When I walked through the door into the Bully's backroom last Friday night, I felt myself slipping away from reality - and it wasn't because I'd had too much to drink.

I began to regress rapidly towards a primordial state of mental awareness, and when I stood at the bar to buy a drink, I struggled to not inanely blurt out 'mummy' to the bargirl.

A few minutes passed and I began to regain my composure - it was then that I could begin to think about what just happened.

The answer lay at the edge of my memory just out of reach, but it didn't take me long to close my eyes and visualise where it was that the music that was playing took me back to.

The easy-going West Coast soul and pop that was drifting from the speakers was of the same creed as used to incessantly accompany my family's Saturday afternoon drive down to Westward Ho! beach in North Devon when I was about five.

I think it took me a while to work this out, because it really was the sort of music that I honestly don't think anyone listens to any more.

I'm not saying that it was bad music ... it's just that it's from the very late eighties and the very early nineties, when the media transition from cassette to CD was becoming most prominent.

If anyone owned it on cassette, they are pretty much guaranteed to have chucked it away after a naughty child took a biro to the spools of tape inside (a favourite pastime of mine), and lets face it - who owned a CD player back then?!

So I was left to decide whether a club playing this sort of music on a Friday night in Oxford was a good thing or not, whilst soul DJ Tony 'Naked' Nanton was left spinning his tunes to an almost empty room.

I think I was nearing a decision when the doors were flung open by the doormen and people started filtering through to populate the dark void that was the dance-floor - this signalled the closure of the front bar.

This is an all too familiar sight at the Bullingdon. People congregating at the front bar, so much so that you can hardly move, while the backroom stays quiet!

It's necessary to be selective over which night you attend the Bully.

Live Jazz on Tuesday night is a sublime evening and wouldn't be complete without a bottle of red wine shared with a mate.

But Backroom Boogie on Friday? I think I'll be giving it a miss...

Backroom Boogie @ THE BULLINGDON