This week I went to a Cool Party for the first time in many years. Now I don’t want to do a disservice to my street cred in my very own newsletter, so let me clarify – I haven’t stopped going to parties entirely. I still party. Sometimes I even party hard. “Wow, Joz,” some people said to me on the odd night out in Edinburgh this year, “you’re really partying hard.” Sometimes I even go to parties that have been organised or are being attended by people that I and others consider to be cool. But I’d say it’s a long time since I’ve been to a party which inspired the thought “Uh oh, it’s going to be cool” even as you were walking towards the building it was happening in. Until this week.

The party was happening inside a warehouse (of course), and as I approached it I noticed a long queue snaking around the building. Cool young people were lined up, one knee popped one straight, heads all tilted to the side, nodding at each other and saying things like “Yeah yeah yeah” but not smiling. They were being fitted with wristbands before being allowed entry. Surely I didn’t need a wristband to attend my friend birthday party? “Hello?” I said, putting my hand up and waving as I approached the security guy. “Kathy’s 30th?”

“Different queue,” he replied, jerking his thumb towards a separate, mercifully shorter but no less cool, queue. I was fitted with a wristband, and sent on upstairs. “Keep going til you get to the loft,” he said, and we began to climb a stairwell not unlike something people might run down in the third act of a horror movie.

“I hope the party isn’t too close to all this malfunctioning industrial machinery,” I said to my girlfriend and the friends we were coming with, gesturing to the air around us to indicate the throbbing, pulsing, grinding noise that filled the stairwell. “That would be a real shame, and probably drown out the playlist they’ve prepared, which is no doubt packed with classic old-school disco bangers.” But in fact, as we ascended towards the loft, the noises only became louder. It was suggested that what I had initially taken to be the sounds of malfunctioning machinery, or perhaps of Hell, was in fact the music playing at the birthday party we were going to. Reader, it did not sound like Earth, Wind & Fire. I thought this was supposed to be a 30th???

We entered the Loft, which was full of haze, in order to better highlight the exciting laser display beaming around the rafters. I have never experienced haze outside of a theatrical production in my life, and I immediately began to cough frantically. This was embarrassing – although my description of the event up to now might sound laced with scorn, I was in fact tremendously excited about finally being granted access to a Cool Space, and felt it was a shame that the first thing I should do upon entering it was to double over coughing, wafting my arm in front of my face like Mr Bean in the perfume department.

I crouched into the corner, putting my face low to the floor where there was less haze and inhaled a huge gulp of cleaner air that should at least get me across the dancefloor. I then swaggered across the room to look for someone I knew, who I nodded at coolly. Unfortunately, I had swallowed so much air that after they greeted me I had no choice but to burp loudly in their face. I was not doing well.

At this point it might be worth pausing the narrative to take a backwards look at my own chequered history with nights out, parties and the concept of clubbing.

I discovered clubbing at university, where I quickly decided it was one of my least favourite things in the world ever. I had never heard of it before, other than the episode of Cold Feet where Karen starts to go clubbing again when her marriage falls apart and all her friends think it is sad. I did not realise that it was something people actually do for fun, and I did not acclimatise well to it.

Perennially unable to lose myself in anything even half resembling a moment, most of my attempts at clubbing generally ended up involving me half-heartedly bopping around the room carrying six Vodka Kicks (two in each hand, one in each pocket of the suit jacket I would invariably be wearing because I thought it was important to look smart at these things) – I hated queuing and thought it was easier to buy all the drinks I planned on drinking at once and slowly make my way through them over the course of the night. I would very quickly deliberately lose the people I had come with because I didn’t enjoy dancing, which was inevitably how they wanted to spend the evening. I always hoped that one day one of them would go “Actually, yeah, ok, I’ll sit in the corner and just have a conversation with you while we drink our alcopops, that’s how I’d like to spend the night,” but it never happened. So I would drift around the nightclub, hoping to bump into someone else who also wanted to sit and talk, or even just think, together.

