I returned to the 13th Floor Club on Saturday night, which is almost always a joy. It might be because it's a niche night, playing only sixties mod, garage and psychedelia, but it appears on the surface to be one of those rare evenings which manages to attract a constant, hardcore audience without once being heavily invaded by scenesters or people determined to force their vain identity on the place. Facebook photo snappers are present there, but for most people the evening seems to be an excuse to have a good time rather than to be seen to be seen in the right clothes.

I find that most of the best club nights in London peak early in their lives - you have to be aware of them just after the first couple of nights when they're beginning to attract a crowd, but before the point where the more obnoxious media whores get wind of them and colonise them. Believe it or not, I know club promoters who (privately) think exactly the same thing, and get painfully nostalgic for the days When They Wasn't Famous. Or didn't have their brilliant idea ruined, at least - fame is probably overstating the case more than a little bit.

Highlights of the evening included:

* Guest DJ David Quantick getting deperate for the toilets and leaving his DJ booth to rush through to the front of the cubicle queues with a nervous and embarrassed wave of thanks. I wouldn't like to speculate about what his problem was, but I hope he's OK now.

* Icelandic mod band Thor's Hammer actually getting a spin on the decks this time around - not with "My Life" but another more obscure EP track "Big Beat Country Dance". Always welcome.

* Can's "Mother Sky". This was spun the last time I visited the club in January and felt like cheating then, being neither psychedelia or garage in the strictest sense of the word, but being blasted through a proper PA system the track always sounds wonderful. Home listening never quite seems to capture the pulsing, repetitive urgency of it, but there are precious few places you can visit where it will work its way on to a DJ's playlist.

Obscure track of the evening on this occasion was Alan Avon and Toyshop's "A Night To Remember". I'm not a fan of it, actually, and nobody danced to it, but I'm always entertained by the curveballs some DJs like to throw into their sets.

Beyond the fact that the evening was much more crowded this time than last, little seemed to have changed beyond the presence of rather more mods on this occasion. This can be bad news in that mods do tend to have a nasty habit of judging a person by their evening wear, but almost all seemed to enter into the spirit of the occasion and were perfectly friendly. I'm also starting to see people I recognise from previous visits in the club now, which is rare for me. Perhaps it's because the 13th Floor Club officially has the friendliest toilet queue in London - although you tend to be stood in it forever, waiting for one of two cubicles to become available, so I suppose chat is preferable to awkward silences.

I only hope this night can continue without being hijacked by a self-conscious set or ruined at any point soon. It does what it does extremely well, and I don't think it needs any additional help.

On Saturday night I got more proof that early-to-mid January is an absolutely rubbish time to socialise. I attempted to get a gang of friends and acquaintances down to the sixties garage/ psychedelic club night 13th Floor at the Albany, only for most of them to cry off at the eleventh hour. Post-Christmas skintness was to blame, apparently. I can't say I don't believe them - my own drinks on the evening were partly funded by Amanda and I going to a branch of Asda and putting all the copper and silver money we found around the flat into a money conversion machine. It transpired we had fifty pounds worth of loose (or "useless") change. Sing Hallelujah!

Despite the fact that only one other friend showed, and Amanda went home early with a headache, it was a fantastic night as always, with one of the most pleasing playlists I've heard at any club in London. One wonderful thing about retro club nights is that they naturally avoid the people-pleasing tactics of the usual places. A DJ in a club for the latest indie soundzzzzz, for example, might stick on a lot of material I find frankly irritating just to get the floating voters on the dancefloor, but at a small night for a very specific type of music, they can be a bit more adventurous knowing that the people there are likely to be huge fans and game for anything. So it proved, with a few tracks I've never heard in my life before but instantly loved, including an obscure cover version of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" which sounded slightly obsessive and demonic. I find cover versions of early Beatles singles usually a lot more interesting than the originals, partly because - well, let's be honest - their output from 1962 - 1964 was somewhat wet. There was nothing wrong with their songwriting abilities post "Love Me Do", but to most people's extreme irritation, I'll always prefer The Score's obscure cover version of "Please Please Me" to the Beatles original. The Beatles sound like they're asking their lovers to bring them a nice chocolate cake, since, after all, they've put so much effort into their bakery buying expeditions without much reciprocation. The Score sound on the edge of mental collapse as a result of one woman's lack of consideration, and really quite irate. That's more like it.

