During a strangely timed London Fashion Week that was gently sandwiched around the Queen’s funeral, there was one joy that nobody was going to take way from me. The fact that a fashion show — quite a big one at that, JW Anderson — would be held at Las Vegas Arcade on Wardour Street (which happens to be next to Anderson’s flagship store). Las Vegas! As in LV! The place that takes me back to 16-year-old me.
Readers, it’s time to get confessional about my true geek core and reveal that in my sixth form years, I developed a very unhealthy obsession with the arcade feet-to-music co-ordination game Dance Dance Revolution, or DDR (acronyms because who needs syllables when you’re out of breath coming off a dance). In some seaside towns, you might still see people having a go at these gargantuan machines with their blue and pink arrow pads on the floor and a soundtrack that is strange blend of EDM, jungle and Afrobeats. The higher the BPM, the harder the level.
If you were part of any DDR crew back in the early Noughties, you had your pick of central London arcades vibes. Trocadero (RIP) was for male exhibitionists, who would elaborately fling themselves over the rail on the machine and do DDR dance tricks. Girls watching on the sidelines would swoon while drinking WKD. Namco (also RIP) on the South Bank was if you wanted to practise in relative peace and get that iconic London Big Ben view after a hardcore DDR sesh. But Las Vegas was where you’d go if you wanted to chiiiill and maybe play a few rounds on DDR, and moreover it was where you’d go and play pool and really goss it out. Its proximity to Chinatown meant you could also slip off and grab a bite and come back and hang.
In the basement of Las Vegas Arcade, I had my first real kiss in a dimly lit corner. It was all lips and not much else
A lot of arcade kids happened to come from the South East Asian diaspora — Hong Kong Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino — probably because arcade culture in those countries was also so strong. By lining up pound coins on the DDR machine, I gained a mixed bunch of friends outside of my very academic girls’ school. We’d ‘cotch’ at arcades, slurp 3am bowls of noodles together and get entangled in very chaste love quadrangles.
In the basement of LV, I had my first real kiss in a dimly lit corner. It was all lips and not much else. People often paired off down here away from the thumping beats of DDR.TV drama scenarios would often play out as minor jealousies, pass-agg conversations and vaguely sexual undertones going on at the pool table (mainly determined by the fit of your Miss Sixty jeans). I was also dumped in LV by someone who I had only gone out with for two weeks. I quickly got over that by thrashing it out on DDR and pigging out on a pork chop rice. Incidentally, pork chop in Cantonese is slang for ‘ugly girl’. Sadly there were days when I did stupidly ponder my own ‘pork chop’ qualities, post temporary heartbreak.
And so last week after more than a decade of not venturing inside LV, I bounded back in. I was here for FASH-on, with a very extra JW Anderson chain jumper that encased my eight-month bump. How far I’d come from those days of being validated by how high my DDR score was and whether or not Xxx fancied me. Perhaps it’s for the best that the arcade is now entirely filled with fruit machines with no DDR machine in sight. The temptation to step up, retrace those high BPM moves and relive that strange microcosmic, cringe-laden period of my life would perhaps have been all too much.
