Before I rip off my metaphorical ra-ra skirt, shake my Farrah Fawcett-style locks and sashay into this review of V&A Dundee’s new Night Fever exhibition, I need to get something off my chest.

I’ve never liked nightclubs. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the idea of them… and even though I was a self-conscious dancer, I loved my music, but I shied away from the sticky floors, the smells, the crowds, the coolness and kitschiness of clubs. Not to mention the ringing in my ears for days.

Growing up in 1970s Ayrshire, I devoured Daily Express columnist Jean Rook’s stories about New York’s Studio 54. Rook wrote about risqué people with exotic names who strutted their stuff in this Babylon-like den of vice. It was enticing – and a million times removed from the Scout Christmas disco and the promise of a slow dance to Wings’ Mull of Kintyre with a plooky youth.

Maybe the bar was set too high by Rook’s reports, but for me, subsequent clubbing adventures in Kilmarnock, Aberdeen and Glasgow never lived up to her over-ripe descriptions of Studio 54. The club closed in 1980; its disco lights having burned brightly for three short years. Now, having being consigned to collective memory, it has been memorialised in an exhibition.

Night Fever: Designing Club Culture opened at the V&A in Dundee last week and I – like most of the media crowd at the preview – was champing at the bit to be let in, having not been inside a museum or gallery for months. Happily for me, this recreated clubbing world is cool, clean and fresh as a daisy. It’s not-too-noisy either. On entry to Night Fever, through a pink neon sign which reads: “Discotheque”, visitors are asked to sanitise their hands and supplied with two mini hairnets which we are told we must place over our headphones to limit the spread of infection.

With only ten people allowed at any one time, you are never going to feel claustrophobic as you stand amid a forest of dangling headphones with your own personal light show-cum-silent disco pulsating on all sides. Instead, you can stand and wonder while the beat goes on… in my case wondering if my husband is dancing (unlikely) or or trying to place his mini-hairnets onto his headphones.

Night Fever is described as the first large-scale examination of the relationship between club culture and design, charting the evolution of nightclubs from the 1960s to today.

First developed by the Vitra Design Museum and ADAM – Brussels Design Museum, and accompanied by a big black impenetrable tome of a catalogue, Night Fever is awash with films, photography, posters, flyers, and fashion, all topped off by light and music installations. It even boasts “bits” of Manchester’s The Haçienda, including its glitter ball and a section of its famous wooden dance-floor.

Studio 54 is represented in the shape of sequin-sporting disco-dancing mannequins, black and white photographs illustrate the grandstanding which went on within its walls. To wit, “nuns” high on atmosphere and illegal substances, Bianca Jagger on a horse, and sleek scantily-clad girls surrounded by predatory men.

The Dundee iteration of Night Fever even includes a new section on Scotland’s club culture, including club nights in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Paisley, exploring “how the Scottish club scene holds closer ties to the music and influences of Chicago, Detroit and Europe than London clubs”.

I predict that this room – free to enter – will attract big crowds, eager to relive their lost youth. You might even see your lost youthful self in one of the films.

A new film called Hold Me by Tim Knights, specially commissioned for Night Fever by V&A Dundee, stitches together found footage from Scottish clubs and raves from 1991 to 2020.

Another short film, SUB18, made in 1997 by Blackwatch Productions offers a close-up of the “Unders” (Under 18s Club Night) at Glasgow’s Sub Club. These gauche awkward teens will now be in their forties.

Sub Club, a roving club night before settling in its present billet at 22 Jamaica Street, has been strutting its stuff since 1987. The other Scottish club in the spotlight is the roving Rhumba Club, which started up in 1991 in Roxanne’s Nightclub in Perth and has been doing its peripatetic thing across venues in Scotland ever since (pandemics aside).

As a subject for an exhibition in a major design museum, club culture fits the bill. This Scottish room is a riot of visual and aural stimulation, which invites multiple visits to take it all in. On a back wall, three large black maps of Scotland, Edinburgh and Glasgow ask visitors to mark their favourite venues; including ones which haven’t been listed.

