Londoners may know them best as the officious meatheads who pull you up for wearing inappropriate footwear, but there’s more to the life of a nightclub doorman than handing out fashion tips and clicking that little silver counter. For many bouncers it’s a life of broken bottles, flick-knives, ambushes in dark alleyways and blood vendettas, and its this aspect of life ‘on the door’ that’s being portrayed in Colin Salmon’s latest project, the Neil Thompson-directed Clubbed.
Based on Watch My Back, the autobiography of doorman and self-defence guru Geoff Thompson, Clubbed is set against the big hair and tight-trousers of early eighties Coventry. Danny is an overworked factory drone who jacks it all in for a job working the door of a downtown hot spot, where life is anything but boring. Salmon is set to play one of the club’s veteran bouncers who takes Danny (Mel Raido) under his heavily muscled wing.
If the book’s collection of anecdotes and incidents from the seedy side of the Coventry streets is anything to go by, Clubbed certainly won’t be anyone’s idea of a date movie. Thompson’s book features a grisly array of violent clashes with the local street scum, as the doormen dish out punishment to the unruly and suffer their fair share of reprisals too.
All going to plan, the film is due to hit our screens some time next year.