News of 3 hour queues, rude aggressive security and dirty overflowing toilets have been reaching our ears since Sunday morning as clubbers updated their experiences straight to FaceBook. We weren’t there…but the Scene.Bitch’s were, who are a couple of guys who run a blog on MySpace commenting on the London gay scene both positive and negative. They write what we can only call clever and humorous escapades…except at the end of this night no one was laughing….

“The SuperMartXe 2nd Anniversary Party and we are still frozen from that surreal sequence of events – did it really happen!? Our first ever experience of entrance queues and cloakroom queues to make you cry! And of course the poor frozen punters were able to give live updates via Facebook as the unseasonable fruitless events proceeded to turn the evening sour for many. You’ll have to look at the Facebook event page for their spicy comments but we can share our own experience for you here. It was chaos alright and they’d last used that name at SuperMartXe ‘Kaos City’ back in February 2009.

Despite London being in the grip of the coldest winter in 17 years, with a temperature at minus 3c nostalgia still drew us to celebrate Logan’s Run of incredible and generally top parties over the last two years (apart from the odd toilet smells, crush and excessive summer heat ones). This was billed as an ‘ANNIVERSARY celebration like we’ve never done before … and we give you…The Biggest show in town’. We B.itches are past masters of not believing the marketing hype and have often commented that the scale of production has diminished over time but they were ‘upgrading’ their space for one night only by going to the 3000-capacity Debut (formerly SE1). So this was a new experience and we are all for embracing change with a trusted brand name. Yes, we had gotten upset when they moved NYE2009 to Brixton academy with its soulless hallways and sloping dance floor that for Latino B.iatch is a nightmare after a couple of Caipirinhas.

Coming out of London Bridge station at midnight, we walked past The ‘Shard of Glass’ – well the ‘under construction’ (hmmm) one that will soon be Europe’s tallest building (hmm big claim) we were freezing beyond freezing – and as we rounded the corner our hearts sank – the same feeling that hit us in the snow at ‘AS-one’ New Years Day 2010 at Fire. Jeez, we’ve never been in a queue except at the SuperMarket before! The guest list queue was empty, the VIP had a few in it but then the main queue for presales, like us, and presumable people who hadn’t bought a ticket even!! Was the same queue. [We do remember the fiasco at Trade ‘Pride 2009’ when people without tickets got in much faster – an hour faster in fact!] but this mother of all queues stretched right down to the far end of this tunnel that is Weston Street – it was soul destroying enough but after 20 min standing in minus 3 and not having moved even half a metre – we decided that it would be at least an hour or more of queuing and these B.itches just don’t do it – as we’d already taken off our Long Johns that we’d been wearing all day! So we hailed a nearby taxi and popped over to Pleasuredome at Waterloo for a fruitless couple of hours – what a ragbag of guys were spending their Saturday evening there – but it was ooooh so lovely and warm.

So chilled and refreshed we left Waterloo at 2.00 am and entered Weston Street again to still find at least a 50m queue but having paid £18 each we were determined to get in and warm again! A cruel twist of fate was that as we edged towards the entrance of Debut, what lay at our feet in the gutter covered in muddy footprints were hoards of discarded ‘WE Party’ flyers for their launch party at ‘The Coronet’ next week – was this a final warning to us not to have entered Debut? Could this be the new Spanish brand to take off in London … well they couldn’t have timed it better with a venue that many will remember the good times that SuperMartXe once bought us and in traditional style clubbers will both dance and vote with their feet.

Thankfully we then moved inside within 30minutes, into the ID Scanning section – WTF – this wasn’t to confirm your prepaid ticket but to check you over 18 – every man and his dog was being scanned – surely ridiculous when its reasonable easy to tell that I am not under 21 – come on venue management, that is stupendous – you only need to scan people like the SuperMarkets do who look until 21 or 23 or … someone needs a jobsworth award for that little prank of not using common sense and we are assuming it wasn’t an Home Office ploy to check for illegal Brazilians! [note since Latino B.itch is Brazilian we can crack that joke – they are the country with the largest number of deportee’s each year!]. but on a serious note – did anyone consider their data protection policy – identity theft – what are they doing with all that data – was it a real scan of ID’s and bank cards…was the guy doing it Russian? This was the added process that was really slowing things down, yes I think so!

Finally then we showed the ticket to the friendly woman who joked could she borrow my long johns

Through to the security gate and the woman asked if I was ok with a woman searching me – fine baby bring it on! Oops but she wasn’t happy to find a pack of chewing gum – honey how else do we retain sexy Brazilian smiling teeth after eating this British supersized diet!!

So finally inside! To meet oops another queue – we had expected it and yes at least another 30 minutes queuing to hand in our jackets and bag ..the speed of this queue effected the queue outside of course – not that it was inefficient just the sheer number of people they needed an operation twice or three times the size to cope. But you do get a good cruise of fellow clubbers and we were getting a number of admiring glances and an viewing massive club plan showing us what we were missing and where – but this part of the club was still mighty chilly so we couldn’t strip off until the last moment as we handed in our coats. So at 3.30am (just 3 hours before the schedule finale) we were finally ready to start our evening and crossed into the club via what we believed an emptyish room which the map said was the Circus arena – um well we were at SuperMartXe Pride and reported an empty Circus room there so well done there for co-hosting another empty Circus tent to celebrate SuperMartXe’s birthday There was also a Trade room – which felt odd as Trade was the after-hours party – so maybe this was an infamous post-SuperMartXe-in-house-pre-warm-up-after-hours-party or maybe for those who weren’t going to Trade – in any case all feels a little like diluting the reason we were there – 2nd Anniversary of SuperMartXe London. Um keep it simple!

