London - The best years of dancing

London

London – The best years of dancing

When I look back then, I can honestly say that those years in London really defined me and had the greatest impact on the person I became. Even though I will always feel like a New Yorker, I truly know that I started out as a Londoner and I doubt that will ever go away.

When I left Hannover on January 1st, 2001, I remember feeling lonely and how things changed after I arrived in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, I also remember how miserable I was a few weeks ago in Hannover when I suddenly met an English guy here, who would become a close friend of mine, which took that feeling of loneliness away once again.

When I was a trainee at a small bank in Cuxhaven, Germany in the early 1990s, London had a big impact on me when I came to the city to study English at a language school in London Hampstead. We were just a group of young people from Europe who were in the UK to improve our language skills and get away from our families.

I was taken by the diversity and nightlife of the city and experienced the early years of dancing at the former Hippodrome nightclub at Leicester Square, which unfortunately was turned into a casino later. But back in 1992, the other students from the language school and I went to the Hippodrome almost every night and missed classes the next day.

The Hippodrome at Leicester Square was probably one of the most touristic nightclubs in London, and a far cry from Boujis in Knightsbridge, where Prince William and Prince Harry had a regular table which was often surrounded by pretty girls, including Kate and her sister Pippa. 

But it was the music that connected us back then, and which made me come back over and over again, especially after I had moved to London after my studies in Hannover in 2001.

Many people believed that nightclubs were a place for superficial people, but I actually understood why they were considered to be a second home. Even in my early years, when it took time and hard work to build a career in London, the Hippodrome was one of the places I could go on a Saturday night and know that I would have a fantastic time. My friends and I spent hours on the dance floor, watching the biggest hits come and go.

I remember dancing to songs such as "Touch Me" by Rue da Silva or "Gotta Get Through This" by Daniel Bedingfield, while earning GBP 185 weekly in my initial employment at Great Ormand Street Hospital for Children in London in 2001. I was happy as long as I was able to attend the Hippodrome every Saturday night, and yes, those were some of the most joyful years of my life.

When the Hippodrome closed its doors in December 2005 due to the loss of its drinking license and rival gangs fighting outside of the building, I had already begun spending entire weekends in the clubs in Vauxhall, where some of the major parties of the LGBTQ community would take place.

And what can I say, I don't believe there were any limits when we were dancing the nights away. When our careers took off, many of us went abroad and started to conquer the dance floors in Barcelona, Ibiza or Mykonos and took clubbing to a totally new level. 

And while my former friends from Hannover wondered if they should buy semi-attached houses in Bothfeld or Kronsberg, we were actually the ones who were working hard and living our lives to the fullest and heads up. That's what I still call living the life.

I really think that some of us were living for those weekends, which quite often ended on the dance floors of DTPM at Fabric in Farringdon, just a few minutes away from Merrill Lynch, where I would start working a few hours later on a Monday morning.

When the financial crisis struck the markets in 2007, the clubbing scene underwent a transformation, and I was informed a few years ago that nearly half of the nightclubs in the UK vanished. But others were there to stay a little longer.

My colleague Naomi was at a party and urged me to come to the Firehouse at Gloucester Road on a Saturday night in 2008. After seeing posh people jump into black cabs on Saturday nights and never knowing where they were going, I ended up in one of the members clubs in Chelsea/Kensington myself. 

Jimi Hendrix played his first UK concert there and Tom Jones had his first number one on the charts there in 1966. The club was built on three floors of a grand Georgian house right next to the Natural History Museum and still attracted fashionable people more than four decades later.

When the real estate bubble burst, the party would continue at the clubs in Mayfair. But it wasn't about money; it was about being part of a club. When I was approved as a member, I began bringing my friends and colleagues from BNP Paribas to the Firehouse for amazing dinners and nights on the dance floor.

Louis Buckworth, who had been running the club for years made sure that after I moved to New York and the Firehouse closed, I would be welcomed at Boujis. The club was famous for its 'Boujis Tuesdays,' with a clientele so wealthy they didn't have to worry about work on Wednesday morning.

When my friends Hawa, Charlene, Emil, and Ella approached the doorman with the guest list at Boujis in 2011, we were unsure if they would allow us in. And then twenty years later, when I first arrived at the Hippodrome for my first night out in London, we were welcomed again.

I recently had drinks with my new friend, William, and we agreed that we should find a good party soon. We're both fathers nowadays, but we are both into good music and decided that we need to make new memories, when I recently heard that there was a party coming back to Barcelona. 

I imagined myself as a young man running to the Hippodrome in Leicester Square after leaving my flat in London Hampstead, where I spent my first years living in London. I saw myself running to the tube, going up the stairs of the subway station at Leicester Square, and being ready for the night.

I smiled and then bought the ticket for the party in Barcelona. 

There is only one life to live, isn't it?