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Singapore’s Heart of Darkness

April 8, 2010 by

Possibly the friendliest goth club in the world. That would be “Heart of Darkness”, held by the Singapore Dark Alternative Movement.

Saturday night was a special edition for easter, a deathrock night called “Bloody Fool”, and we would’ve been bloody fools to miss it 🙂 It was held in a venue in Carpenter St near Clarke Quay, at a club called Six.

We’d just walked in and got a big smile from a guy with tattoo’d face – he turned out to be one of the dj’s. We walked to the bar to order a drink and the organiser Saito Nagasaki came up to greet us.  Noice!

Then others came up, and we chatted, and we met more than half the club by the time we left. Saito is 2nd from the left in this pic, and he has been organising clubs for years, since the time he lived in Perth and ran the club “Outbreed”.

I’d meet one person, and go off and dance to Bauhaus, and I’d look back and see that someone had gone to talk to Dom. So friendly, they didn’t want him to be on his own. Such manners could surely be used in our western clubs, yanno?
Yes, he’s a kind of scary clown, is the one below, Dalsix.
Except HE was the one scared by Eldred, who kept mock-raping him in the corner – funny indeed. Eldred is the one who designs the graphics and posters, and he’s a very talented illustrator, actually. I said he should post his work on Deviant Art or similar.
But sometimes Dalsix strikes back…

But it wasn’t all shenanigans and hi-jinx. Oh no! There was a superb selection of deathrock played, and some up-tempo, non-deathrock tunes played when requested. There was Morrissey, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, and some EBM as well.
The eye opener for me was learning that Singapore is somewhat of a police state, and alternative people get leaned on and hindered, if not threatened, from running the events they want. One person described how the police wanted him to manufacture evidence and say that some tattoo’d guy they didn’t like had done something wrong, so they could lock him up. Our alternative friend refused.
The goth/alternative scene and its people are misunderstood everywhere, but in asia, there are even more pressures that we in Australia, for example, just don’t face.  We know about China, we know about Burma, but there is more that we don’t know.
But back to the fun and larfs. I already mentioned how fab the people were, and Dom and I had a great time meeting people and chatting with them. But there were other highlights. There were lovely ladies in bondage:
men in silly hats…
and DJ’s – this is DJ Ghoul, from the Netherlands. Saito was also a DJ, as was Mentor.
If you’re ever in Singapore and into gothic, industrial or ebm you really must set aside a Saturday night to check out the Heart of Darkness. It was small but awesome.

Date: first Saturday of each month
Time: 9pm – 3 am (but it actually went much later – I think we got to bed at 5?)
Venue: NOVA SAFRA Gamehaven, 29 Carpenter Street #06-00

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Comments

  1. Wendy Crane says
    April 8, 2010 at 9:45 am

    Such an awesome post! Thanks Leanne! <3

  2. the fashionate traveller says
    April 10, 2010 at 12:08 am

    Thanks for reading Wendy! If you're ever in Singapore, drop into this place – it's lovely 🙂

  3. Dalsix Höðr Visser says
    April 19, 2010 at 6:02 pm

    Loving it <3

Trackbacks

  1. Singapore Shenanigans from April — thefashionatetraveller.com says:
    July 18, 2012 at 3:58 am

    […] arranged to meet anyone, though we’d met a few goths back in 2010 when we went to Heart of Darkness. Spotting a few black-clad suspects, we decided to loiter nearby, while beginning to enjoy our cold […]