So turn right into the main room with soulless looking bar on the right and the main floor dead ahead – basically a giant railway arch with the DJ booth and stage at the far end – and what quickly became apparent is that there is no walkway along the side of the dance floor so it’s pretty much a push and shove for all and unless you position yourself against a wall or in a corner where no one wants to go – you don’t get a lot of peaceful dancing.

Fed up of being knocked around we retired to the bar area and jeez it’s still a bit chilly off the dance floor. Trade Arena: But the bar staff were very friendly and no real queues – but this area was not so busy, Circus was pretty empty, we didn’t bother to go towards the Trade room as its entrance seemed to be within the main packed room Before heading back to the dance floor I popped to the toilets and oh dear what was that – flooded out urinal area so used the ladies which wasn’t much better with seemingly half the area cordoned off, and many blocked toilets already – you can’t blame the poor woman working there – what sort of management delivers toilets like that – I’ve read Facebook comments that the opening was already delayed on Health and Safety grounds- well if they had visited the toilets too it might never have opened! We’re not animals!

Back to the dance floor and some tuneful moments of the typical Spanish style house music although a few strange mixes form time to time. The crowd was up for it and generally enjoying the evening, once we’d all quickly forgotten the nightmare of getting in and then coat checking – I expect there were a number of people on the Guest List or the VIP entry that had its own coat check so of course they had less of the pain getting in – like most you wouldn’t really care either of some geezer moaning it was cold in the queue would you But we didn’t see any spectacular stage show – was someone forgetting they weren’t at the Coronet with its massive stage when they wrote the flyer or were they forgetting that marketing blurb is also read by people who actual attend – even if their heads have been frozen for 4 hours before they enter the venue so usually we can remember the blurb and have expectations (not the leather fetish shop type!!)

After another quick bar break we noticed a massive coat check queue around 05.50 – we’d purposely left it to avoid any dash to Trade queue and wanted to leave before the hardened last clubbers but we were caught between a rock and hard place only to head back towards the dance floor to find the main lights had come on, flip, so then we joined the coat check queue – which had one of those barrier zig zag airport style systems and then already stretched half way through the Circus tent room, but we did chat to Daniel from LV for a few minutes and then he mysteriously got handed his coat and bag, oh cheers mate, byeeee. People weren’t really in the mood for cheeky winks although I did get one from the Brazilian couple and they agreed that we prefer clubbing in Florianopolis Brazil as there is NO COAT CHECK!!! NO COATS because its bladdy lovely and hot – just like you too!

We also did witness our most frightening incident of over the top officious threatening behaviour by one of the security staff – you could see the heterosexual aggression – he wanted a fight – I guess this is how they do it with straight people who they goad – the poor lad in some fashionista creation was visible shaken – ok, a bit merry, but there is no need for such crap by security staff he wasn’t endangering someone – and that guy needs to go on an anti aggression course, he was told to calm down by his own colleagues. Totally out of order, if you ‘police’ gay revellers you aren’t going to have your chance to hit a punter – seriously he should be locked up for his own protection!

So one and an half hours later, yes 90 minutes later, we got to being processed, it didn’t feel that they were actually inefficient at all – just the sheer scale of the military operation and we were processed quite quickly except for my bag. Um ‘describe your bag please’ and what’s in it. Phew she did come straight back with it – handy being pink with flowers boys!

Maybe size isn’t everything, why do you need to change venue (Coronet is 2200, this one is 3000) – if it works at Coronet and that’s its home then that’s where you would celebrate its anniversary – otherwise aren’t we saying oh well the Coronet is OK but it’s not good enough to celebrate our anniversary!! [La Demence suffered the same moving its opening party to K-NAL away from its natural home]. But why do promoters change to an untried, untested venue for their big spectacular anniversary events – keep it simple, reduce the margin of error especially if expecting a sell out audience and don’t have unnecessary ‘greed driven’ co-located events that are ‘empty’. We think promoters should put the effort into making it a special show. The hype that promoters come out with is across the board with all clubs and we are all wise to not quite believing what they write – and some promoters make the most outrageous claims – do they not make the connection that the people reading the marketing materials actually go to the event as well so they experience what you promised but the part that didn’t materialise as well. Less hype, more substance – less is more philosophy please – there is virtually nothing we haven’t seen in clubs now – even Beyond is going head to head on live PA’s and stage shows and the like – let’s focus on quality for the paying guests. Why drop a winning formula i.e. The Coronet for what you are billing as your best yet..only Logan can share with us his thoughts – I’ve seen some chatter on Facebook about the venue changing its policy a few days before – we all know that a brand like SuperMartXe doesn’t run the venue or the security teams, bar staff, cleaning teams etc – the venue generally provides this, but the promoter and the club management must work in partnership to discuss every aspect of the night and agree how things will work. This has a déjà vu feeling like the end of Matinee as how do you pick yourself up – a completely free party to everyone who bought tickets? It’s not going to happen is it? Free drinks? Free coat check for life… the least they could do is perhaps post a quick apology on Facebook rather than deleting posts that they don’t like!

People had been queuing an average of two hours to get in 30-40 mins to get their coats in and another 90 minutes to get them out – so all in all an average of 4 hours queuing and 3 hours dancing . After that disaster we just weren’t in the mood for Beyond Amazonia – what a shame and yes Logan you basically wasted our £23 of advance tickets – THANKYOU.

This is probably the most scathing review we have ever had to make but like we say, we just repeat our honest experiences and suggest where things could improve…and then our taxi journey home was driven by the most articulate engineering graduate from Afghanistan and sharing our views of the world in this brief ride we soon realised that actually Mr Brazil and I are actually quite fortunate in our lives and a bit of queuing could be the least of our worries…”

You can read more Reviews by the SceneB.itches HERE.