Upstairs

Perfect @ Pontoon Bar, Darling harbour, Sydney
Assessment Time: 10:10PM – 1:15AM, 3:15AM-3:30AM
Opening Hours: Downstairs: (Open earlier in the night for dinner – 4:00AM) Upstairs: 11:30PM – 2/3AM?
Lockout: No known lockout, but entry is closed to the general public at 3AM, while stampholders are still permitted re-entry rights at all times, though you have to line up in line AGAIN if you want to get back in. Totally sucks.
Address: Listed as 201 Sussex St, but access to the place is more or less via The Promenade at Darling Harbour’s Cockle Bay Wharf. The main entry is now via the ground floor where you will usually see a line of people. After 11PM you can also pay for your entry upstairs and get stamped as well – so there are two effective entry points.
Venue Website: http://www.pontoonbar.com
Event Website: http://www.theperfectnight.com.au http://www.facebook.com/perfectnights
Promoters: Joint promoter companies: Colab, Syndicate Events, GTB, and an extra promoter “Forever Fridays” tonight who are hail from Melbourne – they brought over their MC and a Melbourne based DJ.
Occurrence: Every Friday since Mid-April 2011
Outside Line: We arrived a little earlier than I would usually like, but there were no people in line. As we debated whether we should go in, about TWENTY people jumped in line. Oh my god. We joined the line eventually and got in after about 10 minutes. Upstairs opens at 11PM, and despite having stamps already, we have to line up AGAIN amongst the other people who haven’t paid entry to get access! Bloody ridiculous. It’s the same as well downstairs, once you go outside for whatever reason, you have to line up to get back in. Luckily for the smokers, there are “open” areas on each level where you can puff and stuff your lungs with tar. Later in the night around midnight it took a friend 30 minutes to get in. Tough love.
Dress Code / Door Policy: Smart Casual is promoted here tonight, and pretty much most people here are compliant. Not sure about the hat situation but the last few times I was here, they were okay to wear. Most guys are in pants/jeans and a collared t-shirt, and girls have managed to not wear casual tonight.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: Standard full fare Asian clubbing price of $25 tonight. If you were on the guestlist and arrived before 11:30PM, you got a card that entitled you to $15 entry. Brilliant, except during a moment of absent mindedness, I forgot to use my card and inadvertedly paid $25 without even realising it. I simply gave the discount card to another friend so they could enjoy the benefits of me lining up early, while they didn’t have to.
Guestlist: Guestlists are no longer valid after 11:30PM. Guestlists to be sent to info@syndicateevents.com.au
Inside: Ground Level: Walk past the easy-to-miss cloak room and cashier to enter the middle part of the floor. To the left is the main bar with about 2-3 staff as well as the entire outdoor area. The are large wooden tables and stools, chairs, lounges about, where people were once dining hours ago. This outdoor area could hold easily 100 people or so. The dancefloor area on the right is a slow covered transition from the outdoor area where also 100-200 people can dance here. The DJ booth sits in the far corner near the toilets. There is little furniture bar a lounge at the rear of the dancefloor. Upstairs: Walk through the chillout/smoking area where there are many lounges, with a view of Darling harbour – continue on into the depths of the dancefloor situated on the far end of the room, as where the DJ is. The setup has slightly changed from last time, where the DJ was in the middle. I think this is a good thing as it is as far away from the smoke as possible, though at risk of the area overheating quickly. The walls are lined with squarely setup lounges. Bar is on the right
Cloak Room: Cloak room downstairs – $5 for placing an item, while it is $2 for rechecks. Pretty reasonable.
Bar Prices / Line: $15.70 altogether for a Gin and Tonic, Orange Juice and coke. $12.90 for a Vodka+Red Bull in a tall glass. At 10:15PM there was no waiting time. At 11PM the wait increased to about 5 minutes. At around 1AM, the wait was timed at about twenty five (25) minutes on both levels up and down.
Bathroom Facilities: Fair, could be a little bigger.
Eviction Count: None spotted, but I wasn’t paying attention.
DJs: Resident DJ’s plus guest DJ Mich from Melbourne
Music Style: Mostly Contemporary RnB downstairs, while upstairs did play some more of the older ‘throwback’ rnb songs. Oh yes, throwback is a word im going to use now.
Crowd: Dominantly Asian, and mostly local Aussie Asians. I don’t think I ran into one international Asian here tonight. Most of the ages were young. Company was of course lots of 21 year olds. That said, the crowd was mostly young 20′s to mid 20′s, as far as I could tell.
Ratio: You know its always going to be more guys then girls, but it was good. A lot of the girls looked their best surprisingly tonight, and I ain’t complaining.
Entertainment: There was no real special occasion except for having the MC and DJ from melbourne to do a set.

