On arriving back in halls, I was greeted with the friendly piles of local club spam under my door. It’s worse this year, on all counts.

Manchester being the UK’s most bohemian city, the competition between clubs must be furious. Most of the fallout is in the form of increasingly pornographic leaflets and adverts. If you’re not offering free drinks for girls, “the sexiest music” or a Playboy party special, then clearly your business is doomed.

Ascension inaccurately quotes DJ Pied Piper while proclaiming:

We’re lovin’ it, lovin’ it, lovin’ it, lovin’ it like this! The ultimate clubbing experience, we’re takin’ you back, back to the old skool!

Sly BTTF reference? They are also hiring:

WE ARE LOOKING FOR A MALE & FEMALE THAT WILL BE THE FACE OF URBAN CHIC 2004, A PERSON THAT REPRESENTS ALL THINGS URBAN CHIC.

I’m certainly a hardcore urban gangster, but I don’t think I could pull off chic. More info here if you think you satisfy both criteria. Ascension continues their multi-posting spam campaign by giving the right answer for the wrong reasons:

The culmination of the hottest venue, the sexiest students, the funkiest music & best drinks promos can only mean one thing… Addicted

Rock Bottom @ jilly’s confounds hopeful cryptononymisers with “DJs Slugpellet and Mixmaster Mosh”. Kinky Chic claims Mtwo has one of Manchester’s “most stilish venues”, with its “kinkiest student party”. This flyer features actual porn. Vodka & mixer is one UKP. It doesn’t say how much the whores cost. Equally unsubtle is PUSSY GALORE, Mondays at LOAF, whose cover suggests an 8:1:1 nude-female:male:horse ratio. You are a target market.

CheekyCheeky disappoints by turning out to be what “cc” stands for on a charming cartoon rendition of a typical club scene. Mis-teeq bring all six of their legs to what promises to be “a scandalous party” with “scandalous RNB” by the quasi-googlewhacking combo PRAMS:FUSION:JONNY5.

Afterhours gets unfairly debranded by me starting a sentence with its name, after pioneering insultverts with the mazin:

… the night showcases the hottest dj’s playing upfront and club classic grooves, a must for all you spastic mentalists..!!!

They’re certainly up on their ad-theory, hoping nobody will notice the Freudian shadows.

There’s also an advert for a club called FREE MEMBERSHIP. That might not be the real name; all other text on the page was drowned out by said offer, which might as well have had <blink></blink> around it.

Bar Med Deansgate bolsters pedophile culture with the provocatively illustrated BACK TO SKOOL every Wednesday, as does VODBAR, who, bless them, cater to the nurses-with-massive-syringes market. Their cheap drinks should help with MR WET BOXERS night, presumably before MR CHUNKY VOMIT SHIRT morning. Contact Theatre doesn’t elaborate further than a blood splattered logo on what the weekly STRIPPED BARE involves.

Cheap drink is a recurring theme on every single flyer. Don’t be surprised by the number of people whose heads are so boring to be in they have to get out of them several times a week. The alcohol problem in this country is thousands of times more serious than the drug problem, if that’s a problem at all: everybody’s had the drugs are bad lecture, so there is a latent inhibition in people, causing moderation when they do take them, while alcohol is so ubiquitous and cheap that nobody gives a second thought to choking down their weekly limit in one night.

RETRO at Ascension is one of the few flyers that doesn’t serve the frustrated airbrush fetishist market, which is unsurprisingly massive. Rumour has it that available women these days have to wear plates of frosted glass in order to compete with the phong shaded meat hanging on the posters.

The game is up when you read a leaflet advertising the advertisers, Fly Promotion, responsible for this rainforestworth of tacky filth. If you have a job with them, I have nothing against you personally, but you work for a spammer, so I suggest mugging grannies instead: it’s higher up the ethical foodchain, and you’ll get more cash, as well as the satisfaction of pushing bodies into the canal.