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musicandchips
Thoughts from 30-Something London
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Wednesday, October 01, 2003 :::
Accountant Beer Holocaust
Having worked in the music and clubbing industries for the best part of 10 years I have come to hold the view that the levels of resistance to the influence of alcohol displayed by the majority of my friends and colleagues is normal. Last night however, I was given a humourous, if somewhat shocking, reminder that those levels are in fact excessively high. At the last minute I was asked to DJ an end-of-quater party for the accounts department of a particular firm. It was to start at 5.30, finish at midnight, and had a free bar for the duration.
Here's how it works in the music industry: There's a party with a free bar. It starts at 7, and finishes at 2. By midnight everyone's pretty merry, the quality of dancing deteriorates, and people begin to really mix drinks. Usually shots of some kind with beer or wine chasers. By 2am the heavy drinkers are in a pronounced state of drunkenness, but, with a few exceptions, are still to some degree coherent, functioning, and able to hold a professional conversation should their boss suddenly appear asking about some aspect of their work, before getting themselves home for a good night's kip and work the next day. Perhaps a hair-of-the-dog swifty at lunchtime, but otherwise none too much the worse for wear.
Here's how it went down last night: The department arrived en-masse right on time, and tucked into the beer and wine. Obviously drinking faster than they would have had they been paying, but still at a relatively sedate rate compared to a music bash. As the evening progresses I notice that everyone seems to be sticking to the same drinks. Quite sensible I thought, and precisely in keeping with the stereotypical image I hold of accountants. Fast forward to 10.30pm: Somehow in the last 20 minutes or so the patrons have degenerated from a polite, well-behaved and vertically-consistent gathering into a riotious melee of staggering, screeching, dribbling, jibbering lunatics, intent on covering themselves, each other, and anything in their near vacinity with as much beer as is humanly possible. Requests are coming in thick and fast, bawled into my ear with the vehemence (and coherence) of a herd of rutting stags. The receptionist is grinding her hips rhythmically into the a-rhythmicaly gyrating department head's groin. Three lads from bought ledger are hugging each other and leaping insanely (and at different tempos) around the dancefloor, knocking people flying in all directions until finally bouncing off one of the walls and heading back for another pass. The company secretary, a grandmother, is snogging and aggressively groping some poor kid in a corner. The company bike is sprawled across a table enjoying the attentions of most of the juniors, all hoping they'll get lucky (despite being unable to formulate any kind of cohesive words, let alone sentences). The MD is screaming at me (and anyone remotely near me that in her near-blind drunkenness may pass as a DJ) to "play more f*cking RnB", ostensibly so she can booty-clat in the direction of the only sober person in the room, a devout muslim black guy, who clearly has no interest in her advances whatsoever. Glass, beer and sweat are flying everywhere, and I'm genuinely in fear of my personal wellbeing. I'm not making this up!! Eventually I had to call the venue manager down who thoroughly agreed with me that we needed to terminate proceedings early before someone got killed. They were so hammered that no-one noticed we were throwing them out an hour before time. I only wish I could be a fly on the wall in that office today. The only consolation will be that, with the exception of the muslim, absolutely no-one in that room last night will be able to remember a single thing that happened.
So what conclusions can we draw from this? Whose behaviour is normal? To which group should we aspire? The near-alcoholic muso's who, despite consuming several times the accountants alcoholic intake over a similar period, thereby risking liver and heart damage, nevertheless hold it together without making too much of a spectacle of themselves? Or the not-so-mild-mannered accountants who, although perhaps subject to lower life-insurance premiums, make complete and utter arses of themselves on what in my circles would be considered an embarassingly small volume of drink?
Or perhaps one day, when mankind has evolved beyond his need to indescriminately destroy brain-cells in a quest for dutch courage and meaningless sexual encounters, we'll realise that the only person worth aspiring to is the muslim. Not for him the need for consciousness alteration, for he has found something that he values above inebriation. Perhaps we should all be searching for our faith beyond beer.
In the meantime however, mine's a Hoegarden! ;o)
::: posted by Andy at 10/01/2003 02:30:00 PM
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