Saint James Power Station

I wrote the piece below about a year ago, after an expedition to one of the most popular night spots of Singapore ...
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Friday night … after a late dinner I decide to explore the new night spot that opened in a disaffected power station of Singapore. I arrive there at about 11:45. A long line of cars is waiting to enter the parking. To avoid it, I veer into the underground garage of Vivo-City instead. It is full, but I finally find a spot and find my way out of the labyrinth of this huge shopping mall almost deserted at this late hour and the power station stands in front of me across the street, a large forbidding brick structure girded with steel beams. But where are all these people who parked their cars at Vivo-City?

They are in Saint James Power Station … the place is jam-packed. I avoid the line waiting to pay a cover charge and somehow manage to walk in, waiving away the Cerberus who wanted to imprint a mark on my wrist … 'none of this nonsense will do for me … I do not belong in this crowd and would not give a hoot for not being able to re-enter in the absence of a mark on my wrist' I say to myself … the Cerberus lets me go, he is too busy imprinting the wrists of the hundreds of people passing by him.

I climb a flight of stairs and find myself walking along a tube sometimes widening into bar areas. Low cushy chairs line up the walls or surround tables. Crowds everywhere … conversations appear to be going on in the din of background music. At some point, the tube has glass walls, and it is suspended over huge dark cavernous pits, one on each side. This is no doubt where the boilers used to be, and the wide tube in which I stand must have been built from the bridge that allowed workers to check the controls and pipes at the top of the huge boilers.

I look through the glass at the largest pit on my left. Its darkness is sometimes pierced by rotating beams of stroboscopic light emitted by devices hanging from the ceiling, slightly higher than my point of observation. In these beams of bluish light, I can distinguish, at the bottom of this cavern, in a mixed haze of cigarette smoke and steam from body heat, vaguely human shapes, packed like sardines against one another, with hardly any room to spare, and anchored to their feet that seem glued to the floor, wriggling their middles rhythmically and throwing their arms up in grotesque contortions, as if in an ecstatic trance of devotion to some demonic deity. A group of such humanoids emerges from this ant-hill, as they are performing their ritual standing on an elevated platform. These must be the most devoted practitioners, driven by their extraordinary and truly inspiring energy and conviction to lead the crowd in this orgiastic celebration of its total submission to the rhythms offered by the disc-jockey reigning supreme in the midst of his consoles.

Through the glass wall on the other side of the tube, the other pit displays, in more light, a more traditional and less scary scene … There, I can actually discern a dance floor and a stand for the band that distils, based on the musical waves wafting up to my elevated observatory, something that sounds like Latin rhythms.

I resolve to embark on an ethnological expedition down in the larger and darker cavern to see more closely its frantic creatures. Cerberus was at the gate, this time equipped with a device emitting a violet glow, designed to read the imprints on the wrists of this night's devotees. I waived him again, animated by my revulsion at being identified by a marking on my wrist, which was not there anyway, and, again, he decided not to argue with me.

I followed the convolutions of a dark tube that eventually vomited me and the accompanying crowd into this post modern Hades. The noise was deafening. My inner organs started vibrating rhythmically in response to the subsonic waves emitted by sub-woofers and the higher frequencies resonated as loud as if they originated from between my ears. Above these inchoate electronically generated sounds (to call them music would be a lie) a vaguely human voice was screaming some strange incantations over a loud, primitive beat that battered you into submission. I started fighting my way through the gyrating crowd of young people surrounding me.

From time to time the blue stroboscopic light beams emitted from above washed over the faces of people standing or sitting on high chairs at tables arranged against the cavern's walls. Although most of them were teenagers or hardly more, they looked stoned and bleary eyed, either totally passive and subjugated by the overwhelming noise or mildly moving their bodies in rhythm. Hardly any of them was involved in conversation, made impossible by the deafening noise anyway. When there was communication, it was mainly through signs and knowing smiles or grimaces accentuating an intensified body gyration. Very little touching was visible. A couple leaning against the wall next to me engaged in a chaste kiss and a mild embrace, but it was a rare exception. Hand holding was mainly in order to avoid being separated as a couple made its way through the heaving crowd.

This crowd was an ethnically representative sample of Singapore's population: mostly Chinese, with a few Malays, Indians and occasional off-springs of Caucasian expatriates. I noticed a tall Chinese, with tousled hair shooting in all directions from his scalp, wildly dancing in place near the table he shared with friends. Several had this hair-cut, which appears to be popular among male teenagers these days, and a majority of them had the standard accoutrement to go "clubbing": a white tailored shirt open on the chest, buttoned in the middle, with tails left hanging rather than tucked in jeans or similarly casual pants.

Walking around slowly, I observed, disbelieving, the goings-on. How could anyone find this kind of occupation on a Friday night fun? Looking at these young people's faces, they, in fact, did not seem to have fun. Except for the most enthusiastic and frenetic of them, they seemed bored. They were there out of conformity: clubbing and getting lost in a sea of deafening noise and a mist of cigarette smoke and sweat is the thing to do with your friends among teenagers and twenty something the world over.

But there is a difference. The hardly suppressed sarcastic smile on my face may have, in other parts, provoked anger, and perhaps a violent reaction from the crowd. Not here in Singapore: in spite of the primitive violence of the surrounding music, this young crowd remained tame. The few who noticed me looked at me with a puzzled stare and seemed to wonder what a man of my age was doing there.

Observing … just observing … across the chasm separating generations.