ve treaded the boards at Heaven, the G-A-Y empire dutifully force your singles onto the crowd from that moment onwards.

G-A-Y would also indulge us with a ballad occasionally. Come 2am, there was a sudden need among the lonely hearted to cry-sing Bleeding Love in a sweaty cross-eyed throng. G-A-Y Late understood the assignment, as children say these days.

I'M KINDA BUSYYY….

It’s important to note that during these years, we didn’t watch or post videos on our phones, it was inching into our lives, but by no means normal. Vanity began uploading videos of her drag gigs around 2012 and that felt high brow, and she was indeed slammed with a high phone bill. This was still the days of phone contracts laying out how many “picture messages” you could send. We were the guinea pigs of what would soon become ubiquitous, but the most tech-savvy punters in G-A-Y Late were only just starting to post Boomerangs (short looped mirror-motion videos) - of inane things like clinking glasses, or someone slipping over on a dropped McDonalds, or doing a bit of the Single Ladies dance routine. But generally speaking we posted low-quality blurry photos of ourselves mostly obscured behind long straightened fringes and faux-fur-rimmed Primark hoods. I went back through my Facebook yesterday and we looked like shiny alcoholic gay hedgehogs. Most people my age have deleted their Facebooks altogether because facing the facts of 2010 is a lot.

BUT… and it’s a big BUT… Music videos were eating up space in the collective gay groupthink, resurging as record labels all vied for their slice of attention on YouTube. Smart TVs were coming in fast, but in the meantime people were using HDMI cables to connect our laptops to our tellies. Before a night out, gays would all gravitate around YouTube like Victorian carol singers, we would coo and clap at the latest music videos, pointing out our favourite moments - “wait it’s coming, this bit, look!” It's quite normal now to just search YouTube on your TV and summon any old music video that you fancy, but this was new then. It felt like being in charge of MTV, and you could skip to your favourite bits - mind blowing!

I had an older boyfriend at the time and I remember him saying, gin and tonic in hand, cig in the other - “Oh are you boys just going to watch YouTube all night again? Or are you going out?”

We were so happy at home watching The Saturdays performing Missing You on a cold windy beach, drinking my boyfriend’s champagne, that we sometimes left it too late to leave for the club.

Music videos were taking prominence, along with YouTube comedy skits. We didn’t yet have hot influencers, our eyeballs were not plagued with gym-fit amateurs barking recycled jokes at us, we had Gwen Stefani “What You Waiting For”, directed by Sophie Muller - five minutes and nineteen seconds of sheer genius.

We had to decide… Do we straighten our hair and go out? Or do we stay here and watch Bad Romance twelve more times?

G-A-Y Late was perhaps the only bar in London that offered us both. Sure, they had TVs in places like KU Bar and such, but what they showed on those tellies was a bit random and interrupted with lame gay underwear trailers. We knew exactly what we wanted to watch. So did Jeremy Joseph.

Lady Gaga was one of the first major artists to spot and seize this new snowballing music video youth culture. Building on the preliminary work of Gwen Stefani, Nelly Furtado, Kesha and Fergie, Gaga’s videos became mini films, she changed the way other artists presented themselves, including of course - Beyoncé.

When Lady Gaga guested first on Beyonce’s song Videophone, Beyonce had Gaga smooching around on a green screen, doing the predictable sexy classic R&B thing that Beyoncé knew. But when it was Beyonce’s turn to guest appear on Gaga’s song. “Well well well” as my friend Dylan used to say….

Gaga’s team hired Ray Of Light director Jonas Akerlund to shoot a full on prison-based drama, packed with cameos and jokes and insane costumes, for Telephone - and it completely captured our hearts and imaginations. This video was not messing about. It sold millions of digital downloads. Rihanna soon followed with her arthouse poverty-porn video for We Found Love, being pushed around an ASDA car park by a gay model in a shopping trolley. Fantastic.

Cheryl Cole got in on the game too and we couldn't get enough. G-A-Y Late would come to a stand still as we all clutched our Forever 21 pearls and watched Cheryl stagger along a motorway underpass in dodgy multi-coloured leggings while sparse synths fired out of the ceiling’s speaker system at us like lightning. Call My Name is a masterpiece.

G-A-Y Late, with all of its millenial futurism and TV tackiness caught, partly by accident but seized upon with skill, the zeitgeist of this big budget music video telenovela pop wave. This was a place where you could dance, get laid, AND watch Your Body by Christina Aguilera. Nothing else mattered. We forgot that we had parents and jobs. We lived through these stars and cherished these videos like nuns strumming prayer beads. Today we scroll our phones for six hours a day. I wonder if that disease is worse than what we had - six hours of ceaseless liver bashing while watching JLS jump from cloud to cloud in Eyes Wide Shut.

Very occasionally G-A-Y Late would permit a song that didn't have a video, perhaps because the remix was so popular, like the Bimbo Jones version of Who Knew, or Seamus Haji’s Take A Bow. For these moments the screens would inexplicably show a photo of Jeremy with his dog, and ask you to donate to his London marathon efforts. In nightlife we call things that communicate with customers “talkies”, like a vertical prism-shaped menu asking you to leave a review or come to a quiz night. G-A-Y Late took this to the next level and would use its screens to hit punters with marketing and messaging. This is reasonably normal now but I feel like G-A-Y were early adopters of this. Now that social media is so prevalent, spaces are free again to play a slightly cooler game and not be continuously addressing customers while they’re trying to socialise with each other, you can always hit them later with an Instagram ad.

Sadly the renaissance of the extended music video came to an end. Maybe Swiftaggedon didn't lend itself so much to engaging cinema gems, or was it the advent of digital subscription packages like Netflix, making it less risky to commission gay TV shows. RuPaul was coming our way thick and fast, and Sissy That Walk is more of a sound than a watch. Gen Z didn't need music videos so much because they were the stars. Each twink now came with 5000 Instagram followers and a micro business selling pants. “If you can't love yourself - how the hell are you gonna love someone else?” became the ethos. We had never really loved ourselves. But we loved Fergie, and that was enough. But now we had to perform being happy and talk about mental health and self care. Where did that leave G-A-Y Late with its army of bitchfest twinks? Maybe it was time to apply for better paid jobs and embrace our thirties. Maybe it was time to book flights to Berlin.

Just before G-A-Y Late closed, a friend went there in 2022, and he reported back to say that the playlist was mostly the same, but the newer hits didn't gel so well. Jeremy was trying to keep up with Wet Ass Pussy and Jack Harlow, but boys were standing around the edges looking at Grindr. And my friend saw something truly horrifying… There was a boy sipping from his own flask of cucumber water, in a Cross-Fit vest.

Businesses moved out of Soho, people started sitting at home on their laptops, and an event-based nightlife ecosystem of big raves - things that translated better onto social media, began to take centre stage. As twinks we were never saying “Have you got tickets to X party” or “Are you guys going to Y next weekend?”. G-A-Y Late was on borrowed time.

* * * * *

UP NEXT: Get Sexy Right NOW: Remembering G-A-Y Late (Part 3) I look at what we wore for a night out in G-A-Y Late, and look back at some of the big characters - including of course Mary, the iconic toilet attendant.

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