Lower the Tone at The Oak Bar

My partner and I made a quick list the other day of all the clubs we’ve ever been to so that over the next few months I can get them onto this blog.

Two days later we realised we’d missed out the classic Oak Bar.  This was (and still is for all I know) in a pub on Green Lanes heading towards Clissold Park and Stoke Newington, so it was well positioned for the local lesbian population in that area.  It was ‘just around the corner’ from our flat in Dalston.

They held various club nights but the only one I went to was Lower the Tone, an indie-mix type night.  I can’t say personally this was a favourite club, but was a haunt of various North and North East London womens’ footy teams, and the pool table near the door was always popular.

This is one of those clubs I have no fond memories of, for no particular reason.  Which is likely why I missed it off my list. It had a weird platform in the corner of the dance floor and if I wasn’t falling off it (dancing with eyes closed) then I was being covered by beer from someone else falling off it. I always seemed to leave well before the end, heading out into the relative quiet of Green Lanes (that part of the road wasn’t too busy in the late 90s and early noughties), trying to remember which of the residential streets nearby I’d parked in.  A couple of times I walked home by myself, which, looking back, was probably not wise but took in the delights of the closed up local hardware shop, the lovely French patisserie in ? Square, and led me back across Kingsland Road just in time for a kebab…

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