RICHARD BELL joins the students for a superbly sweaty end of term night at Baby Love’s Narcissists.

So it’s the last week of term for the Oxford students, it’s a Wednesday night and they quite rightly want to let off some steam, and boy are they...

Wading through a thick fog of energy and sweat in equal parts, I join the massive throng of dancers, and instantly it’s clear that everyone has been dancing since the first track of the night, and has no intention of stopping until the very last.

Occasionally one or two will break from the pack to run to the bar and grab a couple of beers before immediately piling back in.

Everyone is drenched in sweat, their perfectly turned out hairstyles clutching to foreheads in a tragic mess but not one of them cares, their faces either wearing huge smiles or open mouths panting for oxygen so they can keep on going.

Baby Love may be a cocktail bar, and while it’s a shame that there’s no beer on draught, really the drink options are redundant tonight.

No one cares about the drinks and why the hell should they? Tonight is about music.

The DJs provide a blistering set, gliding effortlessly between filthy electro and brilliant indie tracks, into a storming eighties set and back again with the crowd loving every second, and me along with them.

I’m not a dancer, and without quite a large dose of liquid courage nothing is usually able to coax me into humiliating myself by attempting to ‘groove to the beat’ (in fact, thinking about it now, the very idea of dancing repulses me, but tonight I couldn’t care less, and I’m all over that dance floor).

Sorry to keep banging on about it but the music really is awesome, and the night has gained a terrific reputation which has brought a great many exceptional guest sets – Abort Retry Fail, TJ Hertz and Foals all seeing fit to grace the decks of Narcissists in the past.

However, the allure of the night is, I suspect, not the music itself, but rather the fun of the whole thing. The reason people keep coming back is because they get to dance wildly with all their friends at the coolest night in town.

It’s not perfect, I’m not all that keen on the venue, I don’t like the lack of draught and the bottles can lead to it being quite an expensive night, but hey, Narcissists is a night of exceptional music, effortless cool and enormous fun, and thoroughly deserves its formidable reputation as the best indie dance night in Oxford.