“I’d pictured a scary and imposing fortress”: Jodie Harsh on her first time at fabric

The smell of flesh hung in the air. Translucent plastic flaps partly exposed sweating carcasses. Bodies squished together like cattle huddled in a lorry off to the slaughterhouse. As the butchers of Smithfield market buzzed into life, people were dancing in fabric, next door. I’d been told all about this nightspot, its epic caves of hedonism. But hearsay never prepared me for the experiences I was about to have inside.

After my nightlife coma, forcibly induced by my parents, I occasionally snuck a weekend up in London. I was rebelling against their sanctions, defiant and unwilling to slow down. They never found out – and as far as I was concerned, rules were there to be broken. The hiatus had allowed me time to study, and I passed my exams with flying colours. Oh how I schemed. After my second year of A levels, I would be able to move to London. But one more year seemed like ages. For now, dark dancefloors remained an occasional solace, a tender balm to soothe my betrayal.

There was a different mood in London in the early noughties – it seemed like the city encouraged mischief. The world was just relieved not to have been ended by the millennium bug or obliterated by terrorists, and the dark shadow of 9/11 hung over it as the war in Iraq blazed on. Social media was in its infancy at this point – we weren’t living through daily digital overdoses, so the only place to really connect with your people was in the flesh. The place that gathered communities together was the nightclub. The drug that enabled this was MDMA.

Kira was the perfect alibi, and a friend of a friend of a friend of hers was going out with someone who worked for The Prodigy. It was through this tenuous hook-up that we blagged some guest list spots for fabric. Us, on the guest list? Major. We couldn’t believe our luck. We’d always queued, crumpled-up discount flyer in hand, little plastic baggy of powder sandwiched in between my bum cheeks.

I’d pictured fabric as a scary and imposing fortress, where I’d be greeted by a big fat ‘no’ at the door, an attempted entry foiled by a security guard like our man at the Astoria. I was used to my home comforts of Heaven, those same bouncers guarding and welcoming me in for another Saturday night. The friendly lesbian in the bomber jacket, the big built guy with tattoos up his arms – they were there to protect us. I didn’t know their names, but they saw mine as my fake ID was scanned. Maybe they knew I was blagging it in as an underage clubber. Maybe their willingness to let us pass was something like a duty of care. It kept us off the streets and under supervision. But fabric? That was going to be new territory.

A sense of unease rumbled in my stomach as Kira and I joined a small line. We’d bypassed the main queue that meandered around a few corners of Clerkenwell, past clubbers penned in like farmyard animals awaiting their fate. It was a roadblock, but we were apparently on the guest list. I felt undeserving, and still unsure if we’d be let in at all. What if our names aren’t down, what happens then? It wasn’t really a sense of shame I was anticipating; after all, I didn’t know anyone here and certainly no one knew me. I just wanted to get in and enjoy the party. We approached a wall of security, and a clipboard-wielding girl asking for our names. Relief – she found them instantly and marked a line through the print with a pen. She branded our wrists: ‘COMP’. A quick pat-down, a glance at our IDs, and we went straight to the dancefloor.

Fabric took the art of disco very seriously, and this particular night was extra special – 2ManyDJs were playing. I’d been rinsing their 'As Heard On Radio Soulwax' CD to death. We hurried into the chanting of Green Velvet’s ‘La La Land’ on that crisp soundsystem. The sonics were airtight, contained within the brick walls – there was nowhere for the vibrations to escape to. The wooden floor quivered under the push of the sub-bass, which tingled in my toes. ‘Something ’bout those little pills . . . ’

MDMA felt like a massage for my brain. It elevated me into pure, transitory joy. It pressed my pleasure button for hours, throughout which any feelings of aggression and jealousy were rendered impossible. It inspired moments of complete togetherness within my friendship circle. My anxiety melted away, and I became part of the music.

It always felt like people cared more when they were on MDMA. Warnings were shared among us users about proper recovery time and maintaining hydration levels. I’d grown up hearing about the pitfalls of going out, dancing, getting high – I’d seen Leah Betts on the front pages and been taught to ‘Just Say No’. But drugs are never going to go away, because human beings will always want to tap into this loving feeling.

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I dabbed some Mandy on to my gums, and we were off exploring. Kira didn’t do drugs, but she didn’t look down on my smoking and snorting. I’d have probably ended up dead in a ditch before my eighteenth birthday if she was as hardcore as me. That night at fabric, we were excitable effusions of light in a comforting maze of darkness.

Curious in the haze, we nudged our way through the labyrinthine space. There was no time for chairs here, but we stumbled across a room full of black leather beds on which to lie. We tumbled backwards on one and stared at the curved brick ceiling, as Kira told of how she’d marry Brian Molko one day. 

Back down to the front of the DJ booth in Room 1 for Soulwax. Blissful. They mixed Nirvana’s ‘Lithium’ into a techno track just as my high took hold. The floor became liquid. A flickering strobe snapped like a lightning storm. Each time the smoke machine billowed out its cloud of uncompromising smog, I inhaled deeply, and it smelled like batteries, or the damp earth after a particularly electric thunderstorm. And then, at 3.45 in the morning when the night was at its blackest point, having lost Kira and with no credit on my phone to find her, I slid out solo, drenched in sweat and stinking of euphoria, back into Smithfield Meat Market.

Jodie Harsh's book You Had To Be There: An Odyssey Through Noughties London, One Night at a Time is out now via Faber, buy it here