Old : Life.

Fabric Live @ Fabric

It's been a long week, a lifetime.

We're tired. Shattered.

We have to get up early the next day, so we do the only logical thing in the world -- go out to the biggest club in London until the sun lurches up.

'Unless you're on pills, you'll be angry,' someone warned us.

There are about twenty different DJs, three rooms, hostile security, racists in line, and mobs of whatever would now be the equivalent of ruffians or scoundrels.

We're only angry because he's right.

This isn't a rave, this huge and corporate thing.

I see signs for V.I.P. memberships and CD compilations, and there's an ugly tension in the whole club, like a fight's about to kick off.

It's confusing, too, with the rooms stacked like a colon, separated by stairs and misleading arrows.

Cripes.

This never would've happened in the fields.

Bad vibes creep out of a couple of rooms, but we stop in the other one, where Trojan Sound System, a traditional reggae collective, do what they can.

One of the MCs stops at one point and says, 'Lights up. Let's get a look at you all up there.' To which another, who is blind and carries a cane, says, 'Oh yes. The balcony. Sorry, I still can't see you.'

We've dragged ourselves here, though, for Skream.

If dubstep is today's half-jumped, slow-motion, Caribbean-influenced, futurist innerspace bass music and a soundtrack for a life of watching your friends die, in the middle of it all is Skream.

He's here and starts a set that sends this horrible place heaving.

Indie-single remixes cross-fade into Skream's own productions.

Low-frequencies bash dead little things in the body.

It's immense.

The kids are mad for it. While a couple of dreadful girls dance like cocaine-addicted models in front of a mirror, and the rank crowd spills over the stage, the set shuts down with the sound's big hits, which have been everywhere this week.

But they're dented in and different and Skream teases them out, which lets more people than Morocco leap into the air like lunatics.

It's a celebration, but we're not sure of what.

It's not of youth, of hope. Just of age.

An end-point.

Dubstep feels like an old idea winding down -- rave's last rallying call, its last moments of cultural life.

I'm exhausted.

I want to shout at them all.

It's wonderful, but a wake.

There's nothing left.

The music's done.

We're done.

Time for home.