At 6.23pm on Friday the newspaper’s marketing director drops by the office to give me a lift to the Tequila Blues nightclub, which is due to re-open tonight. Everyone stares as we leave, wondering where I’m going seven minutes before I’m due to punch my timesheet, with the office hunk.
“You want to change first?” he asks, looking at my black trouser suit.
He is taking me to interview Mikhail, the manager, who’s just finished doing up the club and is throwing an opening party tonight.
We pull up outside a bar with a life-size neon orange palm tree outside. Instead of going in, the marketing director leads me round the side of the building and through a door into a low concrete mound.
Down in the bunker
Inside there’s a tunnel sloping downwards with shallow, irregular stairs. The walls and floor are bare grey plaster except for a single stripe of glossy black paint at waist level. I try not to touch anything; the paint and plaster looked like they could still be wet.
The tunnel opens out into a large underground bar with a band warming up on stage, their equipment strewn around the room and leather jackets draped over chairs and tables.
Shouting over the screech of instruments, Mikhail, a tall blond man in his late 30s, introduces himself and shakes the marketing director’s hand. With my colleague translating, he tells me that Tequila Blues used to be Bishkek’s main underground rock club. It’s been closed for six months for renovations and enlargement.
“Before, the club was small. Now he has a big one,” says the marketing director.
Three Bishkek rock bands – Steinmacht, Coma and Liquid Cactus – are playing tonight.
“When this club was closed they were playing at Johnnie’s – you know this club? – and Zeppelin, but now they are coming back to Tequila Blues.”
‘We don’t shake the ladies’
Mikhail gives me two complimentary tickets and invites me to come back later.
Back in the car I ask the marketing director why Mikhail shook his hand but not mine.
“This is not like Europe,” says the marketing director. “We don’t shake the ladies.”
Later I meet up with three friends and we go back to the club together. I show my press tickets at the door, but the bouncer waves them aside and we squeeze our way in. The club is heaving with a steamy mix of people.
We spot one of my young Russian colleagues on the dance floor, but her face is glued too closely to the boy she’s dancing with to notice us.
People are headbanging and two boys are dancing wildly with their shirts off. Other young men are slumped around the tables with their heads in their hands – too much to drink – and girls in grungy clothes are staring glassily at nothing.
I’m enjoying it, in fact it’s by far my new favourite night spot in Bishkek, but my friends aren’t happy and want to leave.
Snogs, drugs and a broken rock cassette
Before we go I pay a visit to the Ladies, where girls are quite openly snorting something over the washbasin. I wonder why they’re not using the cubicle, then I go in and see it’s a very nasty hole in the ground affair, with a bin full of used paper, and a broken cassette trailing its innards all over the floor.
I don’t think it’s cocaine though because I heard it’s almost impossible to get hold of in Central Asia. The trade is controlled by the police and anyone who tries to buy it is blackmailed. Heroin, on the other hand, is very easy to buy because Kyrgyzstan is on one of the main ‘heroin routes’ from Afghanistan to Europe. But no one seemed extremely out of it, so they may have just been taking snuff, which is quite popular here.
Something similar must have been going on in the Gents because boys are coming out giving big sniffs and wiping their noses on the backs of their hands. One of my friends follows them out looking disgusted.
“Let’s go!” he says.
Steppe in Style 
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