Fight Club

Loitering in West Street at 3am one Friday night in December, it is only ten minutes before the doors of the Paradox burst open to reveal a struggle inside. A man comes flying out onto his back, his face purple and puffed up, his eye punched shut, head still up, snarling. As the police officers stationed in West Street move in to separate the fighters he launches himself back at the door, yelling at the bouncers making their explanations to the police and squaring up at them before being ushered a little way off by his friends. His tearful girlfriend arrives and is seized and hugged, too hard, as they move away across the street. A young policeman says the man has been thrown out for taking drinks from the bar without paying, according to the doormen who also say he has made racist remarks to them. He has obviously taken a beating somewhere between the bar and the door but the doormen look unscathed and unworried. The policeman says there's not much he can do. "If someone comes up to us and tells us that they have been attacked by bouncers, we will try to investigate. But in a situation like this where the person is very drunk and aggressive, it's hard to find out what has happened."

In the sudden chaos of crowds leaving clubs after a weekend night out, amidst the milling around, the drunken shrieks, the yells and the giggles, such scuffles are an all too familiar sight, breaking out or spilling from club doors as people are ejected.

Since the days when the Pink Coconut was the pride of West Street, the night-club revolution has turned Brighton seafront into a buzzing Disneyland of clubbing, with a themed night for every punter. From the Palace Pier to West Street, the clubs are packing in new generations of clubbers as Brighton's reputation for nightlife just grows and grows. If Liverpool's Cream is successful in its plan to open at the Aquarium site in the spring, with a capacity of nearly 2,000, the area will be busier than ever. Excessive drinking is generally agreed to be the primary cause of late-night violence; according to the police, the majority of assaults happen on a Friday or a Saturday night, and there are many more in the summer when the town fills up. The people who work and go out in Brighton's clubland see it all the time, so New Insight decided to ask them what they make of it.

"In Germany there is street violence too, but it's usually on the equivalent of the estates by Turkish or Yugoslav street gangs, where you can see obvious reasons for the aggression," says Tomas Hartwig, a student living in Brighton. He is disturbed by the apparently random nature of the violence he has come across in Britain, but thinks the licensing laws play a large part. The speed-drinking practised in British pubs before closing time is quite different from drinking styles in the rest of Europe. In Spain it is possible to come home from work, have dinner with the family and perhaps an hour's sleep before going out later; in Britain the 11 o'clock 'time-at-the-bar' looms, and people rush. Out for the evening, people drink in order to let off steam and lose some inhibitions, to take a break from being their usual selves, to get a bit more lively and sociable. But as the night wears on, it can go the other way.

Fights, when they happen, often go off very fast and with little in the way of preliminaries. They start for the flimsiest of excuses: you spilled my pint, looked at me funny, looked at my girlfriend. They sound more like excuses than reasons, interchangeable, or maybe the result of a tunnel-vision effect, that irrational single-mindedness that drink produces. The most minor irritations, shrugged off sober, are magnified out of all proportion. Anna Griffiths, who takes the money at the door of The Beach, has seen plenty of that. "Drink distorts people's perception of what is really going on. They can't see themselves and their behaviour seems to them perfectly logical. If you're drunk, if you want to do something, you do it, though you would think twice if you were sober. There are also people who do go out looking for trouble. They think they're hard, big men, but I think they're actually very insecure, and they choose to make themselves feel better by starting fights."

"It allows people to regress to caveman behaviour, it's an escape from the pressure of being civilised," says Graeme Neep, bartender at Old Orleans. "Even the politest person has something darker inside that needs to be released. But a lot of potential fights come down to macho posturing; it can even be about bonding. I've seen friends squaring up to fight, then ending up hugging each other. On the other hand, some people work hard all week in a shit job, and it's frustrating. When they go out, one reason is so they can drink their age in pints and put someone's head through a window."

Women come up again and again as reasons for fighting. It may seem macho to the man doing it, but it often looks more like a property dispute than an intervention on her behalf. Kelly Fielding had a boyfriend who once attacked someone he thought was chatting her up. "It was ridiculous; it makes you feel cheapened. If someone attacked you and you were being defended, that would be alright. But there are women who try to provoke it, who enjoy the attention and chat other people up on purpose." And there are women who fight. Suzanne Hollins tells stories of ambushes on club dancefloors: "One time at the Escape this girl was giving it all that to two of my friends. Then, on the dancefloor I saw one of the girls twat someone, and I thought it was my friend Sarah, so I went over and piled in. It turned into a massive fight on the stage, with bottles flying and hair-pulling, and they turned the music off. When I saw that it wasn't Sarah they had hit I tried to carry on dancing, I was so embarrassed. It's just groups of people winding each other up, and because they're pissed they take offence."

A fight often looks more like a beating than the mutual exchange of punches and grunts we see on TV. "Street fighting is completely different from a fight in the dojo or a boxing ring," says Mark Quinn, a bouncer at a seafront club. "Anything goes. The idea is to take out your opponent as quickly as possible. The one who wins is the first one willing to go animal." For bouncers, or door supervisors as they like to be known, their livelihood depends on not getting injured as almost all bouncers work for agencies and get no sick pay if they are unable to work.
Mark takes pains not to be bettered by any drunken fool who wants to take him on. "I make sure he knows he's not going to win. If he keeps coming at me I'll give him a tap on the side of the face to slow him down. It's all about reverse psychology, you have to become the predator. It's not that we're thugs. Our job is to deal with thugs, so you have to go to the same level." He explains that even if someone takes up a boxing or fighting stance, they won't be expecting him to use his feet, his head or his teeth... and he might.

