All Time Top 100

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Launch Night - Digital

There’s nothing quite like the opening of a new venue to ruffle the feathers of Brighton’s clubland and God knows we need it. After a miserable summer of tumbleweed blowing across dancefloors large and small across Brighton, it’s gonna take a brand with Digital’s pedigree to stir things up a bit.

And there’s definitely a buzz outside the club come half nine with both guest list and punter queues stretching almost up to the two adjacent piers. Search lights scan the sky, camera crews scurry about and its all a bit like a glitzy movie premier gone scruffy Indie.

What a relief then to report that inside Digital is a revelation. Like Audio did with the ailing Escape, Digital have done with the Zap, gutting the main room and rewiring the lot from scratch. Shifting the bar from the left of the room to sit where once there was a clunky two tier stairway-cum-nightmarish bottleneck completely opens the main dancefloor, also now stripped of podiums, poxy stairs and pillars. Simple glass and wood panelling abound and in short it’s everything a contemporary night club should be – fluff free and brutally functional.

It must be pretty galling for the owners to not have thrown open the doors with a set from a living legend, but Miss Grace Jones won’t perform in a building site, apparently. However, Digital’s flagship Indie night ‘Stonelove’ amply fill her shoes, shrewdly booking the hugely popular and consistently brilliant Maximo Park to open the proceedings.

The dancefloor is packed from the off and the Stonelove residents gleefully put Digital’s pristine Funktion One soundsystem through it paces with a selection of Indie hits, pop classics and lashings of floppy-fringe friendly electro. The privelelged few who’ve braved the queues shimmy like they’re on Diddy’s yacht in Cannes and there’s a tangible sense in the air that there are some great nights to come in this gleaming addition to South Coast clubbing.

posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 11:24 PM

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