In the line of fire

Jude Hill gets in line to discuss the entry policies of clubs around Birmingham

I FOR one have never had a problem getting into clubs in Birmingham. I have never been turned away and been told that I was not wearing the right clothes. This may be because I have a good dress sense or that the majority of places that I go to are full of people who dress as badly as me. Who knows. Most clubs in Birmingham have to have a certain degree of leniency towards students as we, as a group, could arrive at a club in anything from shirts and chinos to a Mr. Motivator costume. 

Deciding on 'cool' since 2008

This is not the case when we turn up to regular nights at many of the clubs on Friday or Saturday nights. My friend experienced the difficulty in getting into a club last Saturday in Gatecrasher when he attempted to go and see Hed Kandi. Despite having a ticket, he and many of his friends were denied entry. When he asked the manager why he was not allowed to enter the club he was told that they didn’t need to give him a reason. 

When I began investigating the issue I looked at it from several different angles. I knew that my friend was sober and smartly dressed, and so I could not think of the reason that he was refused entry. The reason became clear when I spoke to the head of the clubs public relations. She told me that the reason that my friend wasn’t let in was probably because one or more of his party, despite being smartly dressed, probably didn’t look ‘cool’ enough.

The official dress code for the night on the Gatecrasher website reads ‘It’s not what you wear but how you wear it.’ (http://www.gatecrasher.com/birmingham/dresscode) This is a very ambiguous statement, and the way that I had it explained to me was that gatecrasher needed to convey a certain image and so they reserved the right to not allow entrance if somebody did not conform to the look that they wanted in their club. Although I can understand this, it was worrying for a few reasons.

Firstly it leaves the decision of admittance down to one person. If somebody on the door considers one look to be ‘cool’ it doesn’t mean that everybody else does. For instance I don’t like wearing shirts to a club, some people do, so who would be classed as cool in that situation: me with a good t-shirt or somebody else with a dodgy shirt?

Also, is it cruel to be kind? Although I understand that the bouncers could not spend the time giving a breakdown of why what somebody is wearing isn’t cool, this causes people to get angry because they aren’t given an explanation. For instance, I have found testimonials on blogs saying that Gatecrasher is racist, when in reality it is your dress sense, not the colour of your skin. In what ways can this be dealt with where people aren’t going to go home disappointed and angry to put 2 and 2 together to make 5?

The problem is also that you can buy tickets in advance. This is what happened to my friend, and is one of his main points of contention. Despite Gatecrasher being fair in offering a refund for the ticket, they do not offer a refund for the time you spend standing in the queue, getting ready and paying taxis to get there. One of his group had actually come down from Warwick in order to be at his friend’s birthday, when he didn’t get in Gatecrasher can refund the £5 for his ticket, but not the £40 for his train ticket? 

Should tickets be sold in advance if the ultimate decision on who is going to get in is down to the preference of one person’s views of ‘what is cool’? After all, as Eddie Izzard mentions, the difference between being cool and looking like a dick-head  is often very small.