The Shed clearly isn't as popular as those lamenting its loss claim

Having missed out on The Shed myself (I already had a baby when it opened in 1998) – but having listened to it being mythologised by the many young people who have crossed my threshold – I have long been curious about its appeal.

Formerly The Marlborough, the C-listed building sits on a prominent junction on the A77, opposite Queen’s Park, its noisy midnight queue snaking its way along Langside Avenue. Its signage is unprepossessing, looming up, as it does, like a dirty factory wall, behind the domed turret and ornate clock of the much prettier Corona Bar.

Inside, the most talked-about features are the ceiling stars, the “VIP” booths, the second-floor bookcase wallpaper, and the “Give Good Shed” – geddit? – neon sign under which newbies pose for the de rigueur Instagram post.

The Shed is the southside’s top club, by virtue of being its only one.

As far as I can tell, it has never been accorded any great respect. Its regular customers treat it much as they treat each other: with an edgy mockery born of familiarity and affection. They share post-ironic memes and refer to it as “legendary”, by which they do not mean it is up there with The Haçienda.

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Sleepy Sundays

There were always other places our YT would rather have been, better plans they meant to hatch. Pre-loading, the chat would be of heading to The Garage or the Sub Club. And yet, three out of five bleary-eyed Sunday mornings, when I asked “Where did you end up, then?” the answer would be: “Och, we just went to The Shed.”

They were like homing pigeons: released from their doocot into a great big world, yet always defaulting back to base.

“That’s so true,” the youngest laughed when I put this to him the other day. The news of the club’s closure had just broken so, officially, he was still in mourning. “Last week, we got a bus into town, and yet somehow we still found ourselves back in Shawlands.”

In its heyday, The Shed had its famous club nights: The Big Cheese and Guilty Pleasures, as well as bouncy castles, roller discos, and foam parties.

A particular highlight was the GBX nights, which would sell out quickly. I remembered how – after watching Nile Rodgers in the Rouken Glen rain, until we were soaked through – the middle one and his then girlfriend had changed out of their wet clothes in the back of our steamed-up car, as I drove them to The Shed door, so they wouldn’t miss out.

Then there was the bane of southside parents’ lives, Shedmas Eve: the December 24 extravaganza which meant many young people (though, thankfully, never ours) spent Christmas Day with a headache. Those who lived in Shawlands in the club’s “Sodom and Gomorrah days”, prior to the current management, had their own headache to contend with: regular fights, vomiting, and other antics in the front gardens.

On a roll, I dug deeper into the Shed psychology. What was it that first attracted you to this “loud, brash and decadent” venue? I asked the youngest (as if I hadn’t – Mrs Merton-like – just answered my own question). In the early days, he mused, like some grey-haired old-timer, it felt like an extension of school.

“I could be sure everyone would be there: my friends, my neighbours, my brothers. You didn’t have to try too hard, and there would always be something – [coppings off and fallings out] – to be analysed the next day.”

And now? “It is still its own community, with in-jokes, so it feels like home, like you belong.”

“You mean sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name?”, I asked. He didn’t recognise the allusion, but agreed with the sentiment.

This has been true for a quarter of a century of southsiders now. A friend who owns a gift shop told me her painting of The Shed was often bought by couples who met there. The Shed’s own closure announcement put it more bluntly.

“Our biggest achievement will always be the army of Shed babies which wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this institution,” it said.

It didn’t – mercifully – reveal how many of these babies were conceived on the premises. Only close examination of the Statutory Register of Births would reveal if there are any little Sheddin or Sheddinas out there with Glasgow’s apocryphal Pocahontas.

I understand my son’s attachment. When I was his age, I spent most weekends in Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union.

The seats were grotty, the carpets were sticky, and they played the same records every night, often in the same order: Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, New Order’s Blue Monday, Iggy Pop’s The Passenger, The Waterboys’ The Whole Of Yhe Moon.

The Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow

Vainglorious venues

We ventured out to other places: Cardinal Follies, Panama Jax, the Mardi Gras, Rooftops, the uber-cool Sub Club once it opened. We bought our clothes from Flip and hung out with the floppy-haired hipsters in the Rock Garden.

But in the maelstrom of late adolescence, the union was the small, still eye: a place you never had to pretend to be something you weren’t.

The outside world might be slippery and unstable but walk through those doors and you knew for sure not only who you’d meet, but where they would be sitting. You knew, too, that – whatever mini-dramas played out over the course of the evening – you’d end it whirling drunkenly round to Sally MacLennane.

On the palimpsest of the QM, each intake of students wrote its own story. The friendships that flourished or faltered. The love affairs that fired up then fizzled out, or deepened over time.

The carousing and caressing, the shindigs and stramashes, until slowly, almost imperceptibly, the old faces faded out, and new ones began to inscribe their own fresh version of the age-old tale.

If The Shed were still as popular as those keening its loss would have you believe, it wouldn’t be closing. But we are moving into a new cultural epoch. Every day, newspapers are pronouncing the death of the nightclub scene.

It has succumbed, so they say, to Gen Z’s sobriety, the cost of living crisis, complaints about noise, and a shift towards streaming services.

Those young people who still want to party are doing it in a different way: at gaffs, bars with live singers, music festivals. According to the Night Time Industries Association, the UK is losing one club every two days – at which rate there will be none left by 2030.

Unlike Oasis, The Shed says, it will never reform. But it is determined to go out with a bang. As well as Armasheddon, it plans a full schedule (shedule?) of other shenanigans: the last Tartan Army party; Shed Eras 1998-2024: The Anthems that Defined The Shed; Shed ‘98: Now That’s What I Call Past It.

SHED

Fake festivities

IN peak Shedness, when Armasheddon sold out, they added an extra Sunday event – a mid-September Shedmas Eve: “Fake snow, real tears, Christmas jumpers, a midnight countdown.” There will be carnage (and Grinch-green Venom), no doubt.

I suppose we should be grateful things are changing. Alcohol has blighted so many Scottish lives. Let’s raise our lemonade glasses to the more abstemious future we’ve been promised.

But it’s hard to let go of eras or institutions that have wormed their way into our hearts. Let’s raise a glass, too, to all those unpretentious venues that – in the best and worst of times – allowed us to let our hair down and just be.