Head case (1/3)

Part man, part luggage, he wanders around dance floors, freaking out unsuspecting clubbers. Who, or what, is Man In A Suitcase?

We first stumble across Man In A Suitcase in the corridor by the entrance to Sheffield's Unit club. He is not dressed as a suitcase. He is dressed as a soldier. He is sitting under some camouflage netting with two other 'soldiers', bothering unsuspecting clubbers. A girl walks by, not noticing the netting or the people beneath it. "Hello," says a voice from under the netting. She screams and jumps about ten foot in the air. Arf! We approach him and introduce ourselves. "You can't see me," he responds. "I'm camouflaged." His name is Shug. And he is mental. Welcome to the world of the club entertainer. A world where dressing up as a soldier and scaring innocent clubbers is a career option. A world where stuffing your entire upper body into a suitcase then legging it round a club is normal behaviour. It's a pretty fucking bizarre place. Getting details of Shug's life is a difficult task. Ask him about his past and he begins, "Well, I was born as a small piece of hand luggage..." And that's the most sense we get out of him all night.

Later, he says he has a PHD in psychology, but that he jacked it in to "run away with the circus". He is a trained magician and a dab hand at close-up magic. He demonstrates by pushing a lit cigarette into my T-shirt and making it vanish without burning my clothes. I'm impressed. As, apparently, was Mick Jagger when Shug performed the same trick on him recently. Shug may be a soldier or a magician, but it is for his suitcase routine that he's best known. If you've been near Sundissential or Gatecrasher in the last six months, you've probably seen him. You probably thought it was just the drugs. It wasn't. We agree to accompany him to his next stop, Kushty at The Planet in Coventry, where Shug nips upstairs to the VIP bar, lodges his body into the suitcase and tumbles out into the club. "What the bloody hell is that?" shrieks a bouncer as Shug dances past. This, we decide, is going to be a right laugh.

The clubbers' reaction is one of mild hysteria. They point. They laugh. Some of them are so muntered they seem to think it's perfectly normal. Shug gets up on the stage and has a boogie. Shug dances with attractive ladies. Shug scares the living crap out of a bloke who looks like his brain is on a cheap-day return to Mars.