Crash Victims (extracts):

battered cars, bleeding guests, pain and suffering. For one group of London clubbers, Crash is more than just a movie. Much, more, as Sarah Bailey discovers.

You are in The Arches, a south London nightclub which, curiously enough, doubles as an executive car park by day. You are standing in a crowd of 850 of London’s most exotic clubbers, dressed variously as voluptuous nurses, Mad Max cyberpunks, S&M fetishists and celebrity crash victims. Tonight just happens to be the 100th anniversary of the first ever car crash in Britain, although the people who devised what you are about to see claim this is pure fluke.

In front of you, the stage is strewn with smashed-up Ford Escorts and performers who are pretending to be car-crash victims, dressed in kinky leathers and smeared with red gore. As the music begins to throb, dancers in bondage costumes leap on to the stage and start making out with the victims and the cars themselves.Two beautiful girls in metal bras and chaps are writhing on the bonnet of one car. The short-haired girl is wielding an angle grinder (a rotating electric saw *apparently*), which she drives into the breast of the long haired blonde....Sparks explode everywhere.

Welcome to Crash – the nightclub – brought to you by Torture Garden, kings of the London fetish scene, to celebrate David Cronenberg’s forthcoming movie. No one here tonight has actually seen the movie yet, but that doesn’t make any difference to the erotic spectacle unfolding before your eyes.

Two women have pinned one of the male dancers to the roof of a car. A tiny red-haired girl *I’m not that small!* with a maniacal grin leaps at him and drives the angle grinder viciously into his crotch. A cloud of red blood spurts everywhere and the crowd goes insane.

Next a guy breaks through the barriers, grabs the grinder off the girl and begins to attack the cars. The red-haired dancer is screaming and trying to wrestle the machine off him. * I would just like to thank security for doing nothing to help me and thank all the other performers for running away and leaving me on stage with a maniac*

You can’t tell whether this is fantasy or something more scary. You don’t know whether the red-haired dancer or the gatecrasher are going to get hurt for real. Some one switches off the power backstage, the performance comes to an abrupt end, the gatecrasher is pulled away *after being physically thrown off stage by yours truly* and the audience melts back on to the dance floor.

…the angle grinders were for real. Available from hardware stores, they are more likely to be used for cutting through stone than for erotic performance.

…the aberrant gatecrasher has been banned from the club…

Sarah Bailey for Sky magazine, February 1997.