This post ran originally on THUMP UK.
Remember My First Club, that series we used to do where the good and the great of club culture regaled us with the story of the first time they tasted the pure pleasure of nightlife for the very first time? It's back baby! With a bang! When Chicago hero Honey Dijon asked if she could detail those glorious ealry days, we couldn't say no…I was really young the first time I went clubbing. Really young, actually. I'd managed to get a fake ID when I was twelve years old, so that's when I first went out. You could say I was a very mischievous young person. The friend I went with must have been too. We went to school together and we were both seriously into music, and we're old enough to remember when they used to play house on the radio. I'm dating myself here, because everything's about streaming now, obviously.We both lived out in the Chicago suburbs, and you couldn't avoid house there at that time: it had filtered into every part of the city. To avoid any suspicion I told my parents that I'd be staying at said friend's house, which they believed. So the two of us got dressed up—I used to shop at vintage shops at the time and I was really into Jean Paul Gaultier, so I tried to recreate the looks from second hand clothing—and took the bus into town.The crowd, when we got there, was really mixed, and that's set the tone for the rest of my experience of nightlife. The greatest parties are the ones that are racially and sexually diverse. Back then, you'd usually just have resident DJs playing, local DJs, so sadly I couldn't tell you who it was we saw the night when my parents thought I was out for a sleepover.What I can tell you is that as soon as we got back to my friend's house, we talked about what we'd just witnessed, played some music, and tried to remember what we'd just heard. Then we started planning next week's outfits, and next week's excuses…Honey Dijon will be appearing alongside the likes of Nina Kraviz and Ricardo Villalobos at the SXM Festival in Saint Martin on the 15th-19th of March.