Eventually I realised that I could pass big stretches of the evening by going outside to buy a burger from the burger van, then slowly eating the burger, then strolling around the campus for a bit, then going back to the burger van to buy a hot dog, then repeating the loop. If I ever did show my face back inside the club, it would usually be to do two or three slow laps of the entire building, always looking out across the dancefloor with my neck slightly extended as though I were looking for my friends. If I ever actually made eye contact with any of them, I would quickly duck my head and walk fast in the opposite direction, and go and buy another burger. I would do this until 3am, or whenever the club night finished, and then find all my friends as they left, and would always greet them with a huge amount of enthusiasm as though I had had a great night. “What happened to you?” they would say, baffled. “We completely lost you.” “Oh yeah,” I would say, “I was just having so much fun.” I never stopped to think that at best, this sounded rude, with its implication that I was elsewhere having more fun with other people. Though I doubt any of them ever thought this – I’m sure they all knew what I was doing on some level.

The best one of these nights involved my remembering that the uni library was open 24 hours, so after paying my £5 to get my wristband and quickly shaking off my friends in the queue for the bar, I just went across campus, found a comfy seat, sat in it and listened to my iPod for four hours before heading back to the nightclub before they left and discovered my perfect crime.

I don’t know why I never said “Do you know what, guys, I actually don’t like going out or clubbing very much, so maybe I’ll just make extra effort to see you guys during the day, or to organise things at each other’s houses that I’ll feel less overwhelmed by, so that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on friendships but also don’t feel like I have to pretend to go along with social things I don’t enjoy.” Actually I do know why I never said that, it’s because saying that requires a level of self-analysis that it took me another decade to discover, and at that time I was principally concerned with just doing the best impression I could of somebody who fit in.

For 17 years I have celebrated my birthday with a picnic, because that’s my favourite form of large social gathering. No walls, you see. Mind you, the lack of walls is always a bit nerve-wracking, because there’s an inevitable hour or so where you are just a person in a park surrounded by way too much food and waiting for someone to arrive, and whereas if you’ve booked a venue for your party that early awkwardness can be relatively private, with a picnic it’s painfully visible to everyone else using the park. This year, Luke McQueen was the first person to arrive, and when he got up close to me he said “Sorry, I’ve been here for ages, I was over there trying to work out where you were, and I just kept staring at you in the distance and I thought “That might be him, but it doesn’t look like a party.””

The one year I didn’t do this was my own 30th, when I felt like I should really make the effort to have a proper party. I booked a room above a pub. I laid on some food (I learned what a “slider” is – it’s a small burger! Wow! I thought it was something to do with poo). I put together an incredible playlist (“September,” of course, but also “Little Lies,” “D.A.N.C.E.”, “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, all the classics). I wore an electric blue suit over a red turtleneck, because I was going through a weird phase and needed help. For one evening, I felt like the coolest cat in town.

We smash back to the present. I am coughing up haze and burping in people’s faces because this party is too cool for me. The world has moved on. People like me are relics. There was not a slider in sight. The music sounded like a huge tractor was sinking down into a lot of gravel. Reader – I loved it. I had such a lovely time. Now yes, that’s largely because I found a mezzanine level where there were some nice sofas and armchairs and me and my friends could just relax and talk and think, like I’d always wanted to do back in my youth. At one point I tried going to the dance floor and found that, yes, dancing still fills me with unutterable horror, but this time I had no problem simply going “Nah, not for me” and returning to the mezzanine.

I was reminded of an episode of Mr Motivator I had seen as a child, in which Mr Motivator was desperate to be considered cool, and tried wearing cool things, doing cool things like skateboarding, going to cool places. At the end he was still perceived by his peers as uncool, and sat on a brick wall in a blue funk, at which point a young boy with a robin on his finger entered the frame.

“What’s up, Mr Motivator?” he said. Mr Motivator sighed.

“I’m trying to be cool, but nothing I do is working,” he explained.

“Cool isn’t about doing the cool things, or going to the cool places,” the boy replied, stroking the robin (I think? This sounds really weird now I type it out, but it’s how I remember it). “Cool is just about being yourself. If you’re yourself, then cool just comes along.” And then the robin flew off. And then maybe I woke up, I don’t know, but that’s how I remember it.

Maybe that’s what had happened to me. I used to be so desperate for other people to think I was into the same things as them. But I didn’t mind any more. I was very happy to just relax on the mezzanine with my friends in the cool warehouse, safe in the knowledge that there was a thing going on over there that wasn’t my kind of thing, but that I was really enjoying it anyway.

Really getting into the groove of the cool party on the mezzanine level.

Then my friend Bron came and joined me on the sofa, vibrating with urgency.

“There’s an orgy going on downstairs,” he said. I sat bolt upright.

“What?”

