YoYo at Notting Hill Arts Club, 6th October

Another one I read about in Time Out’s 1000 Things to Do and one I have been very keen to get to. Unfortunately the only people I know who I thought would like to accompany me to this live elsewhere and I had to wait for the arrival of one of these friends to coincide with a Thursday night. Happily, this happened while Alison was here and she is into a bit of hip hop, r n b and general bass-heavy music that constitutes YoYo. I was very excited. Yet I had some trepidation. We had ended up at The Social the Wednesday before at their hip hop night (we thought we were going to an indie night, but no matter) and we ended up infuriated with the place. Apart from the fact that there were far too many young nubile girls gyrating around for my liking, the music policy was gash. They played some great tunes, but only snippets of them. And the MC talked continuously over it all which meant you couldn’t get into a groove on the dance floor. We worried a bit that this was the way of things on nights like this, and we were perhaps too old, with longer attention spans than the youths of today, to appreciate it and ergo YoYo would be a disappointment. Unfortunately, it was just that.

We first met two of our friends at a lovely pub called The Champion not too far from Notting Hill tube station and drank copious amounts of a lovely Pinot Grigio. We were nicely liquored up when we made our way down into the club. Entrance is guestlist only but you still have to pay. I’d put our names down a couple of days before and we duly paid our £5 to get in. I quite liked the club. It was a good size and there was a good number of people in it. I was accosted several times by girls asking me if I had a spare hairband they could have, which I found quite strange, but that’s neither here nor there. What is, is the fact that they subjected us to the same ordeal that had befallen us at The Social. No more than 40 seconds or so of each song. We counted. If you’re familiar with the song What’s Your Fantasy by Ludicris and L’il Kim – sing/rap the chorus of that and that’s how long they played each song for. How are you expected to dance to that? We couldn’t. I like mashups and remixes but this was too much.  We had more tequilas and tried our best but it didn’t work. I was very sad about this night. Very sad. And then at the end it got a bit electro/housey, which I like but it’s not what I expected from that night. Clearly we had to go back to the hotel and drown our sorrows.