Shhh! RICHARD BELL checks out the Silent Disco at Po Na Na.

One thing I very rarely do in the course of venturing around the city in search of new club experiences is end up anywhere quiet.

Music is the one truly essential element of a good club night out; after all, you can have the best looking club in the world, with the most beautiful bar staff imaginable, and beer so cheap it couldn’t possibly turn a profit, but if the music’s poor I still won’t want to go.

Get it right however and your club can be as inviting as a personal cell in Guantanomo, your bar staff can look like trolls and you can charge me a tenner a beer and I’ll still end up coming back every week.

This is what was so strange about Po Na Na when I went down, as the entire club was bereft of big beats or chunky bass and yet I still had a brilliant time.

Of course, I’m not telling the whole story here. The reason there weren’t massive tunes blasting out over Po Na Na’s sound system is that they were hosting a silent disco.

For the uninitiated you pay a £5 deposit for a pair of headphones, each of which has two channels over which two DJs battle for the audience’s affections.

It’s a wonderful and evidently very popular idea as by the end of the night the place was packed, but... it does lead to some rather amusing scenes on the dance floor as great big sets of people dance entirely out of sync with each other.

The way this sort of thing usually goes down is that one DJ plays a more typically crowd pleasing set as the other goes for a more niche market and tonight was no different. The unquestioned winner for me being a Frenchman by the name of DJ Funkenstein whose rather brilliant blend of filthy electro won my heart from the outset by delighting my ears with Digitalism’s superb Zdarlight.

The best aspect to this arrangement is this inherent variation, essentially giving the clubber the right to choose the sort of club night they would rather be at.

This is not to say that the night is without its problems.

The bouncers wouldn’t let us outside for a cigarette with our headphones on, and being unable to leave them anywhere inside other than handing them back in, really didn’t rub me up the right way at all, but this is a small gripe.

I’ve never been to a silent disco in a club this small before, and for Po Na Na to put on a night of this quality is an audacious and inspired move. I only hope that they continue to be this courageous with their choices of club nights, because it will certainly encourage me to make Po Na Na a regular haunt.