Croydon Tiger Tiger and the Death of the Heart of the High Street

So it's farewell then to the Croydon output of Tiger Tiger. No more booths will be booked, no more plutonium enriched VKs will be served, no more overdraft facilitated Grey Goose rounds will be peacockingly consumed. The party's over Croydon and no, your mate is definitely not allowed back in to get his jacket, I caught him shitting into the mop bucket, and will you please stop swinging that mop at me, it's covered in your mates shit.

No, as of 3am last Saturday, Croydon Tiger Tiger is finished. The dream is over, though the memories linger on and it's corpse is twitching in official Facebook page photo albums and mercifully dim recollections of your 19th birthday. The birthday that you spent winching you best mate's ex in the karaoke pod.

At the very moment the last toilet door thudded shut on the very last mandatory toilet check, Croydon Tiger Tiger died and went to the little corner of club-heaven marked 'Croydon High Street'. It might be advisable to shove a mattress in the living room because it's getting pretty stuffy up there, with recent years witnessing the demise of the much mourned Black Sheep Bar (which was home to the best 'fruit infused teas in the Croydon/Purely area'), a cracking Yates ('scene of a large scale brawl just before Christmas'- 2009/10/11/12/13/14/15) and 12-20/Shoosh ('Police recommended the revocation of the license after a stabbing during the three-hour Westwood set in the early hours of Easter Monday'). There is a question forming on the sambuca soaked lips of at least eight people : 'Is nothing, and nobody in the central Croydon area safe?'

It's easy to be scathing about Tiger Tiger because —and apologies here to any batshit mental Tiger Tiger diehards reading this— it is an awful chain that provides a fundamentally crap night out. Granted, this might say more about my own deep-seated, festering resentments and total incomprehension when faced with an idea of fun that differs from my own, extremely narrow, parameters. And that might well be the case but it doesn't detract from the cold, unvarnished truth: Tiger Tiger is a fucking awful night out.

My only first-hand experience came shortly after turning 18. I was visiting a mate in Aberdeen and we were impressionable, excitable young pups and the prospect of Messerschmidt by the quid in a sweaty 'Ibiza themed' basement was the prospect of life itself. Pre-lashed to the point of oblivion, we night bussed-it into the dark heart of the granite inferno, £20 notes squashed firmly into the front pocket-within-pocket of our spray-on skinnies. This was it, lads. This was it. This was a night-out without the woefully unrealistic fake-ID casualties and 17year old baby faced no-hopers. Passports were duly shown, VKs were duly purchased, imitation Jager bombs were duly downed. We brushed up against gigantic rugby monster lads, had our toes crushed by lethal glam-bae stilettos and stood under-faux tropical gazebos scrambling about for filters. The bouncers looked itchy for someone to nut and the walls throbbed with barely-out-of-adolescence sexual rabidness. This is what we wanted, wasn't it?

I think we lasted an hour before the inevitable chippy trip and interminable trudge back to the halls of residence that seemed to have been modelled on Scandinavian prisons. The next day, plummeting back hundreds of miles south on a sweaty Megabus with cheap booze leaking out my forehead, I could only conclude that clubbing —all clubbing— was a monumental con-trick perpetually played out against people like me in girls jeans with shit Albert Hammond Jnr clone hair. Obviously, the pity-wanking 18 year old on the Megabus was wrong, as he was about almost everything else, particularly the girls jeans and dreadful barnet, but he was right about one important thing: Tiger Tiger is a fundamentally crap night out.

That's not the point though, really. The point is that Aberdeen Tiger Tiger died too, if little mourned. It was a Tiger Tiger for fucks sake, you might as well mourn every slightly sub-par stock take in your local Wetherspoons. The point is that the effects ripple out. As easy as it is to snark at a chain of nightclubs that 'offers you a place to roar in one of our karaoke pods', every closure weakens the night-life of towns like Croydon and cities like Aberdeen. As the number of clubs in Britain continues to steeply decline, a dead Tiger Tiger means one less venue, one more disused unit on a dwindling, thinning high street. It means people lose their jobs, even if that job is 'hen-night VK facilitator' (this isn't a dig, I'm a fully qualified sambuca technician at a pub with a massive student clientele). It's sad to read about staff summoned by 'the area managers (who) came down and told us the decision yesterday. There was a lot of emotion. Everyone's worried about leaving their friends.'

So it's farewell then to Croydon Tiger Tiger, you were a fundamentally crap night out, but fuck me, you were a whole lot better than another disused unit on Croydon high street.

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