Witnesses said the crowd began forming shortly after 2am, when battery levels across the club dipped below 10% and people suddenly remembered they had urgent responsibilities, including filming the back of the DJs head, ordering an Uber to the next photo opportunity, and posting an Instagram story proving how definitely-not-boring they were.

Security say at least 140 “industry folk” aka freeloaders were seen hovering around the booth, staring not at the DJ, but at the row of plug sockets behind the decks like crackheads peeping through a dealers window.

“I thought they were actually connecting with the music,” said the DJ. “And thinking how great I was!”

“Then one girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had a phone charger. She said she would give me head backstage in return.”

“My heart broke. If I’m going to needlessly take advantage of somebody in the crowd, I want it to be about the music!”

The club has since introduced a designated charging area near the toilets where attendees can sit in silence, watch their phones together, and reflect on the fact that one day, we’ll all be dead. 

Scientists are unsure how the club owners have managed such a feat.

“Scientifically, it shouldn’t be possible” said Dr. Michael Beaterson.

“In a space this densely packed humans would be unable to breathe, or have the blood flow around their bodies… or even have their DNA exist in anything other than a densely compacted atomic nothingness.“

“Yeah, that’s exactly what it was like” said Jordan Clubswetter, who attended the club twice this summer.

“My friend Shelley got a drink and tried to push her way out onto the dance floor, but when she came back she was just a compacted cloud of cosmic dust that had shrunk down into a tiny spec of heavy metal.”

“I said bloody hell shell! You’ve got yourself in a right state!”

“She disappeared through the floorboards and we didn’t see her again for the rest of the night. Or ever, actually.”

“RIP Shell.”

“We bought tickets again for the next night, cos you never know, might have just been an unusually busy night.”

“But when the taxi pulled up outside and immediately got sucked into a vortex behind the main entrance, we said we’d give it a miss.”

“We sat at the hotel and did the last of Shelley’s drugs on the balcony instead, which a was nice tribute to her I suppose.”

“We might go back next year and try again, we’ll see.”

“Depends who’s on the line-up.”

“I always knew I had a talent for this” said Kety James, a 19-year-old OnlyFans trainee from Miami.

“Anytime the music takes me, I just have this deep inbuilt desire to completely stop dancing and rummage around my handbag for my phone, so I can stand there lifelessly filming the top-right-hand corner of the stage, a bit of the guy-in-front’s head, and some of the sky.”

“These special moments need to be documented”

“I mean, sure, there is the on-site camera crew. And the artist’s videographer. And the big online platform streaming it with multiple camera angles and drones and then editing it perfectly with crystal-clear sound. And ten thousand people around me all filming it on their phones before posting online…”

“But I have a vision for how it should look. Actually, I have two visions. Double vision.”

“We’re absolutely delighted for her” said Kety’s mum.

“She is always filming those videos in the clubs and at the raves. They’re always brilliant, to be honest. As a family, we always look forward to Kety dragging herself in the front door on her hands and knees around 3pm on Sunday, eyes hanging out of her head from all that concentrating on camera angles and artistic direction, so we can stick her footage from the night before on the telly.”

“We make some popcorn, pour some fizzy pop, and we all climb under the blanket on the sofa together, as a family, and watch hours and hours and hours of Kety’s video masterpieces from the night before.”

“Honestly, they’re better than Netflix”

“2020 was awful’ said Hans-Christian Nutcracker, who told Wunderground he was ‘the guy who puts the stickers on the phones.’

“It’s been tough, not-not welcoming all these people into our prestigious venue for so many months.”

“For years, we had tourists coming from all over the world, queuing outside for hours on end in the freezing cold and in the depths of winter, only to be turned away without explanation and forced to scurry over to Watergate or Sisyphos like English-speaking rats.”

“Now… they don’t come at all.”

“It’s really sad for clubbing, you know? Getting turned away from Berghain is a right of passage for many clubbers.”

“You see them posting online in their thousands. Photos taken while standing in the queue and then five hours later, posting about being turned away, and how it won’t stop them trying again next time.”

“Nothing says I love clubbing like not actually going clubbing, right?”

“Obviously, we turn most people away to keep the non-clubbers out of the club. We only want the real diehards in Berghain.”

