On Wednesday evening we went in search of the Crypto-Amnesia Club.
Needless to say, we didn’t really find it.
Above: The Crypto-Amnesia Club is a novel by Michael Brace well (archetypal 1980s author) published in 1988 (and only ever published in paperback, which seems to have been a 1980s innovation).
The book is a self-aware narrative by the manager of one of London’s most fashionable nightclubs. The style is droll, faux-cynical (the narrator feigns cynicism as a mask for his romanticism) and extremely fashion-conscious. Nothing really happens in the book - “being” is more important than “doing” (which is one of the themes of the 1980s as a decade).
Trying to track down the model for a fictional 1980s nightclub is not easy. The larger clubs (Dingwalls, Camden Palace, Blitz) are fairly well documented, but Bracewell’s text indicates the Crypto-Amnesia was a smaller and more exclusive place (the narrator is disdainful of open-house establishments with their clienteles of “mostly video film assistants”). Given the nature of nightclubs (opening one year, closing the next) actually locating the Crypto-Amnesia prototype seemed impossible.
One clue, however, came from an interview Kim Blacha did with the mother of a college classmate (London College of Fashion). She has done about thirty interviews, the earlier ones fairly loose, the later ones more structured and using a template I wrote for her. The interviewee was aged twenty-two in 1984 and described a club called Blast R101:
“I remember it was lovely inside, more like a house than a nightclub. There were bars and a restaurant and an area where you could watch videos, which was the in-thing then. There was even a little library, although I don’t think anyone used it. What I really liked doing was just sitting on the sofas and watching the world go by. People were more interesting then. There wasn’t this obsession about celebrities. Ordinary people were celebrities - they made themselves interesting. Downstairs there was a dance-floor and I remember dancing to More Than This by Roxy Music. More than this there is nothing the words go, and it really seemed that you couldn’t ask for more…”
The interviewee couldn’t remember the nightclub’s address. A Google search for Blast R101 produced nothing apart from an enigmatic reference to “Music responsive light sculptures shown at Diorama and Blast R101” (see url below). Eventually Kim found an address in a 1989 ’phone directory from the BT historic archive.
Above: 6 Ormonds Yard, SW1. Formerly the Blast R101 nightclub, now the Abracadabra Restaurant. It was absolutely deserted when we went there. Inside the restaurant was a series of booths around an open central area (where the sofas would have been?). We sat in one of the booths, which was decorated with Donna Summer souvenirs. We ordered drinks (I tried to think of something typically 1980s, but nothing came to mind) and when they were brought to us I asked the waiter about the history of the building - all he could tell us was that it used to be a Turkish bath.
Above: in the basement the dance-floor was still in place. Bracewell’s Crypto-Amnesia Club was “quilted in scarlet plastic” and had “floor level strip lighting” so this room looked the part. Is this where the interviewee danced to Roxy Music?
Above: Roxy Music’s Avalon LP (which includes More Than This). Brian Ferry’s Roxy Music was a key musical influence on the 1980s. Avalon was released in 1982 (and was the band’s last LP).
Michael Bracewell has written extensively about Roxy Music.
It seemed strange to hold the Roxy Music LP (a technology that is effectively obsolete, although attempts have been made to revive the format). The 1980s is only one generation away, and yet to recover that decade is almost unfeasible. It is an age as remote as Byzantium.
The only Google reference to Blast R101: http://www.mimetics.com/vur/wkexamp
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