You've heard of 'wife swapping'...? Well, forget that, Simon A Morrison has been 'promoter-swapping' in Manchester which is, um, far more exciting...
If you were to enrol at the University of Dance and major in, say, the history of Club Culture, at one of your first lectures an ageing Dr Ravey Davey, with a smiley face T-shirt, spasmodic twitch and seratonin deficiency would undoubtedly point out that back in the old days, the original warehouse raves were free of all music and fashion prejudice.
He might pontificate that you would be able to hear everything from Sleazy D to Perry Como to Frankie Knuckles to Neil Sadaka, celebrating the pagan potency of life with a diaspora of teenage ravers, home counties rednecks and Chilean zoo-keepers. While you may feel compelled to leap out of your seat and complain that surely Dr Davey exaggerates, it is certainly the case that club culture, in its infancy, used to he more embracing, because, more than anything, nobody really knew what the monkey itch was going on.
Everyone from promoters to DJs to the punters were all flying by the seat of their Joe Bloggs' pants. However, it didn't take long for that melting pot of dance culture to disseminate as the dance scene expanded and developed some flesh to wrap around its bones. And then, on one legendary day, an intrepid Indiana Jones of a journalist discovered the mythical 'pigeon holes' that people still talk of in hushed tones.
Dance music bifurcated into 'house' and 'garage' so that these days trying to round up all of the genres is akin to rounding up a field of sheep with a chihuahua. Sparage; Bolivian avant-garde-jazz-classical; ballsy ballet; electronica; lo-down drum & bass made by a bloke called Brian in his shed on a Friday; the list goes on.
But, as the evolving dance media came up with more pigeon-holes to keep themselves busy Terry Pointon (left), Tangled promoter & Joe Akka (right), Devotion promoter (while punters discovered that the only thing you find in pigeon-holes is pigeon shit), niche nights began to emerge to service the diverse range of requirements - 190 bpm gabba played to wired teenagers who should really consider switching to decaf; crusty techno played to crusty people busy changing the world by writing bad poetry; paper-thin house music played to beautiful people with paper-thin personalities.
There is now a night somewhere to serve the most narrow of niches, clubs where a huddle of three people is a busy night. We have come so far in such little time, split into so many tribes that it is debatable whether these nights can even be traced back to the Adam and Eve of house and garage.
Are we still all in the same ark, paddling furiously towards the promised land of funk? What do these promoters think of each other? Of each other's nights? Do they even care... do they send out spies to check on the competition, do they wake up screaming that speed garage is the way to go, or do they exist in blissful ignorance, operating as disparate desert islands on the Great Sea of Nightlife?
As a bloke who probably had a big beard once said, no man is an island. And to test this idea, Dispatches lifted a premise shamelessly from some dusty 70's BBC documentary. We decided to take the promoter of one club to a competitor's, and vice versa, ostensibly to see what might happen under scientific conditions, in reality to get twonked on their behalf.
So I fell upon two local clubs in Manchester, in itself once a gourmet town with a smorgasbord of nefarious nights-time choices, now more of a bread shop in 80s Moscow. I started at Devotion, the Saturday night at Holy City Zoo. At a sprightly one year old, it has already forged a reputation for glitzy, glammy clubbing, with a legendary door policy tighter than Miss Moneypenny's clenched bum cheeks.
Promoted by Joe Akka and Kenny Goodman, it was rather a perturbed looking Joe that we grabbed as our experimental guinea pig.
We jumped into a rather sexy Beemer that Joe insisted wasn't his, and schlepped around the corner to the Phoenix, home of Tangled, a club built on entirely different morals and aesthetics - more of a basic shell in which all manner of madness takes place, the focus more on the music and the human buzz, a stripped-down, bare-knuckle bout of funky fisticuffs.
"I've never been so scared in my life" said Joe. We hover on the edge of the dancefloor - the limbo zone betwixt dancefloor and bar, his wry smile indicating he wasn't being altogether serious. I scanned the dancefloor.
"So who here would get into Devotion?"
"NO-ONE," he deadpanned.
We continued to hover. A girl behind me tapped determinedly on my shoulder.
"Why are you lot all in suits?"