Atmosphere: Between 10-11PM: People were mostly in the courtyard chatting and drinking, with some daring to go on the floor.
Around 11:15PM: I would consider the dancefloor downstairs to have enough people to be considered pretty busy. That is quite the achievement. I got pretty hot in my blazer already at this time, and the lack of seabreeze from outside plus the cigarette smoke didn’t help either. Man, let me tell you cigarette smoke always does me in at the clubs. I try and stay away from it as much as I can, resulting me in being on the dancefloor most of the time. Though there were quite a lot of people outside in the courtyard not to smoke, but to just have a normal conversation about the weather, or discuss about why do they call it a building, when its already built?
Upstairs after 11:30PM it wasnt packed but it wasn’t dead. You could dance here but the sofas right next to the dancefloor made you feel like you were on show, and people shied away from that area. The line at the bar here was pretty long as well during midnight-1AM
Video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Timeline
Another reason I dont like lining up at the bar
You know what I like about lining up? Nothing. Well actually, I like it when there is like a girl behind me and unfortunately she has to place her breasts on my back as I line up. Besides that, there really isn’t much fun in the line at all. So as part of this fun experience we have two people placing orders, and they have bought some shots. Well, you know, they had to pass the shots to their friends behind us, and somehow spilled some of that shit all over our clothing!! yuuuuuuuuckk. I hate that. Keep your hand steady please. Then as a added thing, his friend spilled another drink on us too. Fun times. Turns out the guy who spilled the drinks was a friend of my younger brother. My lord, I don’t belong here.

A envigorating dancer
There are a few dancers that many Asian a folk will always remember, such as Jason from Bamboo/Wow.. or.. well you know. Other people. Anyway, a friend of a friend who came along to the party looks quite like a normal chap until he starts to dance. He is on supercharged energizers.. oh my lord. hair shaking, fist bumping, very surreal performance. A few people could probably keep up with this guy, but definitely the highlight was when he jumped up and did the splits on the floor. THE SPLITS! who in this world can do the splits? Apparently my friends say 1 in 5 but I don’t know.

Arrivederci
I took it extremely easy tonight as I had to go snorkelling in the morning. I left just before 1:30 .

Final Thoughts & Recommendation
Simply by having two levels of rooms, this place pretty much trumps the others in terms of numbers of Asians you can fit into one place. It seems to be a default for my friends and I do try to avoid it as much as possible to prevent getting sick of the place, but besides the long bar lines, smoking, stale warm weather, and that drink spill.. I can’t really fault much of it. Didn’t really interact with the crowd tonight so I can’t tell if they were friendly or what not. Other than that I would say though, do try to get in before 11:30 with a guestlist, because the difference between $15 and $25 is a big one.

