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Christopher Green unearths a piece of his past for this week’s Verb, reading a poem he wrote in 1992 after staying up all night at The Ministry of Sound. As he says thinking back on his younger self, ‘I don’t think anything means that much now’.  He also reads a brand new poem ‘Everybody Dance Now’, on aging, dancing sober, and how to find the Nightclub within. 

Geraldine Quigley’s debut novel ‘Music Love Drugs War’ (Fig Tree) draws on her experiences as a teenager in Derry during The Troubles. For Geraldine and her friends, a club called The Cave was a haven for them in the middle of a war. She also celebrates nightclubs and particularly nightclub toilets as important and intimate spaces for women to exchange information. She also tells the story of the first woman to wear trousers in a nightclub in Derry…

DJ and writer Dave Haslam is the author of Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues’ Simon & Schuster. For Dave, the club is as important to a city as its cathedral or university. It is a place where we find our own tribes. He also celebrates disco as a place of safety for women, gay men and minorities – after dark is where you don’t have to compromise. 

In her show ‘NIGHCLUBBING’, Theatre maker Rachael Young considers an incident in 2015 where black women were denied entry to a nightclub purely based on the colour of their skin. Rachael explains how she balances telling this difficult story while celebrating dancing, blackness, and the Majesty that is Grace Jones. Rachael Young is performing NIGHTCLUBBING in Glasgow and London, dates