“An orgy. I went to the smoking area, and it was full of people who were taking a break from the orgy. It’s on one of the other levels.”

I couldn’t compute this. To my knowledge, I had never been in the same building as an orgy before. I didn’t even know what they involved. Could it be? That the second I arrived at the sort of self-acceptance that might one day guide a robin to uncomplainingly sit on my finger for the time it takes to film an entire TV segment, I also found myself in the same building as a cool orgy? I had to find out if this was real, so I excused myself and headed towards the smoking area.

Looking back, I don’t really know what I was expecting to see. I didn’t want to spy on the orgy, I just wanted to confirm if it was happening. If it was, it felt like some sort of sign from the universe that I had finally matured. I imagine that as soon as that TV segment finished, Mr Motivator found his inner cool and then got invited to an orgy just off-camera. I had no intention of trying to get into the orgy, I just wanted to find out if there really was one happening downstairs.

When I got to the smoking area and found it filled with people in leather bondage gear, I realised the flaw in my plan – I had no cigarette or vape with me, so no plausible cover story for why I was visiting a smoking area filled with people who were taking a break from a sex party. To all extents and purposes, I was merely a pervert who had come to gawp. This was terrible. This was not what I had intended at all. Some of them looked over to me, as though trying to discern a reason why I had appeared on the balcony. I was clearly not dressed for the orgy – I was wearing a nice shirt and trousers (I still believe it’s good to look smart at these things). I quickly averted my gaze and leaned on the handrail and looked out over the rooftops, like a weary king surveying his domain, and took a big lungful of air. I hoped this would make it look like I’d come to the smoking area purely to get a bit of fresh air and headspace, rather than to perv on the sex party. Unfortunately, I swallowed too much air and burped again. Everyone looked at me, disgusted. I racked my brain to try and work out what to do. Some bit of muscle memory kicked in, and I thought of one other reason why I might be outside in the middle of a party, which I could perhaps use to claw back some credibility.

I turned to the nearest guy, who was dressed in a gimp suit, and asked him “Sorry, do you know where the burger van is?” The guy looked around at the small balcony we were gathered on.

“The burger van?” he said. “We’re four stories up.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, “of course. It won’t be up here, will it?” I then ran back into the warehouse as fast as I could, which I imagine also didn’t look great.

I had done it. I had interacted with someone at an orgy. In a way, that meant I had been to one myself. I had finally laid to rest the sad, lonely ghost of my younger self, wandering around the perimeter of the nightclub pretending to look for his friends. I had crossed the threshold, joined the crowd. But I had done it without betraying who I was, without abandoning my principles. As I ran back to my friend’s birthday party, I heard a fluttering of wings by my ear. I turned my head – a robin was keeping pace with me, hovering, winking at me as though to say “You did it, Joz! You really did it!” I held out my finger as I ran. He hopped on. We ran together. We partied the night away.

A Quick Plug – The Soho Theatre run of You Wait. Time Passes. kicked off last night and was so fun! It’s on for the rest of the week until Saturday, and I’d love everyone to come. Tickets available here if you fancy it!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – I’ve been a bit heads-down with the Soho run, so I actually feel a bit out of the loop to be honest. So let’s just go with some other great shows coming up at Soho that you can and should go and see – next week you’ve got Toussaint Douglass, Sam Nicoresti and Alice Cockayne! I’ve heard such great things about all of their shows and you should go.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – This week I saw an event hosted by BAFTA Green Light in which Kiell Smith-Bynoe led a panel of comedy experts to try and improvise a premise for a TV sitcom with advice from Matt Winning on how to incorporate storytelling elements around climate change, and I laughed harder than I have all year, I think. It was utter chaos and I loved it.

Book Of The Week – I’m just finishing up Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris, which continues to be brilliant.

Album Of The Week – The First Day by David Sylvian and Robert Fripp. As I delve ever further into Fripp’s non-King Crimson discography, I am begrudgingly having to accept that Robert Fripp is probably best when he’s in King Crimson, and that perhaps I needn’t delve any further. Soon I am sure to hit bedrock. This is fine if you like 18 minute industrial funk rock dance jams.

Film Of The Week – Rewatched This Is Spinal Tap to prep for the sequel. Forgot how good it is. Derek Smalls in the pod is one of the greatest comedy setpieces of all time, but you all already knew that.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated!

PPS Here’s another photo of me being cool at the cool party:

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