Credit: The Twang, ripped from MySpace

Okay, I’m making no apologies for the London-centric rant I’m about to unleash. While living in London gives you more gigs and club nights than you could ever hope to go to, sometimes it’s just, well, boring. “Tired of London, tired of life’”, that self-satisfied smug bastard Samuel Johnson once said. Well, he’d clearly never rode the London rock and indie club scene for the last few years.

You can split the clubnights into two rough groups – the first of which are the places that are playing-it-safe, rammed with people getting so blasted on booze that the sheer awfulness of the whole experience passes them. That includes The Barfly (bad beer and worse dancing) Silver (full of people who like dancing to Razorlight, and it takes longer to get served a pint of watery lager than it does to get the nightbus home afterwards), FROG (when was the last time you had a good night there, really?). Blow-Up and anything you’ve ever been to at Metro (grimy, gloomy, god-awful), After Skool and Collide-a-scope (only a student could love the watery liquor and wet playlist) and Club NME (well, I know I’m a psuedo-journo and so naturally hate queueing, but those waiting times are ridiculous).

Then there’s the cooler-than-thou places - Chalk (full of underage children with clothes tighter than the Pope’s posing pouch), Zonino (are you cool enough to know about this? I certainly don’t think I’m cool enough to write about it) Feeling Gloomy (they had a Morrissey theme night the other week, for fuck’s sake)...

Trash has closed down. Those warehouse nights that have sprung up in Peckham and Bethnal Green Road – sweating out the beers and pushing through the hordes who are trying desperately to find drugs? No thanks.

The situation’s not much better if you like it a bit heavier. Rock @ The Mean Fiddler has recently descended into farce - I went a few weeks ago, and they played “Killing In The Name" twice. Sure, it's a great song, but twice? Sin City – okay, it’s better than Full Tilt was towards the end, but it’s flaccid in the bang-for-your-buck department. Club Kerrang! is getting there, but too many bad fringes, and structured so you’ve only just started to dance on the unfriendly dance floor before the bands break it up again. And they’re always bands you’d never want to see anyway.