SAVE THE MOTH CLUB, ANOTHER LONDON VENUE FACES CLOSURE

Now, I’m not saying that the Moth Club is the Sistine Chapel of clubbing in London, but if you have found yourself stumbling out of there at 3am with glitter stuck to your hair, a random person’s scarf slung around your neck, and a faint din of a brass band ringing through your head, you get the picture.

This minuscule ex-servicemen’s club, complete with a gold tin-sel roof that is clearly the result of a Liberace-esque punch-up at a working men’s club, has for years remained a stalwart of keeping the tradition of a good night out alive. It’s a place where the carpet is sticky for reasons that you don’t, or, rather, don’t want to inquire about, where the bar staff address you as ‘love’ regardless of whether they do or don’t know your name, and where the stage is sufficiently compact for the drummer to appear to be merely another member of the audience who’s brought along his own equipment.

It’s played host to IDLES, tearing about as if they’re trying to break through the walls, through Warmduscher, who looked as if they just escaped a 1970s sex film set, to gilt-by-comparison new bands you claim to have known about back when they had a decent MySpace page. Mac DeMarco played there, and they’re probably still trying to find a way back for that kebab that was left unfinished on the sofa. Shame played, sweated, broke something (probably on purpose). Even Yard Act performed their talky shout-along routine, and the old codgers in the corner just kept playing dominoes.

And now, because we clearly don’t have enough of these, some officious person with a clipboard has deemed that this is what’s necessary, luxury apartments, a Pret, or whatever soul-sucking thing that ends up devouring our beloved locations. Like, enough is enough, London, we don’t actually need this much beige one-bedder bliss.

The Moth isn’t just a room with a PA system and far too much money spent on Red Stripe. It’s a demonstration of the fact that you can have far better nights of your lives without the hot tub gel candles, without the sparkly walls, without the cocktail-shaking bar staff. It’s where your friend’s rubbish band managed to sound vaguely good at 1 a.m. It’s where you kissed a person you absolutely should not have, and you blamed that £6 tequila.

And here’s the thing, over twenty-five thousand people have signed petitions to halt this development, and the likes of Lewis Capaldi, Hot Chip, and Tame Impala have weighed in. It’s not just a nostalgic thing, this is a movement. You can sign the petition. It literally takes eight seconds. That’s shorter than the queue to get to the bogs on a Friday. Sign for the nights you can’t remember but remember smiling about. Sign because your kids, one day, will ask you where bands played before everywhere became something called an “experiential content hub,” and you can give them a different answer than “yeah, the O2.”

Save the Moth Club. Because, literally, London is running low on places where the ceiling is sticky from a decade’s worth of spilt pints and pure, unadulterated joy. Sign It Here: Save the Moth Club