12:40AM Upper Level Bar Line

Perfect @ Pontoon Bar (Ground Level and Upper Level: Wallaby Bar)
Assessment Time: 12:05AM – 2:45AM
Opening Hours: The bars are open throughout the day, but the event opens 9:30PM. Tonight it closes at 4:00AM
Lockout: Around 2:30AM, but definitely no re-entry after 3:00AM
Address: Cockle Bay Wharf (201 Sussex St from the other side)
Venue Website: http://www.pontoonbar.com
Promoter Website: http://www.facebook.com/perfectnights or http://www.theperfectnight.com.au
Occurrence: Every Friday since April 2011. Note that this is the event that succeeded Flow Fridays @ World Square Pub, after it closed.
Outside Line: Arriving just after midnight, there was a huge massive line outside the downstairs entrance. A good 70+ people waiting, which is ridiculous. So I went to the second, lesser known entrance upstairs. There was a pretty long line here too, but only about 30 people or so. It took 30 minutes to get in. This was including some folk who joined the line and got sick of waiting, and left. This was also the first week off for pretty much every tertiary school student in Sydney, so people were out clubbing in their droves.
Dress Code / Door Policy: Hats allowed. Most guys are casual in jackets jeans, pants due to the winter. It is encouraged by promoters to go ‘dressy’, but I did spot a friend dressed in sweatpants and a jumper, so there you go. Again due to winter, many girls have leggings on but most brave the cold and wear their clubbing dresses on. I actually paid attention to the dresses tonight and there were a number of questionable leopard print designs tonight. Tonight I wore a blazer, jeans, collared shirt, white sneakers and my ‘bad hair day’ cap.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: $25 full charge. $20 on guestlist before 11:30PM , $15 if it is a birthday guestlist.
Guestlist: Ends at 11:30PM. Email info@theperfectnight.com.au
Inside: The big difference from opening night is that the main entrance is pretty much downstairs, encouraging people to enter the downstairs area. After walking in, to the right is the cleared out dancefloor for about 100 people. DJ is right up at the back. To the left is the ar in the far corner, and the rest of the area is an open air design of tables and benches. Walk back out and up the escalators to enter upstairs. You first walk past the balcony / lounge area for 80 or so patrons, where it eventually transitions to the main dancefloor, slightly smaller than that of downstairs. Bar is on the right while DJ is on the left. A few lounges in the far corner as well next to the DJ booth.
Smoking: Downstairs the open bar allows for smoking. Upstairs the balcony allows smoking. There is no clear-cut border to where you can or cannot smoke, so if you are infringing on the edges here, you and your clothes will be insulted with some cigarette chemicals.
Cloak Room: $5 is the standard rate. It is located on the bottom level just outside.
Bar Prices / Line: $12.90 for a Vodka + Red Bull (They actually use Red Bull thank god). Upstairs, upto 1:30am, it is about a 30 minute wait (!). Theres about a 20 people at the bar continuously ordering with only 4 staff during peak hour. They simply can’t keep up, and patrons have to wait as a result. Downstairs, after 2am, is 5 minute wait at the Outdoor Bar. I’m not sure how it was earlier in the night.
Eviction Count: No fights spotted upstairs but there were two fights downstairs which were resolved very quickly by security.
Music Style: For a place of two floors one expects one room to be house and one room to be RnB, but the promoters have gone for the ‘Two RnB rooms are better than one’ approach, which works out well. The music is mostly RnB with pop, with some top 40 and commercial house mashup tracks thrown in. Closer to the end of the night, ye old school Hip Hop comes out on rotation as well. Mixing was also well done on both levels to keep the crown energy sustained.
Crowd & Ratio: Dominantly Asian. A handful of white folk have come tonight as well. Considering it was mostly uni students, the age range would be from 18-30, skewering to the low, low 20′s. The ratio was pretty much more guys than girls most of the night.. around 60/40. It wasn’t pretty lining up, where it was 5 guys to 1 girl in line. Upstairs was first to have the BBQ setting turned up high, while downstairs maintained a better ratio consistently throughout the night.
Entertainment: MC to keep things going.
Atmosphere: Upstairs was pretty busy throughout the night. Though at around 1am onwards it progressed to a very bad sausage fest. Dancewise it was a bit cramped at times, with a lot of time dedicated to let people through. That’s when we went downstairs where it was still pretty busy on the dancefloor, with the floor being at about 75% capacity at 2am, which is still good. There were *still* people lining up outside, but they just guys, haha. The back of the floor is quite dirty at this time – your shoes *will* get dirty. The front of the dancefloor was somewhat more clean I guess and busy. That said, I think at this time people preferred to continue to drink in the open area. So in comparison, upstairs seemed a bit more cosy, while downstairs, with the glass walls did seem to be more open, but a little bit more dirty. Both were pretty packed.
Video: Timeline / Music Montage

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you, mystery $50 note.

with my two newest fans

Stop and stare
Alright, so when you dance with the only white girls in the club, YOU ARE GOING TO GET STARED AT. You can just feel the eyeballs of every person within a 2 metre radius dart towards you and you try to pretend you can’t see them staring, but you know they are staring! So creepy, especially from the guys! If you are good looking specimen of the Homo sapiens species, you would know what I mean.

Guys also came up and chatted me up to chat the girls up. It’s quite interesting to see how many guys do hit on girls on a typical night.

The state of affairs on the floor.
Late in the night, the dancefloor downstairs is wet from spilled drinks, and idiots who have littered the floor with pieces of toilet tissue. I even spotted someone by the wall chucking up her drinks, dessert, dinner, and lunch… disgusting, smelly, putrid, chunky orange patch on the floor that was not cleaned up for a good half hour. Freaking gross. The cleaners were probably like “Meh, CBF”, and joined in the sausage fest at the time.