In this timeline of lost youth, there’s a busy, bustling wall of old club photographs, guestbooks from Club 69 in Paisley and Sub Club and outfits – including a Pam Hogg tartan wool coat with gold fringe – hanging on the wall. Clubbers of a certain vintage will also recognise a submarine-style papier-mâché clock which hung on the mirror behind Sub Club bar for many a year. Designed by Glasgow School of Art-trained painter, Lesley Banks, it was commissioned by her friend Graham Wilson, who designed the logo and ran the club.

Knockout visuals from artists have been at the epicentre of club culture since the outset. I loved the section devoted to Area, which opened in 1983 in New York’s Tribeca district. In this larger-than-life space, art became everything, with installations and performance art taking precedence.

Every six weeks the club’s 1,200 square metre site was transformed within four days and refurbished to a predetermined theme. The budget for these conversions was an eye-popping $30,000 (£25,000).

During the four years Area existed, it featured 25 different themes, among them art, science fiction, suburbia, natural history, and sport. The invitations for the opening of each new theme were designed by the club’s in-house designers.

They ranged from water soluble pills, mouse traps, and 3-D glasses to egg shells and cheese slices. Large colour photographs of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, pictured during the Art theme phase, made me long to be a fly-on-the-wall, albeit a wallflower-like fly.

Nightclubs are a prime example of the complete designed experience. By highlighting the likes of New York’s The Electric Circus and Space Electronic in Florence – both in the late 1960s – and more recently London’s Ministry of Sound II and Mothership in Detroit, Night Fever’s curators reveal how nightclubs fuse architecture, art, fashion, graphics, lighting, performance and sound.

This giant mash-up of art, design, music and technology occasionally makes for chin-stroking exercise which puts the crazy sights, sounds, smells and dizzy energy of nightclubs – literally – in a glass case.

But if you have the time to linger – and read all the panels – there is much to learn. With real nightclubs still not able to re-open thanks to ongoing Covid-19 restrictions, an oddly clinical, rarified and smell-free version of club culture is on offer.

Along the way, you can dance, laugh, cringe, cry, reminisce and remember. The beat goes on.

Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, V&A Dundee, Riverside Esplanade, Dundee, DD1 4EZ, 01382 411 611, https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee, Tickets £6-£12. Booking recommended. Thursday - Monday,10am – 5pm. Until January 9 2022

Critic's Choice

The CCA opens up its post lockdown doors with a new exhibition called Ambi. Taking works from the textiles, fashion and costume holdings at The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Special Collections as a starting point, the GSA has commissioned four UK-based artists and designers to select one piece and track its histories in order to present new work.

The title of the exhibition, ambi, is Punjabi for the pattern known in Scotland as Paisley Pattern. Ambi also means "both" and anyone with an interest in the twin histories of textiles and design will be drawn to this exhibition.

All four artists have chosen artefacts which have layers of meaning. Rabiya Choudhry investigates the Paisley Pattern, which has its origins in Ancient Babylon or Iran. With its unique teardrop or "boteh" form ("boteh" is Persian for shrub or cluster of leaves), the seed-like shape of Paisley Pattern is purported to represent fertility.

Inspired by carpets, Fiona Jardine examines the relationship between space, place and labour. The firm, Alexander Morton & Sons, was originally concerned with weaving lace in Darvel, Ayrshire but by 1898 had established an enterprise in Killybegs, Donegal, making hand-knotted carpets. Prominent architects and designers such as George Walton and C.F.A. Voysey produced designs for Morton, which were worked up by women in Killybegs.

For her new work, Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo, Raisa Kabir performs with a woven head of hair, responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, Textile Archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement.

Hanneline Visnes has researched the work of Dorothy Carleton Smyth (1880-1933). The GSA Archives & Collections holds several costume designs by Smyth for Shakespeare's Macbeth and Wilde's Salome. In 1914, Smyth became Principal of Commercial Art at Glasgow School of Art, teaching miniature painting and the history of costume and armour. In 1933, she was offered, and accepted, the post of Director of the Glasgow School of Art, but died of a brain haemorrhage, aged 52, before the appointment was made public.

ambi, Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street Glasgow G2 3JD, entry free and ticketed (1 hour slots), 0141 352 4900, https://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/ambi, Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm, Friday, 12pm – 6pm. Until May 29.