"Light blue touchpaper and stand well clear."
How to launch fireworks: close The Fuse
Like books, you can never judge a disco by its cover. But, then, exactly how you should judge it is moot. I think this looks like the front end of an El train.
They say that, if you’ve got a short fuse, you’re likely to lose your temper at the drop of a hat. And that, if you have a long fuse, it’s because you couldn’t care a fig. If a fuse is going to blow, then, let her blow! Worst of all is a slow-burning fuse. Somewhere in all of this, fuses, hats and figs have something in common: a night club.
A night club is a club that is open during the night; and, as anyone who has regularly frequented them will know, they can tend to a form of rule-observance that is more in the breach than the adherence. I might contend: there are some night club operators who downright whistle at rules, once night falls and the party begins.
In one of the four years I worked for The Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the army lent personality to the Castle at which it is annually performed. At closing time, the voice of the Castle boomed across the Esplanade with the reassuring words: “But when ye all go doon the hill tonight, ’tis I will guard the toon” (before breaking into The Garb of Auld Gaul). Castles are great things from which to guard a town, but, honestly, they don’t do that much guarding themselves. No, that’s more the role of policemen and civic officials. And, when perchance abed, policemen and civic officials don’t guard anything but their mute tongues. In short, when the sun goes down on many a town, it slumbers, as do its daytime rules and regulations, and those who venture forth at witching hour can have a bumpy ride if they seek the law of the land’s daytime justice: that’s what goes bump in the night.
When a night club likes you as a patron, it can extend a hospitality that feels like royalty. When it doesn’t, they’ll happily turf you out, and you can count yourself lucky if the boot isn’t laid in, to boot, so to speak. I’ve visited many, enjoyed many, been turned out on a few, rare occasions, never been booted and have had many hours of rollicking good fun at them. But, one door down from The Fuse, a, till recently, hit and, now, erstwhile night club in Brussels’ Blaesstraat, the guy next-door, Mr Gölcük, has actually had 12 years of not very much fun, or, for that matter, sleep. Twelve years is demonstrative of the patience of Job on Mr Gölcük’s part: what we might call a very, very long fuse. He raised a complaint with the city’s Environmental Office, and was accorded right in his cause; but, after 12 years, his complaint can hardly be dubbed impetuous.
The Fuse, it seems, decided some time ago that it wasn’t big enough. Now, as we all know, particularly those of us who have been Fuse patrons, size isn’t everything, and a cosy nook can also be a snug little hostelry; but The Fuse was no snug hostelry; in many a sense. Instead, it was a smug one.
Its management ripped out a number of internal walls, which is the kind of work that any owner can do provided it doesn’t affect the building’s stability (and provided it’s the owner’s own building, of course); in which case, no planning permission is needed. I have no idea whether the wall-removal works needed planning permission or, indeed, whether such permission was in fact sought and obtained. (It’s perhaps worth a moment’s pause: the decision on whether a wall’s removal will affect the building’s stability is one that, if it doesn’t, lies with the owner; only if it does, and the owner thinks it does, does he need planning; so, if the owner thinks it doesn’t but it does in fact, there’s still no planning permission application.) In all events, I have my own personal view on the likelihood of planning permission having even been thought about at the time of the works. But, no matter, it was not the removal of walls that formed an issue leading to the club’s closure: rather the issue was hastened by the effects of their removal.
The least-demanding of demanding night club patrons will still demand value for money, a good crowd and … loudness (and: no watering-down of the vodka. I know a hotel in Musselburgh that can by no means be described as a night club, but they certainly made their own contribution to abating the incidence of drunk driving as far as it lay in their power. It’s a part of the established maxim already alluded to: rules, even of excise law, don’t apply in the night.)
However, the least-demanding night club patron can nonetheless be very demanding; as much so as the club. They’re demanding about the need for high levels of noise, otherwise it’s simply not a party. (WAT? Would you like me to speak up a little?); sorry, where were we? (Imagine the sound of water running and, off, flushing toilets at this stage.) Within the property itself, there’s no maximum; how that noise is perceived in neighbouring properties, well, they’re not so very demanding about that. In fact, I think we can safely assume it probably never entered their heads: we’re in fig territory.
To noise levels can come things like closing at the time required under local legislation, which has never been wont to cause hats to drop among night club patrons. One gains a sentiment that, if a club fails to close at the appointed hour, it is simply not their fault: rather it’s that of the patrons, who just won’t go home. When I was attending The Fuse in its La Démence edition, I was once disgruntled at being swept out of the place at 9 o’clock. Nine o’clock, when the party was just getting started! What a nerve! On reflection, it was, I admit, 9 o’clock in the morning: the morning after the long, weary night before. (Value for money got a star rating that year.)
Now, the complaint complained of by the complainer, whilst long in the coming, dealt a pretty heavy blow to The Fuse: it’s shut. And some of its erstwhile patrons have become very demanding as a result: they want it open. Well, who, aside from Mr Gölcük, doesn’t, I ask? In a demonstration of the people’s power to get night clubs opened, someone lobbed a rock through Mr Gölcük’s window. Nice neighbours, in that part of town, wouldn’t you say?