I love my hat
I refer to it as my directors cap. People liked it. Possibly because my hair has been so shit and I’ve been lazy as a pet coon in regards to styling my hair. So guys, if you run out of wax/gel/whatever .. I highly recommend the hat option.  

Arrivederci
Left at 3AM. Got a bit tired of the guys. 

Recommendation
Lots of people here, come early (before 11PM) for when the ratio is better and when the lines are shorter. People are young and pretty. Music choice is faultless for the contemporary RNB fan.I came later and copped longer lines, and more sausage as punishment.

Long lines are a total turn off, though at the time of writing, they will have waitresses/waiters for reserved areas to get you express drinks – meaning that if you’re just a regular patron, you will have to wait even longer for drinks! Boo!! It would be better if there were fewer people, haha. Well, it’s a fine balance between profits for the promoter and getting patrons the best experience.

Overall I found it an okay night. It’s hard to get drunk in here though – security is tight here and looking to kick people out for any sign of intoxication.  I can say though, that it’s better than the old Flow event, for sure.

Perfect @ Pontoon - Punking it out

(Event Name Resurrection) Grand Opening: Perfect @ Pontoon Bar (Level 2 only) Darling Harbour Sydney
Assessment Time: 11:30PM – 02:00AM
Opening Hours: Unknown. From past experiences at Pontoon it should close at 03:00AM. Opening time unknown.
Lockout: There was no lockout at 2:00AM, but it might have been put into place later.
Address: Listed as 201 Sussex St, but access to the place is more or less via The Promenade at Darling Harbour’s Cockle Bay Wharf. The main level is not ground, but the upper level. It is accessed externally via a set escalators in the courtyard area of Pontoon Bar. (It almost is like the old World Square Pub venue, isn’t it). Ground level doesn’t receive so much attention here.
Venue Website: http://www.pontoonbar.com
Promoter Website: Run by Syndicate Events in conjunction with Colab Entertainment, and Intouch events- specialised webpage at http://www.theperfectnight.com.au
Occurrence: Tonight was Grand opening night, and is set for a weekly Friday occurrence.
Outside Line: A line of approximately 20 people were outside. Luckily some friends of mine had lined up prior and were close to the front. We waited about 5 minutes before getting in.
Dress Code / Door Policy: Hats allowed. Theme is to dress to impress. Guys: Smart Casual recommended. It was strongly advised that all men must wear collared shirts or entry would be denied. I did see some guys inside with t-shirts on, so I am not sure how strict the policy is. I had a t-shirt but with a blazer which got me in, but I took off the blazer once inside. Girls: Recommended to dress sexy/chic, and so happy to report overall almost everyone dressed well tonight.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: $25 full price. Kills me every time, but appears to be standard for the Asian oriented nightclubs. $15 on guestlist before 11:30PM. No midnight love tonight. I think ground level was free entry for the public to dance their socks off, and that only upstairs was charging. Do correct me if I am mistaken.
Guestlist: Expires 11:30PM. Send guestlists to perfect.pontoon@gmail.com or colab.entertainment@gmail.com – tell ‘em I sent ya!
Inside: The event covers two levels, but the focus is of the upper level, with the ground level not getting much love.
Downstairs: Walk into the back of the dance area for about 100 or so people. it is just a roundish room with DJ in the far back wall. To the left is the open bar area for all users with tables, lounges and what not taking up half of the ground floor area.
Upper Level: Outside pontoon is a courtyard area to which patrons can sit down and relax. Escalators from here take you upstairs to the upper level. Walk inside to see a view of Darling Harbour to your left. This immediate area is of lounges and chairs, for people to mingle but not dance. Probably for 40-50 people. Move in to the right where there are a zone of 2-3 small lounge areas for birthdays or what not, then followed by the main areas – dancefloor on the left to hold 80-120 people, and a single bar to the right to hold about 15 people along its length. At the furthest end is the cloak room and bathrooms.
Cloak Room: I did use it but I don’t remember the price. It was reasonable, so I would say it would be $5 or less.
Bar Prices / Line: I didn’t drink, so pricing was unknown. However to get water, there was no simple jugs of water to be around, so I had to line up. After about 10 minutes I gave up, because the line did not move one bit! People were coming in left right and centre to get a piece of the bar action. I could have had better luck going downstairs to use the bar there, but I was too lazy to go outside in the rain. A friend of mine stayed in line for a drink, and she reported it took her 30 minutes for a glass of water. That is really messed up. I secretly hope that future events will have easy jugs of water at the bar, or even better – someone running around with buckets of bottled water giving it away. Oh wait, that did happen! A man came by with a bucket of bottles of water, handing it out for FREE. He was definitely the most popular person of the night. Seriously free – usually bars charge $2 or something for a bottle of water. Am sorry that we didn’t get to see the bottle guy for the rest of the night.

