Long-running club night Delight Alt Night returns on July 19 in a new venue - PopWorld

DJs Will Chump and Alex Dutton have been champing at the bit to get everyone back on the dancefloor – they had a night ready to go on June 21 until ‘Freedom Day’ was deferred for a month.

And now they’re back for their first proper night since last March in a new home – after several years in Astoria, they are taking up residence in nearby PopWorld.

Will says: ‘Working with them has been an absolute joy. Even though they're called PopWorld, they're very much on the same page as us.

‘We've run two sold out new year’s eve nights at Popworld and Fleet, so they know the brand and what we do. They know we're a little bit leftfield, but they're very supportive of that.

‘It gives us scope to do so many different things.

‘It’s still going to have the same attitude and the same music policy of Delight, and we're going to be adding a lot more decorations and be able put in more different features.’

Alex adds: ‘They're supporting us massively with this move. They're giving us amazing drinks deals – permanently – it was £1.50 at Astoria for the first hour, at PopWorld it's all night long.

‘The fact that they're as excited to have us there as we are to go there is great – with the space we can get more creative.’

And the guys have got lots of plans.

‘They're supporting the stupidness, which is ideal for us,’ Alex laughs.

And Will believes their return is filling a gap that no-one else really caters to in Portsmouth

‘I remember when I was a student, seven nights a week you could go out in Portsmouth and listen to eight different genres. Now it's RnB and commercial nightclubs – you've got Eden, Pryzm and Astoria running very similar nights, and there's not really any other nightclubs.

‘People are still excited about having a different and leftfield session – but there aren't the venues there to support it, which is crazy.’

When restrictions eased before, Delight did hold a run of nights at Astoria, but people had to stay in their bubbles at tables.

‘The sit-down sessions were cool,’ say Alex, ‘it gave us something to go back out to, but because of the rules at the time, we couldn't properly DJ, it was just music running off an iPad. As a DJ, I was just sitting there thinking, I should be there in the booth controlling the atmosphere of this night.

Will adds: ‘Here's a night based around people getting up and dancing. Delight is essentially a gig without the band – people jumping and down and singing along and moshing and going crazy, but then stripping all that back and saying you're coming to a socially distanced night, you can't sing, the music's got to be kept low...

‘But the nights were busy because there's a community who go to it religiously and it was nice for them to get out and do something, because at that point people had been locked down and going a bit stir crazy.

‘But that's not what our night is – it's not a sit-down pub session, chicken-in-a-basket pub night.

‘You want that dancefloor deviance – you want the debauchery that goes with the night.

‘Sitting down and not singing along, not dancing... that works for some nights to an extent, but I always felt massively compromised.’

The return will however feature a band – with live music from pop-punk tribute act Blink Daze, and the pair promise ‘big value production.’

They’ll even have their own cocktail (ingredients a closely guarded secret).

Alex says: ‘We’re coming back with a real bang in our new home.’

DELIGHT ALT NIGHT: THE RETURN

PopWorld, Portsmouth

Monday, July 19

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A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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