They don't play The Score, actually (at least not before I leave) but they do slip in Thor's Hammer, an Icelandic mid-sixties mod band who were in actual fact the first really decent Icelandic band, and not The Sugarcubes like you thought. "My Life" is the most manic, crunching piece of mod rock you'll have heard from any band outside the British Isles, and it's on the Nuggets II box set if you want to track it down.

It's always a pleasure to hear such brilliance at a higher volume than I'd be allowed to play it in my own flat, irrespective of whether friends turn up or not.

I celebrated my birthday at the weekend. Whilst I realise that this was a bit premature given that my actual birthday is on the 14th, I’d always rather celebrate early than late. It's harder to get excited when the day has passed and the cards and presents have all been opened. Then there’s the small matter of Amanda’s birthday falling on the 19th, and her wanting to celebrate next weekend. And the even bigger issue of the 13th Floor Club running on Saturday 9th, which is one of the few down to earth club nights left in London I genuinely enjoy.

Saturday night was no exception, although the feel was rather different from past evenings. For one thing, the night had moved (supposedly temporarily) on to the ground floor of the Albany bar rather than staying in its usual home in the basement. This meant that were more casual drinkers hanging around who perhaps weren’t so interested in the music. Perhaps most strikingly, the choices of tunes were considerably more obvious than they have been at past events – The Kinks, The Who and The Beatles had their share of the turntable time in spades, and there was a special Syd Barrett tribute segment (about which there will be no complaints) which even included the lost but much-bootlegged Floyd single "Scream Thy Last Scream".

David Quantick was also on the wheels of steel for some of the evening, and played a lot of northern soul/ Motown tunes, which was utterly unexpected though perfectly welcome.

In all, it was another fine occasion. I applaud the 13th Floor Club's anti-snob attitude to both dress codes and playlists, which is why I'm so ashamed to admit that I bothered the DJ at one point asking for a complete obscurity. His reaction seemed to suggest that I was deliberately testing him, which I'm ashamed to say wasn't the case at all - it was just my birthday, and I very badly wanted to hear "Grey" by the Hush, and asked him on the offchance he had it with him. Never mind. If he ever reads this, I'd like to make it quite clear that I don't necessarily expect B-sides to flop singles to be in his record box, but sometimes drunken optimism gets the better of me.

I also can't recall most of what I talked to people about, so I'm afraid to say it was probably drunken nonsense again. If I can't get away with talking like that at my birthday bash I don't know when I can, though.

On the way home myself and Jon Hall staggered along talking further gibberish, with him "collecting" phone box cards of post-op transexuals for me on the way as "birthday treats". I think I took them home with me but haven't seen them since, which probably means one of them will suddenly materialise at the most embarrassing possible moment - probably when my Christian landlady turns up at the flat to sort some matter or other out.

As well as those, we managed to pick up a copy of the Camden Chronicle, a fantastic local periodical that runs marvellous, exciting stories such as this one:



I would honestly have thought that there is more going on in Camden (home to the stars!!!) than Kenneth Williams' old bass player tripping up on a paving stone. It all reminded me of the Fall's song Jerusalem:

It was the fault of the government
I was walking down the street
When I tripped up on a discarded banana skin
And on my way down I caught the side of my head
On a protruding brick chip
It was the government's fault
It was the fault of the government
I was very let down
From the budget I was expecting a one million quid handout
I was very disappointed

I think I'll emigrate to Sweden or Poland
And get looked after properly by the government

I'll put some "proper" photos up of the night when I get a spare five minutes. It will be behind a locked entry, though, as naturally some people are less than happy about pictures of themselves being plastered all over the Internet just because they happened to turn up to my birthday drinks. Perhaps that's why the attendance was considerably lower this year...

