Four doors down is the Argentinian equivelant of a working men’s club that’s full of artists dancing their tits off. It’s not a restaurant, it’s a room that sells food for eating it in - and I love it. There’s nothing on the walls and a few unostentatious tables and chairs cover the part of the floor not occupied by the dancing crowd. The lovely couple behind the bar serve Quilmes (local lager) at seventy pence a litre (with those white plastic cups you got given orange squash in on your 7th Birthday), hot empanadas and some kind of apple and pear tart I forget the name of.
Opposite the bar there’s a DJ playing a selection of tunes so carefully sequenced that they belie their overall randomness. I arrive with some kind of latin accented minimal electonica (that makes my hips twitch involuntarily) and left just after a slightly naff, but ultimately joyful clash of Mick Jagger singing ‘Paint It Black’ over a Sugarhill Gang sample. Like any self-respecting Englishman I don’t dance unless I am pissed out of my tree, but it’s is one of those rare nights when you feel like an idiot if you don’t rather than if you do.[1] It's the best club I’ve been to for ages. In fact it reminds me a bit of an Argentinian Tube Bar, and there’s not many better compliments than that.[2]
[1] I can’t abide the self conscious ‘half way to pissed but trying to look good shuffle’ stage and besides any picture I’ve ever seen taken of me dancing looks to all intents and purposes like I’m doing an ridiculously sincere impersonation of a dyspraxic turkey.
[2] Tube Bar was a club night that also used a Working Men’s Club as a venue and that was, at least initially, the antithesis of pervasive scene clubbing of the mid-nineties. The DJ’s were from the John Peel School Of Mixing and happlily played ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ back to back with ‘Up, Up and Away In My Beautiful Balloon’.
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