View of the bar and the crowd line (11:50PM)

DJs: Edo, Moto, Bonniez, Flipsta, et al.
Music Style: Mostly contemporary commercial RnB tonight.
Crowd & Ratio: Upper Level: Pretty much mostly Asian Australian here. There are some Caucasians and Indians in the mix, from either downstairs or here for birthdays. There were a slight more number of guys than girls, but that said, a lot of the guys were lined up at the bar, presumably buying drinks for themselves or for some girls – so that left the rest of the venue in a kind of even-ratio.
Entertainment: Just the MC to keep things going. Also CD giveaways were had, and a friend won a copy. Awesome
Atmosphere: Upon entry it was pretty busy, it took a while to cut through the crowd to get to the other side. This included the dancefloor, where people are dancing their hearts away. On the dancefloor itself, there is not much room to dance, but it isn’t sardine packed, it is what a typical busy dancefloor is – enough room to have your own little circle, some simple dancing and that’s about it. Throughout the night it was indeed at least busy on the floor – but somehow , I had the feeling the lounge areas weren’t so alive – people were sitting around being .. people. At the time of departure the place was still indeed busy. Throughout the night even though there were a sizable amount of people, it never got heated up and sticky as in the previous venue, so props to the promoters for that. The vibe was pretty good throughout the night.

View of the general dancefloor area (12:30AM)

Video: Walkthrough the main area and music sampling from the night:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A small mention on the radio of an RNB night on Friday at Home Nightclub. The last time I went to a RNB event at Home bar, it went off! Sounds good, so I dragged my friends along. Here we go!

Assessment Time: 10:30pm – 12:30pm
Address: Cockle Bay Wharf
Door Policy / Dress Code: Casual ok
Cover Charge / Entry Fee: $20. $10 on guestlist.
Guestlist: Unknown, but one was available
Inside: Only the main room was open for tonight’s one-off RNB special. Main floor could hold a few hundred people.
Bar: $12 Yagerbombs
Music: RNB. Typical RNB tunes playing. Regulars to sublime trance event only had the upstairs rooms tonight.
Crowd: There was nobody here, but the crowd that was here, was Mixed. Indian, Asian, Black, Aussie, Euro. Our group represented the only asians.
Atmosphere: Dead.

Timeline
Home nightclub – an empty shell
There was no line for our RNB event. Bad sign, but it was early. We walked into the main floor and this is what we saw:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a picture of my friend with dancefloor behind.

Friend and the main dancefloor behind him. Nobody is behind him.

Yup.. that’s right.. there was NOTHING. NOBODY. Where on earth was everyone?? Did the promoters even bother to properly promote this ?? There were some people on the side seats, sitting down – too scared to even fathom to go on the dancefloor.  This place was as dead as a dick after coitus. Nobody wanted to dance, but not me. Not James Tran. I MARCHED RIGHT UP AND DANCED IN THE MIDDLE OF HOME NIGHTCLUB – THE LARGEST NIGHTCLUB IN AUSTRAILA. ALONE. AND I DANCED.

I danced for a few minutes, before this self amusement looked a bit weird in front of the other people. Evolution of dance crowd attempt failed. Nobody wanted to join James for a dance.

I asked the bargirl if it was always this busy.
“Sometimes, it depends” she replies. It wasn’t looking too hopeful.

“Maybe it’ll pick up later”, friends say. It didn’t.

We get kicked off the DJ stage, because we don’t have the hook ups.
Me and my friend see some girls up on stage just dancing, so we decide to join them. Here’s a video – look for me up on stage bopping around:

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the girls comes up to my friend and asks her if she knew the DJ. No, my friend didn’t know the DJ. He obviously is a popular DJ.
The girl says to my friend “you can only come up here if you know the DJ”. We were then ceremoniously booted off the stage, not before they took photos with us.

