Friday night
Charl
Blignaut
The fact that winter was discernibly lifting wasn’t the only reason I found myself heading back down End Street and up Jeppe Street in Johannesburg for the opening of Club Reality a few Friday nights ago. Nostalgia had something to do with it too.
Certainly, it wasn’t the flyer advertising a new Jo’burg club. The invites for those come and go and by now we have fallen for enough flyer-babble to know in advance that we should rather not expect to be amused. But Club Reality is what it’s called and club reality is what you get.
Starting with the location. Jeppe and End streets, you may recall, were once the last harbour of progressive nightclubs as they dried up in the inner city and regrouped in the cozier zones up north. To over-fried Melville and undercooked Rosebank; enter bouncers in bomber jackets and uptight, sporty girls with elbows of steel.
Strange, then, to drive up Jeppe Street late at night and see cars jammed around what, in 1992 and 1993, used to be Fourth World: house music and ecstasy; Ninja Boys and crystal meth; shiny clothes and techno; DJ Graeme and DJ Petro. Well, a natural, if belated, evolution is now showing at Club Reality every Friday night. Now it’s juicy jungle beats; drum’n’bass and Ready-D; spliffheads and dress-down; B-boys and graffiti walls …
Downstairs at the opening of Club Reality the crowd is mingling tentatively against Gogga’s graffiti backdrop, slowly absorbing the shattered sounds pounding from speakers.
Upstairs the roof is chilly so the dance floor starts to happen sooner. Back at Fourth World everybody wanted to be a DJ, today everyone is a DJ. Fortunately most of them just want to get laid and slowly the hellish fight for control of the turntables subsides and settles into the kind of thumpy, deep house you can expect upstairs at Reality right through summer. Back downstairs, the main floor is cooking up its own particular brew. A wall of sound mutates into the steady drone of MC chants and scratchy rhymes.
When I return to Reality the following Friday night, I’m just in time to witness the mastery of Ready-D, who has decided to open his set upstairs; hip-hop 101 while some pretty young thing projects visuals onto the wall of the neighbouring block of flats.
Downstairs, much later, I happen upon the kind of curious scene that makes you deeply pleased to know you live and die in Jo’burg. A throng of mostly white bodies is packed around the dance floor and hanging from the rafters watching the Ghetto Ruff kids and assorted B-boys take the circle and do their thing.
There’s the kind of energy that says Reality is heading somewhere; that sooner or later someone is going to sustain a landmark, cross-culture jungle club in this city.
By last week, the third Friday of Reality’s existence, the place was packed all night long and by midnight queues were once again forming at the door and spilling out on to the eerie city street …