The old order changeth

M Club

Yes, it’s here! The latest addition to the Top Gun family threw open its doors on Friday night for a spectacular soft opening – but unfortunately it was such a well kept secret that the Reveller and most of the other Blok M regulars had no inkling that this momentous event was taking place.

The odd choice of name begs two questions. What is ‘M’? And it isn’t a club, so why call it one? Perhaps they see the original Club (aka the Bali Hai) as their main competitor, and hope to lure custom away from that venerable institution down by the Blok M bus station by cunningly confusing the names. And dare I say it, but perhaps the ‘M’ is a poke at another place on the street the name of which has an ‘M” in it?

Now If I’d been asked to suggest a name it would have been “The Hole in the Head” – because Jalan Falatehan needs a new bar like a hole in the head.

As I eagerly walk up to the entrance the door is flung open with great panache and I’m greeted like a long-lost friend by Iwan, one of the Top Gun stalwarts from the early days. As I’m ushered into the bar a flier is thrust into my hand, and while I thirstily down my first historic bottle of ale I almost choke with laughter upon reading the text. The English is charmingly maladroit and blissfully inept, a Blok M classic of ‘Inglish’ to cherish and to treasure.

English as she is spoke in Blok M

Here is a translation for those who are not cognoscenti of the local lingo:

• ‘balcony view‘ = you can lean over the upstairs rail and stare at the tits of the girls below;
• ‘high ceiling dance floor’ = of no earthly relevance, but we’ve got it so let’s flaunt it;
• ‘resident female DJ’ = the bint who organizes the music lives somewhere in the building;
• ‘regular sexy dancers’ = the dancing girls always eat their All-Bran;
• ‘mullti layers sound system’ = music for guys who are up for a threesome;
• ‘sophiscated real time lighting’ = spots and twirlers that obey the laws of quantum mechanics rather than optics.

And now, the piccies!

A new face on the street

Lights, cameras, – but action?

What more is there to say?

The downstairs bar – the entrance is at the back, on the right

The bar is simple, stylish and functional

Another view of the downstairs bar

The ringside seats

The downstairs bar seen from the dance floor

The upstairs bar and pool table

The view along the balcony

View from the end of the balcony – the upstairs and downstairs bars

First impressions

This place is big. And I mean big. It’s the size of a young aircraft hangar, a budding cathedral, an enormous barn of a place that dwarfs all the other bars on the street. With its full-depth cavernous space and split-level bars with upstairs pool table it brings to mind Everest when it first opened, while the railed balconies echo the style of the legendary Tanamur.

Again, the Top Gun management is hedging its bets and throwing a little bit of everything into the mix – regular bar, dance floor, bar-side LCD TV, upstairs bar with pool table, sexy dancers, flashing Christmas-tree style light displays, huge disco-lighting grid suspended from the ceiling, enormous central projection screen, raised dais plus pole for cavorting around, and a DJ box that wouldn’t be out of place in NASA’s mission control at Huston.

When New Top Gun emerged from its chrysalis after a hugely expensive refit everyone remarked how big the space was, and wondered if there’d be enough customers to fill it. And as we know, the place drew away enough punters and girls from the other bars to not only sustain it, but for it to thrive and grow. However, the supply is finite and the pinch was cruelly felt by other bars, most noticeably G-String and Oscar. My Bar lost almost all its early evening trade and a fair bit of the late-night traffic (in the old days it would be filling up from nine onwards), and Everest became a ‘niche’ bar with a loyal and steady band of regulars.

So the issue comes down to a simple body count. Is there a big enough supply of present and potential customers to fill the place and give it the momentum any disco has to have? Time will tell. And is it going to be a weekend-only disco, or will there be enough weekday roisterers to keep the cash tills ringing in the loot?

There’s one thing that I think they’ve got dead wrong, and that’s the dance floor. It’s big, it’s open, and the ringside seating is nonfunctional and unappealing. Compare it with the most successful disco on the Blok, Lintas Melawai a few years back, and you’ll see what I mean. LM had a fairly small dance area as a proportion of the total floor space, and it was neatly hedged in by narrow bar tops and bar stools. Behind the bar stools were dark and secluded seating areas where many a nefarious liaison was hatched, and many a premature ejaculation led to a guy coming to a sticky end.

M Club has created a narrow corridor on each side of the dance area, with massive mirrors to make the already vast interior look absolutely cavernous. Wrong, wrong, wrong. What the place needs is a dark and alluring space where you can drop out of the disco frenzy into a little haven of comfort and seclusion.

Of course we all wish the venture well as it’s the only serious, full-scale disco on the street, but the real competition is going to come from the well-established discos up north in the city. Can it cut the mustard and stand head to head with those places?

The road to Elle is paved with good intentions

After a prolonged period of speculation and tidbits of gossip around the Blok and down Kemang way, it’s now official – the Pattens are opening a new place on Jalan Falatehan. It’s being said (but not confirmed) that Darryl is returning to the bar scene after his foray into the world of country and western music.

Sad to say, the history of D’s Place is a paradigm of what’s happened to the Blok over the last few years. It started out as a dynamic hub for late night revelling, with an upstairs bar that had me racing to reach the Blok every evening in time to get pole position at my favourite table. Then the rot set in with a lemming-like obsession with gimmicks, tawdry sideshows, salacious dancing and games of chance, and culminated in ripping the heart out of the place by closing off half the space to make a VIP cupboard.

If the boys can only curb their misplaced enthusiasm for gimmicks and gimcrackery and do what they’ve always done best – build up a real little community centred around their marvelous personalities – I’ll be back as a regular customer like a shot.

The big question is, will it be a fun bar – or a fubar?

Where the Elle is it?

Ahoy there me hearties – there be gimcrackery and tit shows ahead!

Back on track

The blog and the web site have lain fallow for nigh on three months because things on the Blok were just getting rather banal. Like some long-running soap opera, it was the same characters, the same places, and a steady shift away from the very things that make Blok M what it is. A new contributor to the Forums who recently arrived in Jakarta has put it very eloquently: “… start my evening at the Blok and ended up at BATS. So if this is the best Jakarta has to offer I will not be staying long.”

In this sort of impasse any change is to be welcomed, and at last we have some more meat to chew on.