With the weekend arriving once again, I found myself in the rare situation of not having to work on Saturday for the first time in over a year. I decided to take advantage of this opportunity and head out on Friday evening. I’d noticed that a lot of Sydney’s more underground and niche nights were on the Friday, whereas the major commercial ones tended to be on Saturday night, which makes sense really. ITM had recently revealed that Clive Morley of Fabric London fame was now running a weekly Friday event at Ladylux called Flux, with a deeper electronic music policy than most. I’d also read that it had packed it out the last three weeks in a row, so I figured it must be doing something right and decided to head down.

Ladylux was also one of my favourite venues in Sydney, I truly felt this venue had never really being used properly ever since Smut used to be there a while ago on a Sunday night, which was easily the best night out in Sydney in this reporter’s opinion. We arrived shortly after 10 to find that we were the first people to enter the venue, and at the door my friends were asked by security to take their hoodies off; which I felt was pretty unnecessary. If you’re wearing a hoodie without the hood on, it’s simply a jacket yeah? Yet my friends were asked to remove the thing entirely. I understand venues have a dress code, but this was just a little out of line. We grabbed a few drinks and had a chat for a while. I had no idea who was playing, but there was generally some good commercial music playing and I heard Light and Music by Cut Copy, but no cheesy electro which was a good thing.

We hung around till around 11 where the numbers had doubled to a whopping 8 people, so we decided to head off elsewhere for a while. When we arrived back around 12.30 where there were now a few people inside, although still not particularly busy. The crowd was a bit older then what I was used to, but it made sense with the type of night and music policy that it would attract an older crowd. I couldn’t find a set list anywhere but I was told the DJ’s name was Tom; he was playing music that had a bit of a disco feel to it, and it was closer to proper house music than what I’d heard out in quite some time.

At around 1.30am a flux of people began to arrive (sorry couldn’t help myself), and by 2am the venue was packed to the rafters. I found it interesting that the venue tends to pack out so late, as this was often the case with Smut, because the majority of other venues seem to begin to die down around this time. I spoke around to staff to see if they knew exactly why, and he said that a few nearby venues have licenses that run out early, so people tend to head down to Lux at a later time.

Shortly after that the music changed slightly, and I noticed a few techy sounds creeping in to coincide with the new DJ that was playing, and then the dance floor got quite busy. Around 3am we decided to call it a night, because the venue was getting more and more packed. I think if I was to return I would arrive at the peaktime of around 2am and stay till close, rather than arriving early because it was quiet for the first couple of hours. And I reckon it’d be the place to be if there was an international playing.