AKA...

London 2004. The party tribes assemble on a Friday night to stake a claim on dancefloors across the capital. In offices around the city, a generation of 20 somethings will head to the West End for a diet of R&B and WKD. In one office, however, a clandestine splinter group is readying itself for something very different.

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At the nexus of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, the Centrepoint tower looms large over the West End. In 2004, barely 5 minutes’ walk away, tucked away behind New Oxford Street, only those in the know would’ve be aware of The End, somewhere that gained a post-millennial reputation as a fiercely independent club; home to numerous iconic house, indie and techno parties and the burgeoning sound of tech house.

At the time, my great friend and erstwhile housemate Ewan was in a DJ collective with two other associates, called Harmonica. They co-ran a monthly night called 18 West which took place in The End’s upstairs annex AKA. For 2 years of my life, it became a monthly pilgrimage, a reliable act of subversion, a habitual release from all of London’s incessant pressures.

We lived together with two others in a shared house in West Ealing, four late 20 somethings engaged in a defiant, uncompromising last stand for student decadence, assembled together for a nightly, smoke-filled futon ritual in front of MTV or U-Channel, giggling uncontrollably at Takeshi’s Castle or Chemical Brothers videos, the remote control a powerful agent of self-expression. The Seaford Road era was life affirming and character building, sometimes all at the same time. And the zenith was arguably those parties at AKA, to which all roads led - and from which all illegal taxis departed.

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At the time, I was commuting each morning to an office in Farringdon, in the heart of mediaville. The company I worked for was laughable in many ways and I’ve written about that sordid experience in the past. However, it also included a small nucleus of dedicated party people who I managed to enlist on excursions to AKA. Which is where things got exciting.

Determining who was ‘one of us’ versus who was ‘one of them’ involved self-segregating into tiers of cool. Allocating grades of Friday night acceptability to people carefully handpicked from scores of colleagues, was a strategy fraught with risk and error. It meant bestowing enormous degrees of trust on people who would be privy to behaviour not just in contravention of workplace practices, but the very law of the land.

Our nearby boozer, the Great Sutton Arms was a pub of the old school run by an old cockney couple. It was here that advanced plans were carefully hatched to extricate ourselves from ‘other’ colleagues. Having pretended to independently go home, a tight coterie of five co-workers would later reconvene at a strategic point on Goswell Road, near a Lebanese belly dancing basement just off Clerkenwell Road, before bundling into a cab and heading down to the Bloomsbury Tavern, an archetypal meetup haunt around the corner from The End.

On West Central Street, there were two entrances, one which took you into The End itself, and another which took you to AKA, whose splendour was concealed behind a thick curtain. On any given Friday around 9 pm, it was still very much in bar mode. There were office workers, drinkers and tourists sat around on low sofas, gradually giving away to the party people, a changing of the guard as those who had to ‘make the last Tube home’ evacuated the premises. Similarly, you could feel the change in vibe as the bar subtly entered disco mode. The lights would dim, and a projection would swirl around the brick wall. The music got louder and more interesting as the ressies took their cues and tested the set-up.

By around 11, the party was in full swing, tiny bags of crystals being shared around like Smarties, everyone conscious of the fact time was of the essence. It was sometimes strange dancing in altered states with people you had been discussing complex spreadsheets with only 5 hours earlier. Stranger still, when it extended to getting off with each other, fuelled by the illicit energy beneath those projected lights. For a few months at least, such encounters came to define the after work Friday experience.

Occasionally, if feeling adventurous, we would go downstairs to The End, which was accessed by a narrow tunnel, the setting for memorable conversations or less memorable bottlenecks. There would usually be someone like Green Velvet, Laurent Garnier or DJ Marky banging it really hard - but I wouldn’t hang about for long. Nothing could really keep me away from AKA.

I liked the characters who would turn up. The cheeky ravers in tracksuits, grinning Italians in massive shades or cool French or Japanese art kids who really enhanced the dancefloor. I loved the industrial looking gantry upstairs, and the intense sound, loud enough to pack a punch but sufficiently muffled to enable urgent-not-urgent conversation.

Guest DJs included the illustrious likes of Bill Brewster, Ross Allen or James Holroyd, often delivering a sophisticated palate of music I’d never heard before. Sometimes there would be a nod to the more straight-up house I was into at the time, something accessible like Mood II Swing Can’t Get Away or DJ Gregory Don’t Know Malendro. Mostly, though, it was dark and brooding techy music off labels such as Playhouse or Get Physical. I imagined that for seasoned DJs these jobbing gigs didn’t stand out, but for me it was an unexpected route into a London party scene I didn’t previously know that well.

My colleagues, never as invested in the music as I was, soon tired of AKA and things went badly wrong with one member of the cell. I made the mistake of investing too much time and emotion in it all, and the rookie error of trying to involve people in a workplace underground movement; people who, when not in discos, harboured altogether more serious professional ambitions. I was one of the last people standing when that residency finally ended. Like the cult leader in The Beach idealistically clinging on to her idyll when all was lost, perhaps it all mattered too much?

When The End itself eventually closed down for good it was replaced for a short period by another venue, imaginatively named The Den. For us, it was over though. No more swirling disco balls, no more live 5am calls to pirate stations on the Westway, no more toilet attendants offering cheap and nasty aftershave at the sinks with a clarion call of “No Soap! No Hope!”

I don’t know if bars like AKA still exist and I certainly wouldn’t know if there is a new generation of ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ office workers reaching for the lasers on a Friday night. But for a couple of years in the 2000s, I reached a few of my own. AKA was as much a social event, a gathering of different friends, a pointer to something different on a Friday night. I was immersed, hooked and there was no way out, even if, hereafter, all roads would point East.

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10 AKA tunes:

DJ Marky - LK

Switch - A Bit Patchy

Kraftwerk - Numbers

Darkroom Dubs - #1

Max Sedgley - Happy

A Hundred Birds – Jaguar

Slam - This World

Metro Area - Miura

Cesara Evoria - Angola (Carl Craig remix)

Stevie Wonder - Another Star