“Some people behind the scenes make the point that ‘if they’ve travelled from the other side of the world and have queued outside in silence for 4 hours – they’re probably genuine in their love for the club’ but… well, we just ignore that. Makes too much sense for me to think about when I’m high, and I’m always high.”

“Usually we have the biggest queues in Berlin, but last year it was the supermarkets. That was hard to watch. The supermarkets are stupid though, they let everybody in – then the queue gets smaller. Sure, that’s how queues are supposed to work, but how are the people who work in the supermarkets supposed to build a false sense of smugness and superiority if everybody is allowed in?”

“Seems pointless!”

“Once Covid fucks off, it will be a dream to start welcoming clubbers again. To see them arriving in taxis. To watch them standing in the queue for hours, excitement growing as the hours pass and the queue dwindles. Then, telling them to fuck off with the shake of the head and watching their walk of shame, heads bowed, past the queuing herd, hoping not to be noticed before apologetically bundling into taxis bound for whatever second-rate club they think will still have them.”

“That’s what I miss most about clubbing.”

Nightclubs, previously hedonistic safe-havens celebrated by millions around the world, have in the last 12 months been downgraded to ‘financial burdens of little other use’. 

Darren Price, a prominent UK Midlands-based club owner, welcomes the rebrand. 

“It’s been my dream since I was a kid to own a big empty warehouse that never opens but costs me tens of thousands of pounds every single month in insurance – without ever giving a penny back, so it’ll be great to hopefully get some recognition for that.”

“It’s all about having that giant vacuum of unusable space, decked out with the best in light and sound, of course. I’m proud to say I spent over a million pounds on that sound rig, and I’ve not turned it on once all year. That’s the kind of opulence others can only dream of!” 

“I honestly don’t mind pouring the money down the drain. If I cared about money I would have become an insurance broker that sells insurance to clubs – or a Bitcoin expert on Facebook. They’re the only ones making money these days.”

While there are cries of a mental health emergency in the industry, Darren says he’s been coping just fine.

“It hasn’t really bothered me. I’ve not really been thinking about it. I mean, I generally only get about an hour’s broken sleep a night where I toss and turn and suppress the constant panic attacks that bubble up from within, but that’s been going on all year – probably nothing to do with the finances at the club.”

“My wife has left me, I suppose. Well, kicked me out. I’ve been sleeping in the DJ booth. I suppose it’s a good thing the club is closed, or I couldn’ do that.”

“I do cry a lot. Especially at night, when I’m all alone, lying on the floor of the DJ booth in a sleeping bag, holding back those panic attacks, thinking about my wife and going over the books in my head… but I think those are probably tears of happiness.”

“I love this club!”

The world’s most famous venue, which plays host to the best house and techno DJs on the planet, has decided to proceed with a 36 person capacity, confirming circles will be drawn on the floor for people to spend their night in.

“We have exhausted every idea” said club manager, Ryan Green. “36 circles distanced correctly means at least some people can come along on a Saturday night and listen to some great music.”

Other restrictions include the bar remaining shut indefinitely, the lights on full brightness to ensure nobody moves from their circle, and of course a one-way system from circles to cubicles, because, well, you know why.”

“Whilst it isn’t ideal, we are proud to be the first major rave venue to reopen” continued a very proud Ryan. “Our first event is this October and already at full capacity. We have Marco Carola playing and he’s bringing 35 slags with him.”

Alan Kinsella, the writer of the report, claims to have been to almost three hundred UK clubs and found that almost 75% of them are now “smellier than ever”.

“It was a much simpler time, back then when you were allowed to smoke in nightclubs,” Kinsella told Wunderground earlier. “Personally, I much prefered clubbing back then, it was great, you went out, had a few drinks, a couple of fags, a bit of a bop and then went home happy, but it’s not like that anymore. Nowadays, when I go to a club, my senses are constantly attacked by all of the different smells in there.”

“I definitely preferred it when the whole place just stank of smoke,” Kinsella continued. “Sure, it might have been a little bit bad for your health but it was definitely better than smelling the horrible toilets, the putrid bar odours or some lad standing beside you’s armpits. Honestly, I never realised just how smelly nightclubs are, until they got rid of smoking.”

Peter Daly, a nightclub manager from Brighton, claims the lack of secondhand cigarette smoke has made the clubbing industry an extremely hazardous workplace.

