There is a specific energy to a Saturday evening. In any major city, cafés and coffee shops close their shutters. Market traders dismantle their wares. 'The air begins to tingle', wrote John Dos Passos about 1920s New York. 'If you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, the train of magical events will begin.'

Barely four centuries ago, music, fashion, art, sex, architecture, drink and drugs first fused to create what we now know as nightlife. Hedonistic dens of crime and iniquity became frontiers of culture and factories of invention. Calling in on iconic clubs such as the Moulin Rouge, the Hacienda and Les Deux, historian Imogen Willetts pieces together all the tantalising ephemera and foggy reminiscences to discover what really went on at some of history's hottest nightspots.