Lucky Seven Club

There's something great about putting on clothes that are older than you are and stepping out into a bygone era to listen to golden classics on 7''. Wearing elbow length, vintage gloves and false eyelashes makes you hold your cigarette differently and twirl your hair like Marilyn Monroe. Dressing up like your mamma used to and trying to bust the moves she thought were fly is an experience that everyone should replicate – it's as if you're in a black and white movie and Humphrey Bogart is soon to sweep in and buy you a drink.

Lucky Seven Club allows its patrons to feel they are swanning around in an unspecified decade between 1940 and 1960, where all the tunes are great, the war is long forgotten and you can mix and match your painfully post-modern outfit according to what you dig up in London's numerous vintage clothes shops.

It's one of three vintage nights created by husband and wife duo and vinyl aficionados Mr. El Nino and Lady Kamikaze. Their award-winning flagship night - Lady Luck Club - occurs monthly at the On The Rocks Rehearsal Studios and is a free-for-all of sounds from the 20's right up to the 60's. Black Cotton and Lucky Seven (both held at burlesque haven Volupte) focus on a more specific time frame - which is reflected in the dancing and the dress of those who frequent.

The appeal of retro, the art of revisiting a bygone era, can be observed in every aspect of our culture be it fashion, music or architecture. The older our world gets the more material we have access to. And being able to feast on titbits from the past, pick at the bones of what has gone before and adapt them for modern use is one of the privileges exploited by nights like Lucky Seven.

Their music policy is strict - nothing post-1960. A bricolage of jazz, boogaloo, jump blues, rock 'n' roll, jive and swing is served hot and fast to the crowd who all seem to have been dusting off their dance moves for the occasion. A sailor complete with braces, skin-tight white trousers and slick moves twirls a girl in a polka dot dress. Men in bowler hats and dickie bows prop up the bar.

Lucky Seven invites a musician to play every month at midnight – and tonight it's John Crampton - the UK's top slide guitarist currently touring the world with his National Steel guitar. He thrashes out high-octane jump blues using a stomp box, guitar and super-speedy harmonica skills which command the room. He appears to belong in 1960's America; his gravelly voice and explosive energy are evocative of another time and place. He finishes with a cover of blues original 'Baby Please Don't Go' (Big Joe Williams 1935) – chopping between harmonica and the mic which has the room singing along, stamping and cheering.

Check out one of these nights. They are a holiday from the homogenous, nu rave, skinny jeaned, Hoxditch nights where you can no longer distance yourself from the daily mayhem of London by 'escaping' to a club, but are immersed in it. Lucky Seven and her family celebrate the genteel, elegant side of times past and lead you into a more refined kind of clubbing, a world away from the ubiquitous electro and ketamine techno.