I had had to pitch what I was wearing at the median between Georgio Armani and Georgie Porgey and while none of us were exactly wearing suits, it was a fair enough question.
"He's a promoter," I said, pointing at Joe.
"So it's true what they say then," she replied. "All promoters in Manchester are gangsters."
A fairly cracked accusation that suggested that she had had one too many Bacardi Breezers. Perhaps we did stick out like the Pope in a brothel, but it was a diverse tangle of a crowd - dreadlocked men pierced full of more metal than HMS Belfast, girls in their Saturday night finery, blokes with demonic demeanours.
"It's another world from Devotion, isn't it?" I asked.
"There's definitely a difference between the two nights and I think it's mainly the door policy."
"Anything else?"
"Probably the production and decor separate the two."
"And..."
"The music is very different. We couldn't get away with it at Devotion. It's a lot more serious, it's harder than our music."
"So pretty much everything then," I calculated, "apart from the fact that it's a bunch of humans in a room listening to music."
A beer in hand, we headed to the DJ box and found the guys behind Tangled, Terry Pointon and Phil Morse, who exchanged pleasantries with Joe according the rules of promoter protocol. In contrast to Devotion, Tangled has been around for a good few years.
"It's just gone on really," Terry indicated. "We think we've found a sort of spiritual home now - it's good, we don't get any attitude. We believe there should be clubbing for everybody."
The two clubs were only yards away from each other in distance, but a million miles in orientation. As we left Tangled and returned to the Zoo we were swamped by a rainbow wash of silk that bedecked the walls and the punters alike. A careful vetting process had ensured that the crowd was predominantly female and I was suitably embabuinized (my favourite new word from Call My Bluff).
Terry looked a little like he had just crash-landed on the distant planet Vainglorious in the Outer Moschino Galaxy and immediately agreed with Joe about the divided music policy.
"Devotion plays funky, vocally house and we play harder. We cater for two different markets, which you need in a city this size."
It's a funny old game. My mum would think it was all the same old horrible noise, but for the discerning clubber, little nuances can make all the difference. I was intrigued to see the situation from the other side.
"So what's the difference, Terry?"
"The music for a start. People come for the music more than anything else at Tangled - it's a little bit different from what everyone's been playing in Manchester. We seem to cater for a slightly different crowd."
We stepped into a small back room, not so much a VIP area as a closet with a fridge.
"And so is there such a thing as a door policy at Tangled?"
"Not really," Terry smirked. "I mean, there's the usual thing that we try not to let too many lads in, but not really. You can wear anything you want, get in and party."
Certainly Tangled had the relaxed vibe of an extension to a party thrown for mates, whereas some of Devotion's punters must have spent a month beautifying themselves, though to be fair they didn't seem to mind working a little sweat into their DKNY.
"Don't underestimate the calibre of clubbers that we have in here," Joe retorted. "they're still up for it. They may want to look good at the same time, but they're still up for it."
Glam girls and boys at Devotion, Holy City Zoo I tried to draw Terry into making a detour towards Controversy City but the furthest he came was the outer suburbs, whispering that there was a rumour going round town that the last record at Devotion's New Year's Eve do was Cher's 'Believe'.
With some egging on he put the question to Kenny, which is tantamount to implying that he'd slept with his mother. Kenny Goodman stamped on the rumour vehemently.
Devotion has found fast favour with Manchester's jet-set, a rum bunch of actors from Coronation Street and Hollyoaks, footballers from Utd and City and ex indie-band people. True to form Spider from Corrie appears, with the new girl Holly and Ryan Giggs spends most of the night at the bar, no doubt resting the injured leg that kept him out of Utd's 8-1 riot over Nottingham.
Talk about clubbed to death - while Joe and Terry managed to stay focused I bounced between venues like a boozy-faced squash ball, eventually back at Tangled, where I conspired to get myself into a suitable tangled of my own. My head was fit to explode with the myriad of choices now open for clubbers to indulge in what remains, essentially, a bit of a knees-up at the weekend.
Some people bemoan the fact that we can't just all pile into a big barn and party together, but those egalitarian ideals have been long since squashed by the reality of late 90's dance culture. Personally I like to don a beret, munch a clove of garlic, hang out with Laurent Garnier and scream "Vive La Difference!"
SIMON A MORRISON