There’s an old 1982 song that, I’m sure, they’d have refused to play at The Fuse, entitled Come Dancing by The Kinks, which came out in the form of an elegy, to halcyon days of dance time, but in an upbeat tempo. It tells of the antics of the sister of the singer on a piece of land that’s now a car park, “where the supermarket used to stand; before that, they put up a bowling alley at the place that used to be the local Palais”. It was at the Palais that said sister’s dates would get awfully pally: she would come dancing, so the lyric, whilst her dates got just a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.
Video hyperlink: Ray Davies as a London spiv in The Kinks’ 1982 American hit, Come Dancing. In their home market of the UK, the single didn’t even chart.
The song has a poignancy to it, written as it was by The Kinks’ lead man, Ray Davies, as a tribute to his own sister, Rene, who died on a dancehall’s dance floor. But, don’t you reckon? In the minds of most, the poignancy felt at The Fuse’s closure will also probably slowly edge, over time (if not the car park), to fig territory. For those who cherish nostalgic memories of it (such as any memory from The Fuse might actually be), well: where would nostalgia be without tap-room tales of glory days? The glory days of treacherous, half-lit staircases that led to smoky lounges in which one truly wondered what the survival chances were if someone dropped a match and the whole joint, sorry, establishment, went up in a blue light. Glory days! (Glory, that is, by contrast with the inglorious nights, when Mr Gölcük could finally glory in some kip. Along with the party-goers who tumbled out The Fuse’s portals, before wandering home to do likewise: figless, hatless and, like as not, confused.)
Some are now coherent enough to be up in arms, taking exception that Mr Gölcük closed their locale. Except, he didn’t close it. He put up with it for 12 years. He told the owner, they needed to insulate. He even said he would come round and do it for them: he’s a builder. But they wouldn’t listen, merrily sledgehammering their walls as they went; but little ear had they for Mr Gölcük, as he unmerrily endeavoured to ignore their thumping great woofers. So, when an injustice is being practised upon you, where are you supposed to go? (Assuming, that is, that you have the utter temerity to raise a voice of protest against the howls of piqued, if feigned, injustice.)
Where, in the Building Code, does it specify that people who live next to night clubs have no entitlement to a good night’s sleep? The noise was so great that the neighbour couldn’t even commercially let his commercial premises, or even his residential ones, and that in a part of town that, while known as being “somewhat down at heel”, should by rights be run according to rules that apply to all, like any other, somewhat more affluent, part of town.
There is somewhere a perverse logic that is supposèd validation for the proposition that “He who gets there first sets the norm, and all others must suffer him.” (If you’re thirsting for more musical inflections here: Telegraph Road by Dire Straits.) Norms are not set by being there first; they’re set by lawmakers, who set them for all. Whether you’re first or last in the quarter, rules give no quarter, particularly those of amenity: about living together, and not on top of each other. Mr Gölcük didn’t close The Fuse. The Environmental Office may have indirectly done that, by telling it to smarten up its act, apprised as they were of the breach of rules that Brussels city corporation had issued regarding noise and closing times. But even the Environment department didn’t actually close The Fuse: “Then came the lawyers, then came the rules.”
Video hyperlink: Dire Straits, whose name came from their being stoney broke at the time (“Then there was hard times”), are no longer stoney broke.
Maybe The Fuse’s management needed to lie down for an hour to recover from their shock at not being given free rein to do as they in their sole discretion pleased, along the lines of my own, home-grown “What, close? At NINE O’CLOCK?!”: it’s rein they’d never really been given, but had simply taken, and for granted at that.
Well, all good things must come to an end, be they long fuses or short. And The Fuse was, when all’s said and danced, a pretty good thing. Some say Mr Gölcük has closed it; some say, the council’s Environment department; in the end, it was neither. It is The Fuse that shut The Fuse, along with its crowds: too much of a good thing is bad for you, after all. Better it shut now, before some misfortune befall it.
As, by way of a footnote, did happen in the untimely destruction by fire in April last year of the La Rocca club (which, I can assure you I know for a fact, used to open at 9 o’clock, on a Sunday morning), in Lier, elsewhere in Belgium.
The blaze was spectacular and could be heard being litigated for miles around: after its closure was announced in 2018 with a headline “La Rocca mystique sera détruite” (détruit, or destroyed, referring at that time not to its actual conflagration, but to its planned demolition), it limped on into the pandemic, which closed it; at last, with licence to hold one final party before its finances brought it inexorably to its heels, it, conveniently or inconveniently (let’s call it mystically) burned down in the week before the scheduled farewell do. No excited trying-on of glass slippers that Sunday, then.
Image: The Fuse (in its previous guise as the Disco Rouge) back in its 1970s hey-day, before remotes, smartphones or the Internet were invented, with its “set-back” entrance foyer, to accommodate the queue waiting to gain entry, safe from the passage of road traffic. Here, it looks a bit like a “boys’ night out”: in those early days, they laid on events in the afternoons for under-18s such as these youths.
If you compare the photo below to the header photo, above, it can be seen that this foyer was later built over to maximise available interior space; patrons then needed to obstruct the narrow pavement (here, the roadway itself …) while waiting to get in, come rain or come shine, and it’s possible the traffic bollards visible in the first picture were placed to prevent vehicles mounting the pavement and endangering pedestrians at or around the time of the foyer conversion.
Acknowledgements go to the Facebook group Le Vieux Bruxelles for this photo.
