Welcome to the drunk nation, Bank Holiday bar wars, Hoxton mayhem, Dray Walk delirium.
Welcome to wild scenes at the Big Chill Bar, dancing and jumping and drinking but mostly drinking, bar three deep all night, improvised dancefloors all over the shop.
I forgot to take pics of the people again, so I hope a bicycle, a bagel and a beer bottle will satisfy your image craving.
And inbetween mixes and sips of Innes & Gunn (it’s sooooo nice, honestly) I was talking to Tom and we were saying:

There’s something happening in London City, a new feeling that feels like an old feeling. It’s starting to feel like the 80s again. You know, before acid house – Thatcher (it still makes me shiver just to type her name), unemployment, hard times, everything kind of rubbish, no proper clubs, no money. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of, or should that be behind, myself.

There’s something happening in London, there are hardly any proper clubs left, all the action is in bars, early, sort of dancing and a lot of drinking. The breweries have won the battle with the dealers for the hearts and minds of the 20 and 20 somethings, Blair’s babies, the ones who grew up with cheap credit and cheap flights and easy access to education and healthcare and everything, lots of luxury clobber and handbags and jobs and all those things that came so easy that they took them for granted.
And they are here now, still doing it, getting pissed like there’s no tomorrow. They’re still docile and drunk and don’t realise that they are about to be hit by a very large and extremely heavy lorry with Double Dip Recession painted in big red letters down the side.

And that’s why it feels right to play The Specials and Madness again, because the hard times are coming back. I remember it, of course, it feels familiar. For generation credit it’s going to be a shock. But it is the boy W’s generation who will be hit hardest, hard enough for them to fight back; his generation who will get angry that they can’t go to college, can’t get jobs, can’t get credit, can’t get respect from the old people in charge; can’t make sense of the old people who screwed everything up, spent all the money then got them to take the consequences; can’t understand this lot who go out and get drunk like nothing’s happened. It will be his generation who will make the change, make new stuff happen, shake things up, go punk, go renegade; his generation who will hit the coalition with boom, raw power, right in the bollocks, where it hurts.

Singing: all I wanna do is boom, click, kerching, and take your mo-ney.