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cigarette girls, Venetian courtesans, magicians and wandering cosmonauts (sadly none of the latter make an appearance).
The rooftop has deckchairs imprinted of rock 'n' roll royalty (I sat on Iggy Pop), and you can kick back and breeze at the night sky. Gaze west over Stables Market and you're rewarded with a view of a petrol station, a crane and a drug dealer scratching his crotch on Camden High Street.
Back inside there are king size beds adorned with fairy lights you simply couldn't flat pack into an Ikea setup, bizarrely blown up covers of The Sun and three deer heads by the bar. The clientele are a mix of beautiful people, students, boorish indie boys and young men who like to wear tight red jeans and no socks. And Amy Winehouse. Past the bar, and the two full sized wooden horses (marked DO NOT MOUNT), you find the main floor where Trash Money are ploughing through their likeable brand of shuffly artrock.
It goes down fairly well, they have the meddled hooks and right look (frontman Chris Tate is sporting a rare Vivienne Westwood number). They really don't seem to be sure whether to join the electro-indie bandwagon or stick to noise-corey artrock, so they come across like a lop-sided Hoxton haircut.
Shakes were billed too, but their live show deceptively 'sounds like a CD' as one of our party put it. So we mistakenly waited their set out with dry house white and even drier Amy Winehouse jokes.
When something close to resembling a live electro band popped on we jumped to the floor astonished to find a DJ and a white room full of whirring lights and contorting bodies. One of our party, so inspired by his wish for dirty electro being granted, started Russian dancing. It was like a scene from the UFO club. Not as weird, but definately surreal.
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