Ben Powell was seized by a bouncer as he was leaving a Brighton club. "My friend had just slapped me on the stomach and said, 'come on mate, let's go'. It was clearly a friendly gesture, and we were already leaving. The next minute someone runs at me from behind, smashes into me and half knocks me to the floor. As he swung me round to get me out, he used my head as a battering ram to open the door and shoved me out onto the pavement. I needed twelve stitches for a big gash on my head. If you go to a club and you're drunk, and the people that are supposed to protect you decide to attack you, you've got no other protection." The licensing of door personnel nationally announced by the Government is already in local operation in Brighton and Hove, and things have improved since the Wild West days when some of the people working on the doors were hardened criminals, according to both bouncers and police. But it's still easy to find bouncers whose diplomacy skills leave a lot to be desired, or whose over-excited flexing of their power paves the way for trouble later. "When people go clubbing, the first one they meet is the doorman. They're going to go in pissed off if they get a bad reception," says Alex Burns, a door supervisor at The Beach.

When someone is ejected from a club, the bouncer can become the target for their aggression. "It's in the last six feet before they leave the club that they start to put up a fight. It doesn't matter what it was about before, now the fight is with you," says Mark Quinn. "We can't win: no matter what they were up to inside, you get other people jumping in and shouting at you to leave them alone, and we look like the bad guys." Alex Burns says, "We all get tarred with the same brush. The best door supervisors have better verbal than physical skills. You do need to be strong in case you get a problem, but you learn, over the years, to talk your way out of problems."

Late night fighting outside clubs and pubs has attracted the attention of the Government, whose pre-election crackdown on crime will include the power for police to impose £100 fixed penalties for disorderly conduct or 'yobbish behaviour'. "I'm not sure how on-the-spot fines would be administered," says Mark Huff, Licensing Sergeant at John Street Police Station. "You either arrest them at the time for a public order offence and take them away, or you don't. You can't just take them aside and give them a ticket. Normally if there is scrapping late at night the police prefer to separate them rather than making arrests, unless there's an injury or it's serious."

Outside the Honey Club on another cold night a French lad is hurling himself at the metal doors in anguish, begging to be let in. Some of the clubs down on the beach have a policy of turning away groups from out of town. "They could be out on a stag night, and if they aren't from around here they have less incentive to behave". But this isn't Jacques's problem tonight. He's drunk and it's after 1am so the doors are closed and he's not getting in. But he won't be told. He thinks his friends are inside, having the greatest time, and he is outside, howling. We watch as a man in a jumper, a have-a-go amateur bouncer, slaps him around the head, knocking him to the ground before heading off up the steps. Outside the Old Ship a teenage boy slumps into the road from his place in the otherwise orderly taxi rank, before being hauled by his friend, heels dragging, into the gutter.

A little later, on West Street, people linger outside the clubs looking for lost coats and friends as a dozen police officers stand around, simultaneously deterring and waiting for trouble. Most of the people leaving the Paradox and the Event drift off towards taxi ranks and kebab shops. A gang of girls barely out of school, wearing sexualised school uniforms with authentic mottled, goose-pimpled legs, let some lads squeeze onto their table to steal their chips and exchange some banter. They've had a good night. But there's always someone who's having less of a good time. A bleary-eyed man stands in a doorway, blood drying down his face and neck from a gash on his temple. "I've just head-butted someone," he explains. "I'm London-Irish; nobody tangles with me." Round the corner, blue flashing lights illuminate a vandalised bicycle and Burger King, where two men outside are pressing serviettes to their bleeding heads, waiting for the paramedics but not saying how they got their matching injuries.

There's a sudden uproar inside; a group of women and two or three Burger King bouncers are pressed tightly together between the tables, shouting and pointing in each other's faces. A bouncer with a neck the width of his head, tight T-shirt accentuating pumped-up shoulders and a tiny waist, has apparently called a woman a 'dyke', thrown her food in the bin, and told the group that they are barred. They are incredulous, outraged. "We thought we'd come and have a burger before we went home; I haven't been out since our Christmas do last December and now look what's happened. But we weren't doing anything!" They are mothers out for a night, having a laugh but not drunk, ready to go home.

One of the group, gold earrings swinging, cannot contain her anger. She insists to each police officer of the handful there that they arrest the bouncer immediately: "He's called me a fucking dyke!" "Come away," says her friend, "What's the point? They won't do anything. Look at them, they're in with the bouncers, they don't give a shit." "It's common assault,' says a policeman, "it's not an arrestable offence. If she calms down she could go over the road with one of us and report it properly." But she can't, she is disgusted, enraged. The manager comes out and presses money into a woman's hand for the uneaten food, and says the bouncers are agency but yes, he will try not to have that one back again.

Sgt Huff thinks that without alcohol, violence would fall by 50 per cent. Frustration erupts under its influence, and often the environment doesn't help: clubs need to pack in the punters. "Overcrowding in clubs can be a factor in violent incidents - people's body space starts being invaded and drinks get spilt," says Sgt Huff. For those left outside, already full of alcohol, exclusion from clubs and the dashing of their hopes for the evening can lead to brawling with bouncers or whoever crosses their path. Large numbers of people on the streets at closing time, and the tribal aspect of being out with friends, showing off and backing them up, can lead to peer-group bonding over a swift kicking. Sgt Huff comments, "It's not just the alcohol. In the majority of small pubs, you don't get fights. It's in the town centres, where you get a lot of people congregating."

According to taxi driver Lee Blackmore, 90 per cent of the worse-for-wear people he takes home after a night on the town are fine; "it's the other ten per cent who will give you grief." Alcohol affects people in different ways: some become overbearingly affectionate, and most are probably more inclined to fucking than fighting. It's a minority, as Mark Hutchinson, senior charge nurse at Sussex County A & E comments, but still "a significant amount of the population who get very aggressive with alcohol on board, and it doesn't take much to spark that kind of aggression."

Some names have been changed.

copyright New Insight 2001

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