Do you remember the time Michael Barrymore was in Exodus? I do, quite vividly.
He had been starring in a musical or panto at HMT, and had tried to go for a quiet pint after the show. Nae such luck in Aberdeen.
If my memory is to be trusted – and, let’s be honest, for a column about a nightclub where I spent much of my 20s, it isn’t – a queue of around 100 people long snaked around the building. It might have been 200. All for a quick handshake and an “awight”.
It’s one of my firmest memories from Aberdeen’s legendary indie club – until now the city’s greatest survivor but, as of last weekend, just another part of local culture confined to our collective nostalgia.
Although my rapid ageing has prevented my visiting Exodus in a few years, it was my most usual haunt from about 19 until I had to start taking my responsibilities more seriously. Once you’re in your early-30s, it becomes less acceptable to brush away the cobwebs by uttering “Exodus was a bad choice” in the morning.
They all fall by the wayside eventually, don’t they? Kef, Moshulu, Snafu, and now Exodus – all gone. Large chunks of drunken debauchery erased from the city centre map over the last decade-and-a-bit, changed into other bars: similar but not the same. TV and a glass of wine is nice, but it’ll never beat standing in the 4am sun on Schoolhill, questioning every choice you’ve made over the last six hours.
A hazy, sweaty, smoky mess is how I remember Exodus, at least until the smoking ban came in. Then it was good fun inside, and good fun outside. The irony of standing in that queue on a Friday night for up to an hour, often in the rain, to get inside, just to immediately hurl yourself back out with your pint for a cigarette.
There was probably someone you fancied. There was probably a song you didn’t like. You’d probably had too many tequilas. It was all the same as the week before. Looking back, that’s what made it great.
I think of late-2004 until around early-2007 as the indisputable “classic” Exodus period; when I wasn’t too old to be there, even though we’d all declare that we were immediately after walking in anyway. Even though I kept going frequently (until I was definitely too old to be there), those 24 months or so were where the memories were made. That’s how I remember it.
It’s hard to explain without using real expletives, but this was a blimmin’ excellent time for British rock music, and being there, you felt like a part of it. In a wee club in Aberdeen, dancing to Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs, screaming along. “So underrated”, indeed.
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor would come on. At the tender age of 20, I’d decided Arctic Monkeys were a band for “the kids”. Now, I’m not sure who I meant. I danced anyway, week after week.
Mates would sing “here comes your dad” along to Pixies track Here Comes Your Man. I don’t remember why, and it’s no less funny for lack of explanation.
I still love Interpol. I still love Proud Mary by Tina Turner. I’ll make sure it’s played next year at my wedding, harking back to Tuesday nights in Exo. People still love The Killers, the most overplayed band in Exodus history, who served to allow the snobs among us to appreciate it all the more when Talking Heads or The Smiths came on.
Friendships were forged on the dancefloor and standing at the bar; many are still my best pals to this day. Girlfriends have come and gone. Those times are missed dreadfully, particularly when my thoughts turn to those who are no longer around, but who danced shoulder to shoulder with me every weekend.
Something for a new generation to enjoy
The plan for Exodus is for it to become a Popworld which, to my understanding, has nothing to do with T4, or Simon Amstell. I’ll never go inside Popworld because those days are behind me. “Cheese with style” is how the brand describes itself. It sounds like something for a new generation to enjoy.
I hope those kids who are excited about Popworld have as much fun in that wee space above Triplekirks as I used to.
It won’t be Motown Tuesdays, DJ Dave or Debaser, but it’ll be what you need it to be, I’m sure.
Thank you for the good times, Exodus. Thank you for the tinnitus. Thank you to everyone who ever spilled a pint on me, or to whom I returned the favour. Thank you for being somewhere we shared so much, with so many. Without these places, we are lost.
Colin Farquhar works as a creative spaces manager and film programmer in the north-east culture sector
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