Memory sticks: Club keepsakes have a very particular power

It’s the height of summer, and it’s hot in here – really hot. The press of bodies around me moves in time to the rhythmic chug, and here and there an arm’s raised high above my head. Everyone’s skin shines with sweat; a guy in shorts and flip-flops shares a bottle of lukewarm water with a friend, and when I get out my battered DC10-branded fan and begin to waft some air around, I draw several grateful smiles. We’ve all paid through the nose to be here, and while the heat is oppressive there’s a real sense of common purpose, as though we’re all on some kind of journey together. Which we are: this is central London on a weekday rush-hour, and I’m on the Victoria Line on my way to work.

How is it that club memorabilia can trigger such powerful emotions, transforming a dull Tube journey into a trip down memory lane? After all, if truth be told I have no recollection of actually buying the fan (did I buy it? Perhaps it just… arrived). That haziness is hardly surprising, though, given that my memories of a decade’s-worth of Ibizan adventures are patchy, to say the least. Yet even without a firm origin story my DC10 fan feels disproportionately precious; and it’s only one of several dancefloor mementoes I have.

A few months ago I cleared out a kitchen drawer – you know, the drawer of random junk everyone has, home to takeaway menus, birthday cake candles still sticky with icing, broken sunglasses, dead Biros, rubber bands, cling film and obsolete phone chargers. My drawer also yielded an unopened bottle of poppers – sorry, ‘room odouriser’ – a business card for ‘Boss of NOS’ (“Quality nitrous delivered to your door”), a Ministry of Sound VIP fob (no idea), and a Space lighter.

Oh my heart: that Space lighter. Not a crappy plastic job; a metal one, pleasingly stubby with a tactile rubber wrap embossed with that naïvely retro Space logo and the words ‘IBIZA DANCE’ underneath. Unlike the DC10 fan, I can remember everything about how it came into my possession: the year was 2012, me and my friends were at We Love…, and Jeff Mills was playing one of the most extraordinary sets I’ve ever witnessed, tough, uncompromising and totally lacking in anything familiar, the kind of set you have to fully commit to or ship the fuck out. We got on board, and Jeff repaid the commitment; and in the euphoric hours that followed we made a couple of new best friends in the dance and they were so funny and friendly, we had so much in common, it was like we’d been friends for years, we couldn’t believe we hadn’t met each other sooner, we properly loved each other, like really, not just saying it, and they were both so beautiful, and she must have nipped to the Space shop on the way back from the loo because she suddenly presented me with a lighter to say thanks for something I’d given her (you don’t need to know what I’d given her) and we had a group dancefloor hug and it was like hugging your soulmates, really it was beautiful the way dance music can bring people together and help you get in touch with your feelings and connect with humanity on such a meaningful level.

Obviously, we never saw either of the sketchy weirdos again. But I still have the lighter, which has added poignancy as a keepsake now that Space is no more; and while it’s easy to laugh at the chemically induced nonsense we all spout in clubs, the fact is that while that new friendship may not have blossomed, the ability to let down your guard and trust total strangers – if only for a few hours – is one of dance music’s greatest gifts. So my lighter is testament to something precious, as well as a souvenir from the best club the world has ever seen. I binned a load of junk when I cleared out my kitchen drawer, but I kept the lighter. And the poppers, obviously. There’s no use-by date on amyl.

But why keep hold of this kind of thing? Why do I have a battered Pacha whistle on my keyring; why is there a DC10 fan in my bag? A big part of it is their tangibility: as soon as I picked up the fan the feel of it in my hand was so familiar, the thirring sound as it unfurled open and the knack involved in snapping it shut viscerally recalled sunny Ibizan adventures, and along with its orange design and DC10 logo it evoked an almost Pavlovian pleasure response.

All this can be taken too far, of course. I’ve got friends who’ve carefully stored away the wristbands and lanyards from every festival, good or bad, they’ve ever attended; I’ve met people whose nightlife allegiances are emblazoned on everything from phone case to gym bag to watch, turning them into walking adverts for savvy brands. In both cases the objects concerned have lost their meaning; instead of memory-jogging keepsakes they’re indiscriminate collections, or worse: transiently fashionable identity props.

To me, the club memorabilia that matters is emotionally charged, totemic; and it retains that charge despite the passage of time because its physical nature short-circuits our logical, linear memory, and taps directly into our ancient lizard brains. My DC10 fan, Pacha whistle and Space lighter are tactile reminders of times gone by, but not forgotten: powerful talismen wrestled back to this world from a parallel universe far, far away.

Melissa Harrison is Mixmag's Production Editor, follow her on Twitter

This feature appeared in the August 2017 issue of Mixmag