Me, Friend, and two friends of the DJ who kicked us off the stage. lol there were just as many people on the dancefloor as up on stage.

So, the entire population of women were only here because the DJ invited them?? What is this place?? HAHAHA. What a joke! There was NOBODY on the floor to show off to. Well there was just this one Xzibit lookalike black guy sipping on his drink, but he wasn’t dancing. He did really looked like Xzibit though.

Entertaining ourselves in this wasteland called a nightclub
Some things to pass the time with. Feel free to use these ideas for your own when you find yourself in a similar dire situation:

1. I play choo choo train around the dead dance floor with a friend – the few people on the dancefloor looked at us with amusement, as I ‘CHOO CHOO’ chug around the floor with my friend behind me,  turning her wheels. A ‘transport’ version of the conga line.
2. We play some limbo – a great time killer. Just use two people to hold their arms out, and everybody else goes under!
3. Jumping around in group circles, while everybody stares at us.
4. I sleaze myself in front of 4 girls – These girls just came into the club. I went up to the prettiest girl and with my sleaziest voice said “Wanna dance?”. She gave me a bemused face, and I said it again but with an added line -  “Wanna dance .. with, THIS?” and I slowly point to myself, up and down. another bemused look, and her friends are giggling. Meanwhile my friends out back are cracking themselves laughing. haha.. this wasn’t going anywhere. They left the club altogether after that encounter. I suppose I did them a favour.

I’m sorry.
My friends know I run this blog. They wanted me to pick a good club tonight. They put their trust in me. I failed them in the greatest way possible by making them come to a night worse than clubbing at that sole club in Katoomba – Yup, there *is* a club there – I was the only one there, with a 40 something year old DJ playing James Brown and other hip artists. I even tweeted a recommendation to come here tonight without doing my research. I suck, and I apologize.

I don’t apologize on the promoters though. Without them, they would not have made such a crap night possible. This was an epic fail.

Coda
After giving this place 2 hours to revive itself, we left to Pontoon Bar.

Recommendation:
Do not go to events which are not properly promoted. Whoever promoted this event, get professional help. PLEASE.

POST CODA: Pontoon Bar
I’m not going to write a separate post for this. Free Entry, 10 times more packed – which made it a billion times better. I highly recommend it if you have nowhere else to go for your RNB needs. H

We even saw some other people come in from Home Nightclub. I was too ashamed to acknowledge them, and they were probably too ashamed as well to recognize me. It’s one of those things you just don’t talk about with a fellow clubber.

There are a high concentration of Indians, so if you don’t like that crowd (I don’t mind but some others don’t), then don’t go here.Here’s a video in comparison.

Until next time.

Pontoon Bar Afterwards - 100x more people than Home Nightclub tonight

Pavillion – Two girls in the front, 4 on the side, and indian guys for the rest of the people on here. DJ was playing west coast rap. My favourite anthems were being played (Dr Dre,  Snoop Dogg, etc). A crazy indian was dance-cracking onto the two girls in the front. He was out there, just shaking his body loose. I wondered where my energy was tonight. I think I get intimidated by other good dancers in a desolate setting.

Shark Bar/Hotel – I walked in and there was nobody on the floor. I was about to leave, but they started to play “Push it” by Salt N Pepa. I love this song so I *had* to get up there. So I jumped up and did a little boogie to the song, to the amusement of everybody staring at the elevated dancefloor in the middle. Everyone who looked at me I looked back, and they would stare away. A group of people at the very back took a photo of me and waved hi. The song ended and I ran off.

Spectrum – My usual friends had gone home, so I met up with the French backpackers for some dance. We checked out Spectrum first. Free entry. House. We went upstairs and it was *dead* as. A handful of people dancing, a handful of people sitting down, a small room, and that was it. I don’t think this was meant to be a place for clubbing. Reminded me like an oxford st version of Manning Bar at USYD. I can’t imagine that place being a place for clubbing. We left quite quickly.

We then stumbled upon Oxford Art Factory and settled in..

After Work Art Fridays @ The Oxford Art Factory (Art After Dark) (29th May 2009)

Note: This review is primarily for the ‘Art After Dark’ Room’, and not the ‘Live Art Space’ where a cover charge applied.