Oh, and happy birthday today to prosepina. The card is in the post, I promise. Happy birthday too to icecoldinalex, although I highly doubt he reads this journal.

I suppose I could mention that yesterday was Siobhan Fahey's birthday (out of Banarama and Shakespeare's Sister) as well, but that would really be pushing matters.... er, happy birthday if you're reading, Siobhan. No hope of that I'd say, unless she's some sort of obsessive vanity googlist.

The highlight of this weekend for me has been, without question, the 13th Floor Club at the Albany on Friday night. True, this isn't exactly an enormous achievement on the part of the organisers, the DJs or the Albany staff, since I've spent most of this weekend sat at home typing up two enormous application forms for jobs I would like to do. Still, though, it's one of the only club nights I still bother with or treat with any excitement or enthusiasm (though that might have something to do with the fact that I find it very hard to drag people out clubbing these days).

I've had the accusation thrown at me several times now that immersing myself in sixties music and culture is a rather sad indictment of my personality. A certain poetry promoter once made the rather valid point that holding sixties values up as being the pinnacle of western civilisation is somewhat bogus. Homosexuality was illegal. Apartheid was still common in many countries. The working classes were not generally invited to the hippy love-ins and parties, especially those living outside the capital. For the vast majority of the population, the decade was a nice time for music, but the trials and tribulations of daily life were the same as they've ever been. I once asked my father what the sixties were like, and he recalled that for him it was just about going to jazz clubs and sitting in pubs in South London, and he didn't remember anything special happening. The only celebrity he ever met was Peter Starsdedt in his local, who kept on continually putting "Where Do You Go To My Lovely?" on the pub jukebox and declaring to disinterested drinkers "That's me!" until someone wearily told him to piss off. Not much to write home about, then.

Accepting all the above, though, does not and should not ignore the fact that music in the sixties was an ever-changing, ever mutating beast. It seems unimaginable now to think that in 1960 all there was on the record store shelves were a few left-over balladeers from the fifties, some basic rock n roll and some nice variety performers. Then, by the end of 1969, the proper beginnings of heavy metal, progressive rock, glam rock, art rock, Philly soul and even electronic music were all in place. Somewhere inbetween all that, Merseybeat had arrived and died, mod based R&B clattered and shattered dancehalls, reggae began cracking the mainstream charts, and the quifftastic fifties seemed like a daft, old fashioned Victorian world. It's my firm belief that in this era of innovation and progression, record companies got so confused that money got doled out to just about anyone who wanted to make a single and looked the part, creating some invaluable and absurd nuggets I still play a lot at home. So, ridiculous singles like Anan's "I Wonder Where My Sisters Gone" (essentially a vaguely Beach Boys sounding track wibbling in a disjointed manner about Christian martyrdom) got released. They didn't chart, but that's not entirely surprising. And people like Captain Beefheart signed to major labels with proper budgets and promotional campaigns.

"But it's so irrelevant, it belongs to the past now", people say, whilst sitting listening to the Stone Roses, a band heavily indebted to the underground sounds of the era, so much so that they regularly covered Nazz's "Open My Eyes" and The Misunderstood's "I Can Take You To The Sun" live (the latter track was also the inspiration for Primal Scream's "Higher Than The Sun"). Or perhaps they're eighties goths, happily listening to the folk-psychedelic noises All About Eve pedalled, or maybe the freaky child-like noises of The Cure, a band who took more than their fair share of colour from the paisley paintbox. Wherever you tread in music, it's hard not to put your foot in the sixties. When I listen to Buddy Holly, it feels oddly quaint and innocent, like something from a primitive society. If I listen to a lot of the music that occurred not six or seven years after his death, on the other hand, I'm always astonished by how current much of it sounds.

