Tab Parties Out At…..Shuffle Nights’ Freshers’ Week!

If you have the pleasure of being friends with any of Toby ‘Beers’ Baker, Hannah Yolosquared or Shuffle Nights on Facebook, you’d have been told that every night of Freshers’ Week was ‘off the chain’, and yet somehow the next night was ‘set to be bigger than ever’.

About ten days ago our team of nightclub correspondents acquired some press tickets and decided to see what the fuss was all about.

Those who say that you have to be drunk to enjoy clubbing in Oxford are malicious LIARS.

But it probably helps. Above is our correspondent Jimmy who decided to extract the bag of wine from the box before guzzling.

Spirits were high.

Co-correspondent Cindy wasn’t too impressed but she had coordinated a matching outfit and so we expected her to at least find one nervous fresh-man who was up for it later.

Correspondent Damian completed the trio, posing with all the empty bottles of booze we had seen away.

With eight small bottles of warm 3% beer between the four of us, as you can imagine we were pretty fucked, so we decided to go to our first local hotspot of the night and check out the scene.

Up first was a ‘Hawaiian Party’ at Lolalos, which I’m fairly sure is a Hawaiian-themed club normally.

Anyway we weren’t complaining, and as this Pulitzer-winning photo shows, it was unbelievably raucous.

My memory is a little hazy, but I’m fairly sure Playboy models were grinding each other to ‘N***as in Paris” as topless freshers crowd-surfed the screaming fans.

We assumed the £3.99-aviators-with-Hawaiian-lei combination must have got this nutter many, many orgies that night, so inevitably we wanted a photo with the man soon to be the Thames Valley’s new Don Juan.

Freshers’ Week is inherently strange – much of your time you’re herded like sheep into dark clubs, to stand drunkenly in awkward dance circles with a load of strangers.

This was Damian with his new friends.

Meanwhile Jimmy had initiated a dance-off with Gok Wan.

Jimmy was left startled by the moves his opponent had clearly been practising all summer, and lost the duel.

The Hawaiian theme translated into essentially serving sand-coloured drinks in buckets.

When you wear matching outfits and start handing out the buckets, inevitably we were the popular kids in the clubs.

I’ll let you make up your own mind as to what was going on with Jimmy here.

The Omen’s Damian enjoyed this new-found attention and started pointing at the girls he wanted to romance.

It was suddenly time to leave.

Next up was a foam party at the Junction, or as its more accurately known, the Crunktion.

It was a sea of more bemused, rabbit-in-the-headlight teenagers, drenched in fairy liquid suds as the sound of ‘Thrift Shop’ got Engineering and Biochemistry students alike screaming with faux-joy.

Clearly the DJ was not amused that his dreams of playing at the Hacienda had translated into playing Fearne Cotton’s Radio 1 playlist to Corpus Christi students on a Thursday night in Oxford.

Dropping Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’ did cause one man to physically hug everyone around him, overwhelmed by emotion, as pictured above.

Cindy was having a lot more success with the girls than us. She befriended a group of Merton glitterati as us boys looked on enviously.

Strangely though as everyone attempted to make some foamy memoriez on the dancefloor, security guards stood on tables surrounding the dancefloor, with eye-of-Sauron torches scanning the club, as this video shows.

They were terrifying, the Drunktion’s very own 1984-like civilian surveillance.

I tried to draw people’s attention to it as something quite weird, acting as the club’s Edward Snowden, but most people were just too drunk to understand and instead tried to engage me in a bullet-finger battle.

What did the guards think was going to happen? That Lincoln’s chemists and Christchurch’s geographers were going to kick off?

There was no threat of people drowning in foam either given there was only enough for about half a bath, stuck to the top of people’s heads.

The Cranktion’s coup de grace was a new silent disco room, which everyone was oblivious to, as evidenced by this photo.

It made for the awkward situation of there being more people DJing (three) than dancing (two).

It was a strange addition given silent discos are really just a necessary evil of this world (like UKIP or Noel Edmonds), for college balls when there are noise restrictions after a certain time.

The night had been utterly nuts so far as you can tell, but it was time for us to march to our final party of the evening – a ‘Back to School Disco’ at Wahoo.

We approached it with the sort of excitement of a little girl who’s on pills on Christmas morning and has found out she’s been given a pony.

This photo doesn’t do justice to the clubbing Mecca we had arrived at. It does show the new raised platform for dancing in Wahoo though, no doubt exciting for those of you who thought it couldn’t get any madder as a club.

The ‘Back to School’ theme epitomises Freshers’ Week pretty well – it’s never really acceptable ever again but everyone gets into it this one time.

Naturally Jimmy sought out the biggest baller of the club, whose look of supporting-the-Vaccines-at-Reading was enhanced by his firm clutch of a Tropical VK.

We were naturally impressed with a man who thinks to himself “I can’t see shit but there’s no way I’m taking my sunglasses off. No way. Look how good I look.”

We were drunk and acting like idiots but with confidence because we’ve been doing it for a few years.

Everyone else was drunking stumbling around too but in a shy, meek way having arrived only days before.

Inevitably that made a lot of people stare at us on the dancefloor, as if to say “How are they so much more comfortable acting like pricks?”

We felt pretty cool.

“Are they prescription? Are they bollocks.”

This photo inadvertently captured in the background the never-ending group photos that were being taken, with Wahoo’s strobe light matching Cindy’s fluorescent alcopop.

All it needs is a dose of Sepia to make it my centre-piece for a shit photography project in my alternative life as a teenage girl studying at art college.

With two Vks in each hand, this character was doing the face which secured him modelling for Fat Face’s winter catalogue.

Three days into term and it’s “So I was just joking with that whole ‘breaking up for university’ thing…the train from Durham is really not that long….”

If you’re going to do Back to School, then I suppose wearing your Year 8 blazer is a certain type of winning.

As is wearing your tie wrapped around the beanie you rocked in Year 10 when chilling in break-time listening to Phantom Planet.

At this point correspondent Damian went home to his ‘girlfriend’, while we were left to continue searching the discotheque for romance.

Supposedly no-one gets any action in Freshers’ Week (That’s the same for everyone right guys? Guys?) as most new students don’t want a ‘reputation’. Which doesn’t says a lot for the liberation of young people’s sexualities and consciences.

On the other hand, look at this photo.

While our tie-beanie man was happy to rock out solo in the background, Cindy was less happy about her lonely predicament, contemplating the futility of solitary existence.

Jimmy on the other hand was going from dance circle to circle, making everyone link arms and chant in unison.

It was immensely enjoyable to watch.

 

GOAL! Cindy had got a number! Look at her gleeful face.

Unfortunately it turned out to be a 12-digit number, one longer than it should have been.

Freshers’ Week can be tough, kids.

On that heart-breaking note, we decided to call it a night.

Of course the information you’re all now waiting for, to start living the dream for yourself: Shuffle Nights run Wahoo on Fridays and the Junction on Tuesdays.

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