In loving Congress

Brussels-Congrès is a commuter train station about two minutes' walk from my flat. Built in the 1950s to serve the fledgling Cité Administrative - a collection of vast civic buildings in the centre of Brussels - the station has recently fallen on hard times, with its grandiose post-war environs facing demolition and its traffic thus reduced to a few trains every weekday. By night, however, the scrappy little station comes alive. Tonight I bore witness to its transformation first-hand.

As you enter the station, you go down a wide staircase into a tunnel (the whole station being underground). Further stairs descend from a small marble concourse to the two platforms. By day, the station is basically empty, serving a mere few hundred commuters a day. However, on Friday night, the national railway company gives the keys to an art collective who - under cover of darkness - transform the little subterranean halt into a ridiculously hip nightclub for the weekend.

Tonight, I met up with Henning - a beer-loving Dane who I know from Edinburgh and who is now working in Brussels - as well as my new Flemish friends from across the corridor, Winke and Galia. After a few relaxed beers in the old town, we headed to Congrès to dance and party the night away to a mixture of too-cool-for-school hipster electro and - later in the night - a live act. Serendipitously, the band turned out to be Ssion, a indie group from Missouri who I happened to hear and fall in love with back in Uppsala. And here they are, performing in a train station 500m from my door! What luck.

Ssion describe themselves as "queer punk." I don't care for the term "queer;" much as with the N-word before it, some gay people consider it a slur to be reclaimed. I consider it a tedious attempt to relish in an outsider status which would be better off forgotten. Semantics aside, queer punk is a fairly appropriate description of Ssion's act, with lots of 1980s moustaches and suspect clothing coupled with campy, attitude-heavy music. They stumbled onto the stage at about 2:30am (early evening here) and set the crowd alight, and it was impossible not to be carried away by the tunes and the excitingly impromptu locale (not to mention the omnipresent stubble and tank-tops). The "bar" was a collection of beer cans on a garden table next to the ticket machines and all the "staff" were clearly good friends, all adding to the sense that you were at a trespassers' party as opposed to a for-profit club. All in all, a highly recommended night out, and yet another reason I love the location of my little rented room.

Make your move if you've got something to prove
I wanna know you inside and out
'Cos I'm not joking, I never do
Have I given you a reason to doubt?