We went to Beaver Works sober

After arriving at Leeds as an innocent, fresh faced, high street dressed teen, it doesn’t take long to realise that most of the people around you are way cooler, wavier, vibezier.

Having the majority of our first year in and out of the comforts of Warehouse, Mission, Mint and admittedly Fruity, we decided it was time to fork out money for a taxi and venture past Leeds City Centre to see what Beaver Works had to offer.

Just for an experiment, we wondered whether we could deal with it sober. No alcohol, nothing else. It was a big pledge.

Before even arriving at our pre’s, we had already been subject to numerous warnings, texts and looks of surprise as we told people where we were going – a clear indication of just how “uncool” we are.

We spent the hours leading up to the taxi trying to distract ourselves from drinking by looking at the lineup for the night.

The event we attended was High Rise, which advertises itself with a long list of obscure DJs. A ridiculously long list – surely nobody knows all these DJ’s.

You could probably pretend you were cool enough to know them and be convincing at it too – if you were off your face. But sober, we were just gonna have to deal with our ignorance.

Wild fresher

When the taxi came at about 11:45 we were ready for our challenge, having not taken anything or drunk we were half way there. We tried to reassure ourselves with this – surely we’d got the hardest part over with already.

The taxi drove us outside our comfort zone of town and left us at some industrial warehouses. We thought we’d got lucky with the minimal queue, only to later realise that the cool and popular time to arrive was after 1am.

No surprise there – it does go on until 5am.

Inside it was mostly empty so far, except for the few hard-core people that were already feeling the DJs vibes. We were surprised at how big the place was and the various rooms were all equally grimy and dark.

Even the lacklustre hippy elephant on the wall didn’t impress us – we were sober after all. After getting an expensive (but alcohol free) drink at the empty bar we took a look around before finding ourselves, and everyone else, in the toilets.

We chilled there, soaking up the vibes, acutely aware of how sober we were, waiting for things to kick off.

When everyone finally arrived, we began to realise that we missed the dress code. If the lack of face gems was not enough of a giveaway, our plain outfits said it all.

The standard wavey garms were out at High Rise: shimmery crop tops, trainers and some form of vintage bomber jacket (bonus points if it is Adidas).

Boys had similar jackets and trainers, with the odd bucket hat making an appearance. Add in a water bottle or a can of red stripe and the outfit is complete.

Our lack of vintage and glitter seemed to lose us some serious cool points.

Wavey garms

So much edge

Although we tried to dance to the music, the DJs were not catering for the sober. It is quite difficult to soberly dance to MC DT rapping random cities into a mic.

By 3am, McDonalds was calling us. We decided over our chicken nuggets that Beaver Works is not for the painfully sober and we would not be returning until we found our inner Leeds edge.

Wrapping up our lacklustre night and stumbling out of McDonalds feeling unfulfilled, we resigned ourselves to our “nugs not drugs” status and went home.