I hate to say you had to be there…

Lost is dead, long live Lost.

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog <3 Come with me to the final weekend of Lost.

I may be biased but I think Lost is the best thing to happen to London nightlife in a very long time. Last year they took over a shuttered cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue, this beautiful Art Deco music hall that had been converted in the 1970’s. and started throwing parties in it again, bringing music back to the building in a way that felt completely nostalgic and completely new at the same time. Isn’t that exactly what dreaming feels like? I think so.

I thought this tube carriage was the perfect chariot for me, the unofficial Queen of Lost. I love graffiti, I love anything that is an attempt to leave a mark. I love Lost because it had that same ethos. It brought weird, messy, loud culture right back into the centre of London.

I chewed some gum on Shaftesbury Avenue and walked to the club. The night was hot and the queue was long. The other day I heard someone say how much they liked queueing because you can just zone out and not think about anything. I agree. But I didn’t queue because I am the unofficial Queen of Lost. At the door, phones are locked into pouches. The more I went to Lost, the more I started to experience the opposite of phone addiction. You start to crave the same kind of presence you feel in there, in all the other parts of your life. Anyway, I floated in wearing my white dress and drank some water. Then I bumped into Ethan and Ava from Silver Gore who had just played in the music hall.

Lost had lots of different rooms. The music hall was my second favourite, but my favourite was the Lost Cinema, one of the untouched screens from when the building was an ODEON (famously where I watched Toy Story 2 in 1999).

Style Wars the graffiti film from 1983 was playing so we watched for a while and then went to the club because Groove Armada were starting their set. They opened with “Superstylin’” and of course everyone lost it.

After shaking my [redacted] for a while, I snuck off and wound my way up a metal spiral staircase into the Loft. The Loft is a sort of VIP room that everyone constantly wants wristbands to get into, but as soon as you’re in there, you immediately want to leave. There’s just too much going on to sit around and schmooze.

Leaving immediately, I went to watch the genius director Jake Nava introduce some of his music videos. I got a lemonade and danced like I was possessed to “My Prerogative” by Britney and “Baby Boy” by Beyoncé (feat. Sean Paul). The entire cinema was full of people dancing and cheering. (No phones! Anywhere!!!) When something amazing happens at Lost – like if every single person in a cinema gets up and starts dancing – you notice the immediate instinct to pull out your phone. But then you override the instinct because you don’t have a phone. You experience things in the real, immediate world, instead of immediately attempting to curate what you’re experiencing for other people to see. It feels like freedom.

But it’s not just the no phones thing that made Lost so special. It had this feeling of expansiveness and potential. It’s often the friction between things that creates something new; between people, genres, aesthetics. At Lost you could find yourself watching hardcore bands, rappers, house DJs, ethereal harpists, bumping into Central Cee, walking in on a Soho Reading, seeing Gaspar Noe introduce his films, watching erotic cartoons and hearing poetry all on the same night. It was like five festivals in one building, with a secret line-up they only ever wrote in chalk on the wall. You could explore Lost forever and never see the same thing twice. I was there almost every weekend and there are still rooms I went to once that I couldn’t find again.

By now I was passing through the powder room. Here you could do whatever you needed to do, to your heart’s content.

I got lost for a while before finding myself in the music hall face to face with an enormous inflatable shark and Mowalola performing one of the best live sets I’ve seen in so long. She’s truly so punk. I love her and the music was so good.

That’s the shark. I think it was leopard print. It was really hard to photograph because it was so big. Then it was home time because I knew I was coming back tomorrow.

On the bus home I had an existential crisis. I think it hit me that the building was really closing. The corporate jaws of the city crunch up all these places that people really need: places to discover music and make friends in and get fucked up and make out with each other and dance and sweat in, places that make the difficulty of trying to live in a city more than worth it. They crunch them up and turn them into glass-fronted shopping centres, bland restaurants, places where nothing interesting will ever happen. Anyway here’s sad me and Neptune before I went to sleep. 1:41am, not bad!

On Saturday I woke up tired and went to a Pineapple dance class and ate a cream-filled mochi to prepare myself for round two.