“I loved the good old days, it was great, you always knew what to expect when you went to work,” Daly explained. “But now, you never know what you’re going to get. Puke, fart, sweat, piss, shit, we get the smell of all of them in here on a weekly basis, and that’s just from one of our regulars.”

“If you thought the smell of smoke was bad, you should smell an old school, hard house clubnight, it’ll have you praying for someone to light up a couple of smokes,” he revealed. “It takes three weeks to get rid of the pong, we don’t actually have a smoke machine here, we just burn rubbish in the DJ box to mask the smell.”

The news comes as a shock to many people who have been buying their way into VIP areas in recent years.

“Shut up,” Danielle from Essex said upon hearing the news. “I don’t believe it, I’ve been going to nightclubs for years now and I always pay the extra money to get into the VIP area, so how am I not a VIP? It says it on the bloody wristbands you get and everything. What a load of bollox.”

“My boyfriend sells a bit of beak too so we always drink Grey Goose or champagne,” she continued, her voice getting more high pitched the more annoyed she got. “And, we got invited back to an afterparty in Katie Price’s house one time, there’s no way Jordan’s having normal people back to her gaff, we must be VIPs.”

The report claims that, while paying the extra £20 might get you access to the VIP area, your presence there does not necessarily make you a VIP.

Some bloke who looked smart explained, “It takes a lot more than being in a VIP area to make someone an important person,” he told anyone who’d listen. “Just look at the royal family, they’re always in VIP areas when, in reality, they’re the most useless humans in the country. How can they be important? They literally have no use.”

“The really important people in this country are out there working in the hospitals, schools and KFCs and they certainly don’t pay to be there,” continued the person. “It’s the opposite, they get paid to be there, because they’re important, not some coked-up chav with a few extra quid from knocking off a bit of gear.”

It is now believed that VIP areas are the least likely part of a club to contain an important person, with most VIP areas now full of people who are only important in their own heads.

“Once upon a time, VIP areas in nightclubs were full to the brim with actual important people,” a source from the clubbing business told Wunderground. “Now, the only people you’ll find in them are lads with over-inflated egos, caused by chipping ion an a bottle of Grey Goose and excessive cocaine abuse, and girls who have been identified as afterparty eye candy. The days of important people in VIP areas are long over.”

“Honestly, people pay an extra ten or fifteen quid for a ticket and they genuinely believe that makes them a VIP,” continued our source, “but the truth is, actual VIPs don’t pay extra for tickets, they pay nothing for tickets, in fact, they pay nothing for anything, because they’re important.”

Adam Jenkins, who regularly frequents the VIP areas in all of Burnley’s most popular nightclubs, claims the latest reports are “a load of bollox”, with Burnley’s VIP areas packed out with some of the areas most influential characters.

“Are you mad, no important people in the VIP? Go check yourself mate,” he said dismissively. “I were in a VIP this weekend and there two lads in there who played for Accrington Stanley reserves and another lass in there with over 15,000 Instagram followers, are you telling me they’re not important? Behave!”

“Next you’ll be saying I’m not important either and my uncle owns 5% of a KFC franchise, so I think we can safely say that that’s bollox and all.”

In A Wunderground exclusive, owner Pablo ‘Peroni’ Smith revealed the stark reality of being the owner of the club that hosts the biggest techno events in Ramsgate.

“Yeah, its great packing the club out every weekend,” Pablo, known to his friends as P-P, told us. “We get the ‘in-crowd’ of East Kent. The real cool kids who know their music. They know their Guetta from their Aoki’s. We work with all of the biggest promoters from the likes of Medway & Maidstone.”

Often billed as the ‘Amnesia Club’ of Kent, the prestige of such an accolade often comes at a price for owner Pablo.

“We are all getting wet… we had to remove the roof!”

“Quite simply, we got sick and tired of the problems caused by promoter’s egos. We can’t get to our 400 capacity and have the promoter in the same room at the same time.”

“We get 200 in, but on certain nights we are full. It then dawned on us that we had to make more space. We did a few things, like move the Green Room to the car park, but removing the roof was an expensive necessity. I had to re-mortgage my house to pay for it.”

“Since we removed the roof, we’re now having to supply towels and hairdryers, we’ve even had to replace beer in the fridge with coffee machines.”

Reports suggest the bank has now repossessed Pablo’s house, with the club owner currently living in a tent on the dancefloor, and saif to be thouroughly enjoying sleeping under the stars.