It’s about time somebody said it: I hate Fab

Fab is the most over-rated night in Birmingham.  The only reason any of us go is because it’s close and involves almost no effort.

There are so many clubs in Birmingham, so many places for a good night out. Every Saturday we might consider paying the £2 taxi charge and heading into the centre of town to go somewhere a little different. Somewhere where we’re trusted with glass, somewhere we can choose from a selection of beers, somewhere where the music might actually be worth listening to.

But, despite these considerations, we always end up at Fab and then stumbling home at 4am weighed down by chicken and disappointment.

The fake Fab smiles

Fab is guaranteed to be night of suspiciously sticky dance floors, rubbish repetitive music (playing Cee Lo Green ‘Fuck You’ more than once in a night is NOT acceptable) and long queues.

The level of drunkenness it takes for the average student to actually enjoy a Fab is complete sensual anesthesia. The goal of every Fab-goer is to retain this level drunkenness for the entire evening in an attempt to remain numb to the banality of the time you are having for as long as possible. Perhaps an advantage of this is that the next morning you can’t even remember what a boring time you had, which is possibly why we keep going back.

This means for those of us who don’t quite reach this point, we have to spend the entire night surrounded by stumbling, retching drunken wrecks with no sense of personal space or control over their bodily fluids.

But I sympathise with my fellow Fabbers’ need for destructive inebriation – Fab is boring, it has all the elements a night out needs, but does none of them well.

Joe’s Bar may have drinks and chart music, an overcrowded dance floor and repeated 2012 playlist week on week hardly makes it a winning night.

In contrast the Underground is so sparsely populated and the music so obscure that it is reminiscent of school discos – with everyone hovering at the edges afraid to break into the middle ground of the dance floor as they might reveal that they know none of songs playing.

And then there is the Silent Disco.  Is the bar in there actually a recycled child’s lemonade stand? And the music channels can each be labelled as generic cheese from across the ages, which makes it boring for all generations.

Take me home…

Finally let’s talk about the toilets.  It appears the natural response to the dullness of Fab is to retreat to the more exciting location of the loos. You know that no one is having a good night when the queue for the toilets is longer that the queue for the bar.

So next Saturday I will venture that extra ten minutes travel time in to the city. I will go somewhere that plays a range of music, somewhere where I don’t have to negotiate a twenty minute obstacle course of vomit to go for a wee.

Or I could just Fab it again, I mean it’s so close.