The Waiting Game

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For some venues, it is all about the queue…

For some club doormen and their female clipboard-wielding counterparts – the best part of their night is sending you home. Before you get in, preferably, or just after you have been waiting in the queue for over an hour. Either suffices and surely must bring on a frisson of pleasure that negates the actuality of standing ceremony outside a door in a bad puffa jacket all night.

Venues like queues. It shows that their club night or bar is THE place to be -- it is so popular, people are willing to wait patiently in the cold until they get in and can pay £4.50 for a bottled beer. People are drawn to queues in general, as the consensus is if other people are waiting, we should too to see what all the fuss is about. But queuing when you know you will definitely get somewhere eventually is a different thing to queuing on the off chance.

Favela Chic in Shoreditch, London is one such off-chance place, if you don’t get there by 9pm, than your only chance is to plead with the bouncers who obviously take great pleasure in such behaviour. They have a ‘one in, one out’ policy in place after 10pm on Saturday nights, a practise a lot of venues employ to keep numbers down, although it seems a little harsh when you may be let in but your partner has to wait outside for another ‘one’ to stumble out the doors, whenever that may be.

The trick is these places have rules – like school, the clipboarded ones are the teachers with the power and you, no matter what you earn, how you are dressed or what you look like, are mere children crowding the gate. You have to obey the rules to have a good time – check the door policy before you set off and go with exactly the time you are advised to get there. Venues cannot let everyone in so they need strong personalities to stop the undesirables. This helps with the exclusivity, you don’t want to party with just anyone do you? But it is when it feels personal that is the biggest problem.

If a venue has certain policies after certain times, well then that is understandable, even if said times are guarded by the German Shepherd equivalent in people. It is when a venue seems to be selective for no apparent reason that is the problem, as then surely it is based on how you look, who you are with and how you are acting. No one would expect to get in somewhere that says no trainers with Nikes, if people in your crowd are under age and have no ID or if you are so drunk you have to support each other while claiming sobriety. But if you tick all the right boxes yet still get turned away, then what?

The Box nightclub in Belfast is one such venue whose door policy has sparked a huge debate. People claim they are turned down despite ID for looking underage, for being larger than a size 8, for not wearing the right clothes or wearing too many of them. Is this just sour grapes from people who don’t get in for whatever reason? There are enough positive reviews to balance it out but any venue that sparks debate over its door staff as opposed to its music raises an eyebrow.

And moving on, what about being turned away for the colour of your skin? Venues will never admit to a racist door policy, although there are several whose reviews on our websites time and time again mention race as an issue when they were trying to enter a club. Many clubbers say places have a policy of numbers when it comes to race, if they have filled their allotted quota of ethnic, white or black people, than chances are you might get turned away when you rock up, although of course this will be down to a different reason (to your face, at any rate) and hard to prove, sadly. And what can you do about that then? Absolutely zilch, except feel thankful that your money is not funding such a venue and that there are much better places around the corner that are far more worthy.

Mandy Carter, MyVillage, 05th February