Lifestyle

Sophie Heawood looks back over her years of partying



Bianca Jagger said recently, with some exasperation, that she wanted to clear up a myth about herself: she hadn’t actually ridden into a party at Studio 54 on a white horse back in 1977, but had merely sat herself down on a white horse that was already in the nightclub.

(Presumably it was just hanging out, ignoring the barman’s questions of ‘Why the long face?’ etc, etc.) For God’s sake, I thought, we don’t care what the truth is about your equine seating arrangements, Bianca, just keep the dream alive for the rest of us. Let us imagine the person we could be if we, too, rode into a soirée on a majestic beast, like Joan of Arc leading a nation into its fight for the right to party.

I love parties. I know this might seem an obvious statement but there seem to be so many people who say they don’t like them nowadays, or who only want to talk about their social anxiety in crowded spaces, or how they prefer Jomo, ie the Joy Of Missing Out. Obviously I have the deepest respect for other people’s mental health, it’s just that every time they disrespect parties, I nurture a burning sense of outrage as if they were murdering a member of my close family. Parties made me who I am, released from my daylight inhibitions. Parties are the places where I’ve grown into a bigger personality (alright, a louder one), and a braver one, too; where I’ve always tested out new parts of myself to see if they are funny or beautiful or useful to others trying to have a good time. Where I’ve learned that the best tactic of all is simply to walk into the room with an enormous smile on your face — you get so many enormous smiles back. It’s joyful. Parties are where I dance off the parts of my soul I don’t need any more, shedding my boring old feelings into the pounding music, into the darkness, into the night. They’re cheaper than a holiday, less painful than plastic surgery, easier than therapy.

The model Jack Guinness used to throw some properly ridiculous Christmas parties at his warehouse flat round the corner from me in east London, with its broken windows and leaking lavatory all adding to the festive spirit. You’d go there a few days before the 25th, quietly thrilled to have found your name on that year’s guest list (the fear of falling off it was deep and real) and find Alexa Chung DJing, insisting that ‘The Rat’ by The Walkmen was a massive crowd-pleaser. (Turns out it is. Who knew?) Then someone else would put ‘Uptown Funk’ on and Mark Ronson would duck out of the room, blushing. Pixie Geldof would be manning the bar, cheerily making cocktails out of Tesco booze while singing along to her family’s traditional hymn, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Florence Welch and Dev Hynes would bellow out a storming rendition of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ while Daisy Lowe danced around in a tinsel mini dress and Grimmy talked to Fran Cutler’s cleavage, which would be holding a party all of its own on the other side of the room. Even thinking about walking past the mistletoe would give you a 93 per cent chance of getting felt up by an Instagram influencer heaving under the weight of their own #sponcon. It was wonderful. 

(One year I protested to a friend, who wouldn’t stop asking, that Harry Styles definitely hadn’t been there, until she showed me that not only was there a blurry video of him singing on the Daily Mail sidebar of shame, but that it was a blurry video that had been borrowed from my very own Instagram account. No recollection. None.) 

But the parties were just as good before I became a tragic name-dropper. I remember when much of south London was still derelict or squatted, and Oval Mansions, a sprawling network of flats overlooking the cricket ground, housed a community living without landlords or mortgages. I remember everyone piling on to the roof to watch the millennium eve fireworks going down the Thames before the party splintered off into other parts of the building, and then into the art bar downstairs where the party pills were flying around. My fake Gucci handbag, from a holiday in Thailand, got nicked and I summoned all my powers of excitement to make myself into the sort of person who could feel free enough not to care. 

Squats and castles excite me equally: there is no wrong place for a party. I once went to a 30th birthday dinner in a vast stately home where I thought my luck had run out, as the seating plan had all the fun people down the far end of the table and me next to the actual Lord at the other. I thought, I’ve come all this way only to have to listen to some aristo bleating on about why his butler believes we should bring back hanging. Only to find out that the ageing aristo was actually quite left wing and fascinated by electronic music. All so intriguing that I went back for the New Year’s Eve do the next year, where our host gave me so much of his ancient precious wine from the ancient precious cellar that I danced backwards into the Christmas tree, all 50 feet of it, and sent the glass baubles smashing on to the marble floor. I happily await my next invite, but it has been a while. 

The DJ Erol Alkan used to run a club night called Trash at various venues, only he never called it a club night, always a party. It was on every Monday, an arrangement that weeded out the hardcore from the tourists, and I went so often Erol gave me a job with a clipboard on the door. I got to know all the regulars and discovered that some of them had organised flexible working arrangements on Tuesday mornings so they never had to miss a night of queer-friendly electroclash raving. Such was their commitment to dressing up in a bin bag and eyeliner and calling it art — there should be medals for this kind of loyalty. 

And my respect remains undimmed for a party animal called Charlie, whose memorial service I attended earlier this year. In the speeches, we heard how he’d once been unable to find his way home after a particularly memorable night out, and so had fashioned himself a bed for the night out of two wheelie bins laid end to end, putting his lower body in one and his top half in the other, and using his wallet as a pillow.

You know how yummy mummies talk about going on family holidays so they can ‘make memories’? Well it’s my firm belief that party animals go out at night to make regrets. To look for trouble and then enjoy feeling absolutely awful about it afterwards. There’s something perversely appealing about those dark, hungover mornings of the soul, where inner voices whisper to you that you are a crumpled, failed attempt at humanity, that everyone hates you, that you might as well just disappear. I suspect that this is what we all want: a disastrous morning after as well as a marvellous night before. Admit it — we all long to wake up in a pair of wheelie bins.



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