Luke O’Connell
For some, The Palace of Camden St seems to hold a curious Mecca-like status on Thursday nights. I had never been but was assured that it was a place of magic and intrigue, where anything could happen. It seemed to be a place where you paid money at the door to be guaranteed a sweaty shift or an encounter with friends of yore. It seemed truly “buzzing”.
And so, with a heavy heart, after the recent SU election count, as some sort of putative celebration for the successful Ents-to-be Chris O’Connor, The Palace’s bell finally tolled for me. But it was a terrible, soul-destroying bell. The kind of bell that accidentally goes off on your alarm clock at 5am, waking you up to the stark reality that you are alone. That you must go back to sleep, somehow, or lie there and take it on the chin. That in The Palace, no one can hear you scream and, even if they could, they would probably take that as a sign of your sheer euphoria at the greatness of it all.
Like hell itself, The Palace reaches out to its exterior with grotesque and infernal neon lights, like a nightmarish Marty Whelan vision of Las Vegas. There is a wailing heard from inside, the sound of a thousand fleeting and forgettable shifts, and a deep thumping that suggests the whole club is being date-raped by the devil.
I enter, clueless that I am stepping into a soulless funhouse with 2000 other glazed and craven individuals who know too well how this story ends. Or rather doesn’t end, repeating itself next week, and the week after, “and it goes on, and on, and on”, throwing their hands up in the air, sometimes.
Dublin's young lost souls...
It is beyond anything I could anticipate, in the way that Fade St was, but in this case there will be few to share the sadness and loneliness of the place with tomorrow. There will be no group rewatchings of this tale on the internet, and even if there were they could never relate the horror, the utter paucity of humanity, the so-obvious reality of this dancefloor full of knowns and unknowns and unknown unknowns bumping together violently and contorting animalistically, in some vain attempt at sharing the experience of what feels like it might be the end of the world, for one night only (or at least until next Thursday), and you just can’t afford to miss it.
And then, just when it all seems too much, as if the place might explode from all the contrived excitement, and from that fucking Rihanna, it ends, and I can leave, never to return. But it’s not the people that I flee from, who are all lovely and make a world-ending night become merely world-endangering. And it’s not the music, because I can handle, or even sort of enjoy, whatever it is that they play. It’s the venue, The Palace, a Hotel California kind of place where there is the constant feeling that once I check in I will never be allowed to leave. The exit takes me a long time to find. And the sign on the door says, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
