John Jones: I Bloody Love Clubs...Obviously.

Clubs. I bloody love clubs...obviously. I love the chunky bouncer who gets to third base with you before you’ve even entered the building. I love paying a crisp 10 pound note to get in and then nigh-on five pounds for a pint of Fosters-flavoured water. I love getting evil looks from the man in the toilets for washing my own hands. I love being guilted into putting my hands up for Detroit and I love being hugged by sweat-drenched strangers...obviously.

Clubs can be a surreal experience at the best of times. Looking around to see six brutish men circled around a girl with their mouths on the floor and their hands locked and loaded for a grade-A fumble, it often feels like a scene from Attenborough: Human Mating Rituals. Heck, I won’t lie, I still find myself looking around the back of the plastic plants, half expecting to see the silver-tongued narrator on all fours, excitedly whispering about how lucky we are to finally witness the homo sapiens in its natural habitat. Without wanting to be seen boasting about my opposable thumbs here, let’s just say the nightclub scene isn’t really for me.

Now I know that opinion may not sit too well with everybody: some people love clubs, I get it. I still have nightmares about that one group of girls who scream like banshees as their favourite song comes on...oh you know the one, that song with that sexy man singer and the electronic drums and the synth bridge and that bit where the rapper talks about sex.

But the main problem is that these places don’t want people to converse. As a club owner you want to maximise your profits – keeping the dance floor full and the bar busy. Give your punters a quiet atmosphere and they won’t be pouring expensive shots down their throats but instead they’ll sit talking about retro cartoons and Russian literature - then you’d really be in trouble, what with no profits and a club full of fictional morons. Club owners keep the music loud so that their clients will abandon the idea of communication and just resort to drinking away the awkward bass-filled silences. So you’ve not paid the 10 pounds entry for the conversation or the atmosphere, and here’s where the problem begins for a single man. It’s hard to even enter a club environment without being given the ‘he’s only here for one thing’ evil eye. Girls love dancing, for the most part: it doesn’t take a genius to notice that it’s not Frank and Terry buying the Glee boxsets. Men, on the other hand, tend to spend their time on the dancefloor awkwardly pushing their chests out and lurching their feet up and down like a drunken Pinocchio.

So why do men go to clubs at all?

I normally find myself at this stumbling block of a question at around 12am on a Saturday night. Now I’m well aware of the answer that screams its way through the heads of female readers, and let me be the first to say that it’s not to meet a girl: it’s said that 80 per cent of a person’s opinion of you is made in the first seven seconds of meeting, and there’s no way I’m looking to find a girlfriend whose first glimpse of me was a misty-eyed rendition of ‘It’s My Life’ complete with back-to-back guitar solo.

It’s not the music, the conversation or even the girls that lure me into the local nightlife. Truth is, it’s peer pressure. Find me a man that loves clubs and I’ll find you a liar. Week in, week out, men are being bullied into clubs by other men, who are being bullied by other men, who are, in all likelihood, being bullied by the first man in a circle of drunken confusion.

So, please do your borough a favour. The next time you see a single man in a club with two left feet and a penchant for tequila, don’t judge him as a misogynist with his cross-hairs ready to fire. Take pity on the man: have a conversation outside, buy him a kebab perhaps, but if you want to keep your toenails in place it’s probably best not to ask him to dance.

Next week: I’ll be jumping straight into the world of the club nightlife with the help of Neill Strauss’ sleazers Bible, ‘The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists’.