- Italy has a handful of internationally-renowned nightclubs and Tenax is one of them. Located 20 minutes outside of Florence's city centre, the venue is one of the oldest in the country, established in 1981 by a group of young entrepreneurs who saw that the burgeoning scenes of the time—new wave, punk, italo disco—needed a home. It became a meeting point for artists, designers and emerging musicians, evolving, as described on the club's website, into "a sort of Greenwich Village of the Tuscan capital." Bauhaus, Psychedlic Furs and New Order all performed there, and by the time dance music exploded in the early '90s, Tenax was ready for it.
These days, Tenax runs weekly parties on Fridays and Saturdays, both electronic. The Fridays are commercial, and the Saturdays are home to Nobody's Perfect, the club's long-running house and techno night. Bookings hover around the top-tier, going from Marco Carola, Carl Cox and Ricardo Villalobos through to Deetron, San Proper and Davide Squillace. On three nights during the season (September to May), Nobody's Perfect hosts Fragola's Night, a lighter, more colourful party run by Tenax residents Philipp & Cole. Its sound is more refined, too, with Cobblestone Jazz, Acid Mondays and Lil Louis among recent guests. Last weekend, the Chicago veteran headlined the party's 11th anniversary.
The first thing you see once you've paid your money and entered the club is the wall of fame. Split across two glass panels—one for dance music and one for bands—several hundred artists are listed, from Daft Punk and St Germain to Depeche Mode and Radiohead. Pausing to take in a few names, you get an immediate sense of Tenax's legacy. The club itself is mid-sized, with a large central dance floor flanked by a bar on one side, and VIP booths on the other. A mezzanine runs above the flanks and behind the raised DJ booth. Four custom-built speakers hang from each corner of the room, angled down at the crowd. The sound is sharp and weighty. Playing first were Speaking Minds, an Italian duo who did a neat job of oiling up the early arrivals. Starting with moody, pitched-down tech house, they segued into some bouts of lighter piano, upping the tempo with every new track.
By the time Philipp took over at 12:30, the room was nearly full, mostly with young, stylish Italians. For every boy in a baggy T and snapback, there were clusters of goth girls, decked out in black. Philipp moved through the gears at pace, leading with emotive, Innervisions-style numbers into sharper, more slamming cuts. Towards the end of his set, jugglers took to the stage directly in front of him, joined later by female dancers in see-through lino dresses and strawberry fencing masks. Lil Louis, playing on his customary Rane rotary, mixed straight into Philipp's last track. After one or two bits of disco, "The Conversation" inched in, getting the crowd on-side from early. The floor was throbbing at this stage, and whenever the volume dipped a notch you could hear a cacophony of whistles and chants. Some time into Lil Louis' set, two huge sparklers appeared in the booth and everyone joined in the birthday cheers.
Not long after that, Lil Louis took his top off. For the last 45 minutes, he plunged full-throttle into big-room Chicago house, shaking his thing as he went. To close, though, he took it in a more frenzied direction, even finding space for Plastikman's "Spastik." With little room for manoeuvre, Cole set off at a hard, fast pace. For the last half-an-hour, Philipp joined him in the booth and the music shifted from Slam's "Positive Education" to "Blue Monday" to Sylvester's "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" in the space of 20 minutes. For the night's finale, the entire room—DJs, crowd and staff—sang along to an edit of Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer." It was a jubilant, moving homage to the club's rich and colourful past.