About Oxford Art Factory (assessment time 1.30am)
Address: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst
The Bar: Jugs of beers and cocktails offered for a reasonable price.
Website: http://www.oxfordartfactory.com
Inside: Walking downstairs, there are two rooms:

Live Art Space: Carpeted area with central wooden dancefloor, with DJ up on stage. At the back is an elevated area where more lounges exist. It was mostly dancefloor space.

Live Art Space - Oxford Art Factory (image oxfordartfactory.com)

Art After Dark: (where we were) A further flight of stairs down takes you to this room. It’s pretty small, holding about 100 people max. A bar as well here. The room has a high ceiling length, and a big TV on one end of the wall. It’s been painted white, which is different. Tonight there were only lounges along the wall, and not sticking out as in the picture.

Art After Dark Bar - Oxford Art Factory - This is where we hung out (image oxfordartfactory.com)

About After Work Art Fridays: (assessment time 1.30am)
Entry Fee/Cover Charge: Free for the Art After Dark Bar, $15 for the DJ in the Live Art Space Room tonight. After 3am it was free for all.
Crowd / Dress Code: Artsy types. People in their 20′s and 30′s. Lots of hats around. anything goes.
Atmosphere: I was expecting not many people to be here, so guess how surprised I was when I saw the whole room packed! Well, it was 1.30am, and it was a small area, but usually at an average to bad venue, 1.30am is when people start going home. So overall it was a good sign.
Music: Art After Dark Bar – Earlier in the evening there were live bands playing, but we missed that. So when we arrived, the band area was cleared and there was a DJ playing a mix of music across pop, rnb, retro and rock. Basically a bit of everything, and each upcoming song would be of a different genre. Somehow though the crowd was fully right into every song being played.

Live Art Space – DJ Sega (USA) was the main act playing tonight, (Indie). I didn’t get to check him out. Later another DJ was playing around 3am, with some dubstep beats, and another artist came up for some raps where I could practise some krumpin on the very open dance floor. The crowd here were all the hardcore types left, so everybody was into it.

Timeline

Not much dance room
Because of the TINY amount of room and the way in which the room was designed, our group of 8 people basically took up the middle section of the floor area. This meant every person walking in and out to the toilets or the bar had to go through our circle or around us. So basically the entire time our circle would be interrupted and I was, at least, constantly shuffling back and forth, with people hitting into us and spilling some beer onto each of us. Also because of the room, there weren’t many other large circles.. usually a max of 4 people would be per circle. Also I couldn’t pull off any crazy antic dance moves!! It was really cramped, but not shoulder to shoulder, I had about 20cm of room around me.

Boobs! (So your loyalty to this blog has paid off)
The screen in this room was playing some movie from the 80′s (You could tell by the hairstyles – it could have been the 70s). When we got in, there was a zoom in of a woman’s boobs, and someone was fondling them, just to test out to see how bouncy they were. A minute later, a couple are having a cigarette on the sofa, while the woman, still topless,  starts dancing behind them!!  It was the most bizarre film clip, but she was a pretty good dancer with her arm movements. Her boobs stayed bouncy throughout the dance routine.

I look up a few moments later and I see a naked man lying on bed, his bum crack towards the camera. gross. Back to dancing. Look up again after another few minutes, and there’s a young man and her partner – and guess what she’s doing – SHE’S TYING A CLOTH AROUND HIS DICK LIKE A BOWTIE!! What the hell! What kinda stuff is this??? He then stands up , with this cloth dangling from his dick, and he stands behind the bedpost. That was all. So bizarre!

It wasn’t surprising that there were couples making out everywhere in the room.

I wore casual. I am rewarded with solo dancing.
We mostly stayed within our circle through the night. A friend dances around with his bald head and basically gets all the attention! Damn. I had nothing. No wig, no hat, just my shirt, jeans and dodgy sneakers – I was very casual and  quite content just dancing it out on my own. Everyone else was dressed their own style. Crazy hairdos, different fashion styles.. half the crowd wearing hats – it would have been quite difficult to attract attention. Only later in the night near closing time, the music became..  I don’t know.. I wasn’t too into it anymore and wanted to just dance it out in the other room.

Coda
We all get kicked out of the Live Art room around 4am. Music was still going in the Art After Dark Bar but nobody was dancing. We were all buggered and left, quite happy with this  place. I liked this place and would recommend it if you like all sorts of music, don’t mind crowded packed small  bars, and mingling it up with the artsy types. You know who you are.