<img align=left src="http://www.fosca.com/dickon-at-kashpoint2004.jpg"></img>
<b>[<a href="http://www.markusinteractive.com/clubs/kashpoint2">Photo by Tatu Vuolteenaho, used with permission. Click here for more photos from the night.</a>]</b>

Every Thursday night, I'm currently to be found at the club <a href="http://www.kashpoint.com/">Kash Point</a>.

Last week, it took place for the last time at the venue Moonlighting, underneath Greek Street. Festooned with tacky mirrors, Stringfellows-style striplighting, and plush seating, the premises seemed rather more suited to bored businessmen and luckless lapdancers than the colourful New-New-New Romantics of Kash Point.

After taking this week off, the club will be changing venues once again, returning on March 4th at Infinity in Old Burlington Street. So it seemed fitting that the last night at Moonlighting was its busiest there, by a long way indeed.

The reason for this radical swelling in attendees was, it seemed, down to one thing. Fashion. There are all kinds of exciting new pop acts performing at the club every week, but rarely do they draw so many souls that a substantial queue develops outside the building. Announce a Kash Point Fashion Show instead, and the fire regulation limits are met within minutes. The only conclusion to be drawn is that Fashion is officially Better Than Music.

Is this true? Or do Fashion People just have more friends than Music People? It certainly is a curious world. The people behind the scenes in the fashion industry are not any better looking or better dressed than their counterparts in the music industry, yet their work has a more universal quality. Fashion itself never goes out of fashion. Music can often appear the domain of the young. The sight of a man in his thirties carrying a guitar case in the street can be downright embarrassing to all. People have to be Fans of music. Music has to be explained, even defended. Fashion doesn't need fans. It's already accepted. Fashion manages to both feel ridiculous, elitist and closed-off to The Rabble, while soliciting forelock-tugging in even the most resentful of minicab drivers. Fashion is The Royal Family of art forms. "God bless them – they do a good job".

One hears of slumps in the sales of music magazines, but not of fashion magazines. Fashion's connection with advertising is purer than Music's, and so somehow more forgiveable. Musicians lending their songs to advertising campaigns are looked down upon as desperate, but fashion models and make-up designers appearing in commercials are acceptable. Because they're worth it. The model Ms Moss makes fashion-connected adverts all the time, and her appearance in a pop video is seen as a Good Thing. But when a pop star like Ms Madonna appears in a clothes commercial, the world weeps.

Kash Point's own fashion show, held at the end of London Fashion Week, featured, as one might expect, gloriously imaginative, colourful, and often cumbersome creations that the late Leigh Bowery would have approved of. But the thing is, Kash Point really encourages people to come dressed like that whatever the week. The host, Mr Glamorre, always wears an entirely different visually striking ensemble, every week. Another young club staffer, known only as Little Richard, goes in for customized garb usually involving something cheap he's found melded with a large amount of gaffa-tape.

One one memorable evening, Richard was decked out in a child's lobster costume, picked up in an Archway discount shop for a tenner. A desperate attempt to cash in on the film "Finding Nemo" was probably the shop's intention. The costume was the most unlike a lobster, or indeed any creature, that it was possible for a costume to be. A better description would be a tube of three hula-hoops covered with pink nylon, with a hinged lid at the top by way of a mouth. Sad, spongy lobster arms drooped uselessly from the sides, and cheap plastic white goggle-eyes on the lid completed the costume, at least as far as its woeful manufacturer was concerned. In addition, Richard had improved the thing by gaffa-taping a couple of old pillows to its front. And then proceeded to walk around the nightclub and dancefloor in the costume all night.

When he danced, the costume began to disintegrate. It may have been a natural process, or aided by its wearer, or both, but every time I glanced at the dancefloor, the lobster had devolved into something else entirely. Its bottom half vanished fairly early on into the night. Then, as Richard went into a frenzied pirouette, one of the pillows span off into the crowd. The other found its way up the costume, and into the lobster's mouth. I've seen many sights on London club dancefloors, but the vision of an unconvincing giant dancing lobster swallowing a pillow is, I firmly admit, exactly the sort of thing I postpone suicide for.

The following week, Richard recycled the lobster's thorax, wearing it horizontally on his head. Thorax On The Dancefloor.