I made my way over for the last time. It was sad. I wore black. Then I found everyone and we smoked cigarettes on the roof.

(Something you need to understand is that I cannot be held responsible for any technical mishaps made during this diary. Ultimately yes I accidentally reset my camera so every photo is now permanently timestamped with the wrong date. Just think of it as intentional. A night lost forever in time.)

From the roof you could see the huge golden moon and the London eye, and these fragments of messages from people who had been to the club being projected on the building opposite. I like the idea that Lost can appear and disappear in any place or any building across the city at any time. There are so many empty buildings sitting around in London doing nothing. I think we should act with more entitlement over our cities. They do not exist to make money, they exist to hold us while we go about the crucial business of finding out what it really means to be alive.

A lot of time went by between the roof and the club. I met Giggs, who was having a haircut in a van outside. I drank cranberry juice and watched the end of Mulholland Drive in the Lost Theatre, which was amazing because everyone was out-shushing each other in a funny way and at the end there was a standing ovation but everyone kept shushing all through it. Then I watched Mark Leckey films and lost everyone and then found them again.

In the music hall, I met Maria Dearest and we watched Geordie Greep play the most genius, brilliant, life-changing, fantastic, amazing show that I think has altered me as a person forever. Everyone was dancing like squirming cats and rolling on the floor and I was headbanging a little bit and felt so happy.

I thought this man’s shirt was perfect.

Now everything was starting to feel like one long glittering beautiful blur. Watching music like that with a crowd like that does something to your body. You can shake and laugh and shout and exorcise whatever you need to. Then we rushed out while everyone was cheering because The Dare had flown over for one night to DJ in the club and I knew I had to be on stage for that.

Here he is, the man, the legend, myth, the star. IT WAS THE BEST SET EVER.

Everyone was losing their minds, including me. The whole stage was full and the club was heaving and then who showed up but of course the rock star icon herself ms Charli XCX! <3<3. Duh! We were at the centre of the universe!

As you can imagine, I got a bit swept up in the moment (now streaming on HBO max) and didn’t really take any other photos. Harrison played Twist and Shout and I left my body.

And then, somewhere between a Georgian choir, stolen moments in velvet-lined rooms, lost connections, found possessions, forgotten people remembered, phone numbers written in chalk and accidentally rubbed out by people kissing - it was all over. I got lost in the mayhem of it all until suddenly I woke up and the lights were on.

I stayed around until the sun threatened to rise, then walked out onto Charing Cross Road and waited for a bus that never came.

The cab I ended up taking had a Union Jack doormat in it that felt very right and very wrong at the same time. Iconic, British, kitsch. Pointed, threatening, hard. People love this country for different reasons, but a growing number of them seem to think that in uncertain times they need hate as much as they need love. It’s like they think they need hate in order to love, or something. For some reason those people take comfort in turning away from things that look different to them. They start to say there isn’t enough room on our island. But there is so much room, so much empty room. It’s just locked up behind closed doors.

I’m sure a lot of the people who partied at Lost feel just as uncertain and afraid about their futures – probably most of them. But faced with the same uncertainty, they turn towards it, not away.

What’s obvious is that this cold, strange country is nothing without music. We all need to stand in a room and lose it to something, whatever it is, whatever you’re into, with other people losing it around you. Without music, “iconic british culture” devolves into a weird racist village fete where every stall is owned by another red-faced and dishonest dynasty. In contrast to all this reduction, Lost felt like a genuinely big swing, a historic moment for our club culture. Something only we can do, done so well, and with so much love. a place to find things and lose things. a place where things felt like they could really happen. a place you could just be, without needing to broadcast it.

I love London but it causes me so much pain. I really believe this city can be brought back to life. There is so much wasted potential locked away, taken from us without ceremony, and demolished. Lost showed me a glimpse of the kind of London that we deserve, a city that belongs to the people who live in it, people who wake up and use it every day as a way to figure out how to live. Isn’t that the point? Hasn’t that always been the point?

Anyway, I wish you had been there.

Lost is dead, long live Lost.

Bertie xxxoxoxxx