Club Guestlists in Barcelona

Barcelona’s nightclubs can basically we split into two halves. Studenty and posh. Personally I prefer the studenty ones – yes there may be too many dicks on the dancefloor, but at least you can wear whatever you like, and really go wild and have fun without basically giving a damn (which is what clubbing should be all about right?).

The other sort, which the Catalan locals seem to love, as well as female guiris (I guess I’ll have to do a post on guiris some other time! Basically tourists, who look, act and embody every stereotype of tourists) are the ‘exclusive’ nightclubs. I tend to avoid these places, as 1) I hate shoes 2) I hate people who wear shoes 3) no one actually has any fun at these places, they just check each other out a bit and then go home.

Most of these clubs, like Opium Mar, CDLC, Shoko and Sotavento can be found on the Port Olimpic, just by Barceloneta beach. Others like Sutton Club are up by the Diagonal. Many of them are run by the same people, and they are all basically identical copies of one another. If you’re on holiday, have a bit of cash and like your girls/guys nice and dressed up, then there are some merits to a visit – esp. to Opium Mar. This is the one place (I’m not counting Catwalk) which stays open to 6am on the Port Olimpic and the club which pretty much everyone tries to get in. During summer on a saturday night that can be tough!

Anyway the point is that none of these ‘exclusive’ clubs are in fact exclusive at all (hey they even let me in on occasion). You don’t need any special contacts or to grease the palm of the bouncer. You just need to follow a couple of basic rules about dress and get yourself on the guest list… how do you do that? Well there are a tonne of nightlife agencies offering guestlists to all the above clubs and a thousand others you’ve never heard of, desperate to fill the dancefloor of each, from Monday to Sunday. (During summer in particular most of the top venues will throw parties every night!)

Our amigos at Barcelona Life have just started to add some information about club guestlists in Barcelona to their website, starting with info on the all-important Opium guestlist, Sutton guestlist and more. After all it’s one thing to spend a night in a crap venue, but it’s definitely worse to be rejected by one! For some of the other nightclubs you can do some simple Googling to find an agency.

Sadly, all of the best music clubs in the city, like Apolo (home of Nasty Mondays and Crappy Tuesdays!), Razzmatazz and La Terrrazza don’t operate such lists… relying instead on old fashioned methods, like having a good DJ, to get people in.

Too Many D!cks on the Dancefloor

Maybe it’s because spring is in the air, or maybe it’s because it’s been too long since any of my extensive Polish harem came to visit me, but the Freak’s libido has been in overdrive in the last few weeks… with sorely disappointing results.

Nothing materialised after I somehow got this nice Catalan girl’s number at Sidecar (despite the fact I could barely speak)… the older Czech girl with enormous bazookas, who I met on a quiet night in Marula, gave me the briefest of snogs before disappearing down into the Liceu metro station and out of my life forever, whilst even my beloved Polish chicas have spurned my advances. One very cute veterinary sciences student from Wroclaw who I met at Crappy Tuesdays suggested we leave the club and take a night walk at the beach… but sadly she really did only want a night walk on the beach (WTF!). Hasn’t she read the Freak’s best-selling manual on sexual subtext?

No doubt much of my failings can be blamed on my lack of charisma, looks, money, confidence, height and all-round sexual appeal… but nonetheless I’m going to lay some of the blame for the lack of wild oat sowing going on in the Freak bedroom at the door of the Barcelona nightlife!

What I want to know is: where do all the freakin’ hot girls go at night? You seem them on the beach, you see them on Las Ramblas, you see them trundling around town looking cute on the Bicing bikes, but turn up to place where you might be able to interact with these cheeky chicas and 99 times out of 100 you find yourself sh!t out of luck… which is why most Sunday mornings I wake up with this song in my head:

I think I would be doing y’all a disservice if I didn’t reproduce the lyrics of this, my hymn to Barcelona:

Going to the party
Sippin’ on Bacardi
Wanna meet a hottie
But there’s Adam, Steve and Marty
There’s Billy, Todd and Tommy
They’re on leave from the army
The only boobs I’ll see tonight will be made of origami

Tell the fellas, make it understood
It ain’t no good if there’s too much wood
Make sure you know before you go
The dance floor bro-hoe ratio
Five to one is a brodeo
Tell Steve and Mike it’s time to go
Wait outside all night to find
Twenty dudes in a conga line

I imagine the best place to meet girls in Barcelona is a taxi ride to the Port Olimpic strip, where a host of pretentious lounge bars suck in the leggy blondes in short skirts looking for playboys to shell out the 15 euro cocktails on them. However for guys, nightlife on the Port Olimpic strip means wearing a shirt with a collar and shoes… and I for one am not getting in time machine and going back to the UK in the 90s! (Once the bouncer turned me down in my red clubbing T-shirt and sleek Puma sneakers to wave in a group of 15 guys wearing Primark jeans and stripey Next shirts).

As for the more authentic dance clubs or indie nights they’re regular ‘brodeos’, and what cute girls do turn up are usually surrounded by a posse of South American surfers, ‘hip’ skateboarders with ‘cool’ tattoos, and other assorted losers that impressionable alternative girls seem to think are second only to rock stars.

Well enough complaining. I’ve heard a rumour about a club in Poblenou that is full of hot and brazen Scandivanian girls with a 50/50 ratio and my Catalan friend assures me that simply to turn up at Plataforma on Nou de la Rambla is to guarantee a night of the horizontal honky tonky. Naturally I don’t put much store in either, but rest assured you’ll be the first to know if and when the fun times begin this summer…

Polish chicas, on the tourist trail and some clubbing

Just spent an enjoyable week entertaining two rather gorgeous girls from my erstwhile adopted homeland of Poland. It’s easy to be snobby about seeing a city from a tourist point of view but Barcelona really does pull out the stops when it comes to sightseeing and it was a pleasure to revisit all the greats with guests in tow… as well as get in some bikini time (the Polish girls, not me).

Having also done some fairly extensive club crawling I’m still not entirely satisfied by the Barcelona nightlife, and waiting to find my niche. We did Jamboree, Catwalk and Razzmatazz, but the first two are typical tourist fare and the latter is a just a huge crush (a night spent queuing in effect!) and def too much for a clubber of my advanced years. Did turn up a new place called Marula which may be worthy of a second look. Met a French DJ called Fred Spider and although I can’t recall very much of our 2 hour conversation I seem to remember we shared the same music taste and nightlife outlook… he plays there at weekends so I’ll get back to y’all if I get around to going.