Friday night saw Norman Blake out of Teenage Fanclub DJing - another chap whose output has been particularly sixties shaped - and he treated us to a variety of tracks it was an absolute pleasure to hear in such an environment. In particular, it was a delight to hear The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band's "What a Transparent Day" so loud, as well as the Byrds "I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better". The great thing about this music is the effect it has on the punters as well. True, at first they're reluctant to get on the dancefloor, and laugh uncharitably when my companion Toby and I "bust some moves". Within a couple of hours, though, people are smiling, laughing and singing along. There's precious little prissy posing going on, despite the very studied sixties wear some people are sporting, and I think that's the other thing I like about this music - ostensibly, for all its avant druggie leanings, it is POP. It makes you feel elated, even in its most baffling oddness. You cannot pout moodily to it, however hard you try. It's an instant pick-me-up, but not a disposable one. You can come back to it many times and still hear new details. It was very nice indeed to be surrounded by people having a good time to such great noises, and I only wish I could have dragged more people down to the night.

Still, ne'er no mind. My computer at home is still knackered, so I've borrowed Amanda's work laptop to complete two application forms for jobs that pay a bit better than my present gig, and also offer progression. The time for change is really long overdue, and interestingly the tedious process of filling in the forms has at least made me feel more optimistic about the sheer scope of my abilities. Sometimes when you're forced to break down your skills in fine detail, it reaffirms your strengths and boosts your confidence just when you need it. I haven't needed to lie or exaggerate on these applications at all.

My birthday drinks went ahead last night as planned, and as predicted the concept of late night drinks at a sixties garage/ psych night did indeed put a few people off. The turnout this year wasn't as great as it has been in the past, but hey, it's not the turnout that matters, it's how much of a good time everyone has. Or how much of a good time *I* have. One or the other.

To be frank, I can't remember much about what actually happened after about 1am, which worries me somewhat. One of the last things I can recollect is being offered a shot of something (I can't remember what it was), rejecting it at first, then downing it, then running back on to the dancefloor. Everything else is a total blur from that point on, and the next thing I can recall is being in a taxi on the way home. According to Amanda I enjoyed myself, though, and didn't upset or annoy anyone. There's a turn up for the vomit-stained drunk books. I also think most people managed to have a good time, although a few complained of the "anorak" choices the DJ made, and tutted when he put on The Eyes.

Anyone who wishes to observe pictures of the event can do so by clicking on the link below. Oh, and I'm assuming it's OK by everyone if these appear in a public entry - if anyone has any serious objections, please let me know and I'll stick the lockers on.

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The day after, of course, has been filled with sickness, a blinding headache, and initially today a slightly croaky voice. Remind me the next time I'm out not to spend all evening drinking bitter, then top it up with shots of Christ-knows-what I'm offered.

We've also had the Rentokil man round about the cockroaches, who must surely be now be on first name terms with us. The flat upstairs has had a mouse and pigeon infestation, and our flat has had a wasp's nest above the lounge window (I'm phobic of wasps, and can't help but feel slightly victimised about that one - why in a "wasp drought" year did they pick on me?). Now there's the roaches, which are apparently of the German rather than the Japanese variety. Amanda had Japanese roaches in her old house in Haringey, and they were huge, indestructable beasts. We used to put them in a glass filled with bleach and watch them swim for twenty minutes before any signs of burning or unwellness kicked in. She also once threw a Thomsons Directory at one, and it crawled out underneath seconds later with no real signs of damage. These German ones are rather less hard - they keel over pathetically as soon as bleach comes anywhere near them, and are quite easily stamped out. However, since they've moved in they've eaten other dead roaches (their favourite food, it seems, is themselves), soap, breadcrumbs, and God knows what else. They hide behind the washing machine then come out at night for drinks of water and midnight snacks. They are quite vile creatures, and I for one will be glad to see the back of them; however, even in best case scenarios they can take weeks to completely wipe out.

So then, on top of reminding me not to spend all night drinking bitter, perhaps I should be reminded not to move into a flat by a market above a dingy restaurant. Ah well.