La Rocca

La Rocca is a funny little club. I only found myself here because nowhere else nearby was open at the time, and so decided to try this place out! I mean, this is one of the places where your mood really makes the atmosphere. If you want it to be fun, then it will be, and if you don’t, then it won’t be.
It is a basement club, playing cheesey music, relatively quite small with a small bar. I mean, a nice place if you like cheese, want a jive, and are already quite drunk to start off with.

No bells and whistles, La Rocca is just about drunken good times to cheesy music. Not necessarily a bad thing next to some of the over decorated places on Park Street and nobody will mind if you dance like an idiot here. It’s in a basement, so you’ll have to look out for the doorway entrance, which you can miss as there isn’t always a queue at the door.
It isn’t the biggest of places. Two fairly small dance floors and a couple of tables. I wouldn’t call it intimate though, pounding pop music and drinks deals don’t engender that sort of atmosphere. The drinks deals are what might pull you to this place, three beers for a fiver is the one I can remember. Definitely a lot cheaper than some Bristol clubs then.
When I last went the dance floor didn’t take long to fill up and I think there might have been a smoke machine, I had plenty of fun and things got a touch blurry towards the end of the evening. If this sounds like a decent night out to you head to La Rocca.

Located on the Clifton Triangle, this place is a little hard to find being that it’s a (small) basement club. Look out for the neon sign (classy!) next to the casino.
The geography lesson out of the way, let’s get to home economics. This is one of the cheesiest clubs in Bristol. It opens on Thursday to Saturday only and churns out the same relentless stream of pop hits night after night. Indeed, they don’t really tend to advertise their wares as there’s no differentiation from night to night. Accompanying this are some cheap booze offers — this is the sort of place that does deals on alcopops (remember them?).
A recipe then for everything I hate in a nightclub, though for some reason the one time I went there I actually had an okay time; it may have been due to a combination of 80s music and cheap booze. As unpretentious as they come, this is still only enough to elevate this place up to two stars.

Grungy underground club at the bottom of the whiteladies road in Bristol. This place looks dodgy, but go in and you’ll be surprised at the cool chilled out and essentially fun atmosphere of the place.
They do cheap drinks, being primarily a student club, and there’s a tunnel between the two rooms which people have been known to climb through at moments of great enthusiasm, although the management aren’t too keen.