It's the ironic lives we lead, mining emotion from cover versions, half comfort, half camp, wholly unselfconscious

It's 2.15am, and the last night of Love Muscle at the Fridge, Brixton. The place, cavernous and dark, is busier than it has been in many a declining month, a thousand strong and then some. We're the sort of crowd that, after four and a half faithful years, gets a cheap charge out of farewell. It's the tunes, the pop prose, we listen to, are listening to, move to, are moving to; the aural sense given to each Saturday midnight and Sunday morning; songs of belonging, betrayal, break-up, revenge, recovery and renewal as cloying, as cliched and as grand as opera. Break the Chain. He's On the Phone. It Should Have Been You, You, You. Not that we'll be abandoning ourselves any more. Not here, at any rate. Not after six o'clock strikes.

Listen as Tony and I make elbow room, lip synching, laughing at the impotence of cheap music: "What did you think I would do?/Sit all alone by the telephone?/Wait for the day that you might come home?/Savin' myself for you?/Did you really believe I'd never look at another guy?"

It's the ironic lives we lead. Mining emotion from bombastic cover versions, half comfort, half camp, wholly unselfconscious, because Paul Parker and Angie Gold proclaiming that they've finally found someone is more crassly loaded than Bryan Adams and Barbra Streisand delivering the same message, and...

And Simon is doing what everyone is, wiping the sweat from his brow, from his torso, hugging strangers, declining proffered poppers: the end of an era, and what have you. He howls in my ear, over the rolling opening chords of Dana Dawson's "Hold Me", the first song that Andrew and I danced to, that he's "pottering" off to cruise the talent.

Together we take in Love Muscle's brazen pick 'n' mix: boys in bright, skimpy briefs who fret and strut their hour upon the famous stage at the front - a showcase for proud beauties without an ounce of fat or an iota of sense; the grinning guys in distressed leather jackets who shriek when they hear a favourite, waving thick, impressively veined arms in the air; the hard numbers slouching against the rails semi-circling the vast, black dance floor, or hanging out at the upstairs/downstairs bars, radiating attitude, but who, on the meeting of a glance are, week by week, warm, funny and welcoming in a way that is, of course, partially chemically powered, but mainly to do with clocking familiar features.

We're all repeat customers, ready to delve into despised "handbag" and "hardbag", not the sound of love's labours lost, but, revealingly, of perennial adolescence, this blend of thrusting, thundering bass and ecstatic female vocal, sucking energy and an unspoken sense of communal self from Saturday night fever. Out of towering speakers floods a shifting sense of induced tribal togetherness that's a bitch to pour into sentences without overstating or waxing pretentious, but which my pal Paul B is right to call euphoria, and which I think...

I'm having one of those scream-of-consciousness moments that the music at Love Muscle triggers, and has been triggering since I began attending close to two years ago. Moments when my dead father is by my side, or Sean's ghost says, "See that hot, cute clone?", or I recall how 18 years with Nicholas nearly played out here, except in the queue I said I can't do this any more. Let's finish it, it couldn't hurt any worse. Could it? Moments aided and abetted by DJ Marc Andrews's seamless mixing, when what's currently spinning is interrupted by the chorus of what is to come, and the music fuses not merely moods, but past, present and what might lie ahead. Disco-deep - that's the embarrassed, next-day phrase used when trying to explain why you danced to Suzanne Rye's club cover of "Because You Loved Me", believing it.

Marc Andrews isn't on the turntables tonight. He apparently walked two weeks ago upon hearing that Love Muscle was to convert to Hard Muscle, and to the relentless butch rhythm of techno, darling. As if it was the music at the root of present failure and not that police raid some six months ago, swishing away the de rigueur dealers. And as the speakers erupt, unable to hold the Full Monty's "Brilliant Feeling", Tony raises his arms as if to embrace the sound, and all I can think is that techno requires Class-A drugs much more than handbag and what about the direct competition of Trade at Bushmill's, the techno citadel proper?

I look up, squinting against the battery of flashing lights, and catch the expected spectacle of falling balloons, the jittery blizzard of descending ticker tape. The crowd goes crazy, just in time for the preordained Abba cover: "The Name of the Game".

The second song I ever (reluctantly) danced to with Andrew, the fifth person to approach me that night at Love Muscle, this brand name I kept dragging myself to. Because, as I told myself, walking down Brixton Hill, it's only ten minutes away, and, besides, you have to be adult. Forget. Acclimatise. Join in. Move on.

And I'm moving on, maybe to G.A.Y. or Heaven, because Love Muscle is about to stop beating. Love Muscle with its songs that reflected without ever being reflective. Songs that didn't, actually, allow you to dance with tears in your eyes, for the other turntable was already lined up. Songs that aren't especially elegiac tonight, because force of habit, in the face of fact, tells you, no, there's more to come. As a complete, but perfect, stranger says aloud as six o'clock hits, and the evening and everything ends with Hysteric Ego demanding "Give Me Love": "I think my entire life flashed in front of my ears" - a line that is, in itself, a Love Muscle lyric.