It was a random Friday evening when a bunch of our colleagues asked: "Eh, have y'all been clubbing at Orchard Towers before?"

Orchard Towers, sometimes known as the "Four Floors Of Whores", belongs to what many would dub the seedier side of town.

In the 1980s, nightclubs and massage parlours had begun to pop up there, with many of these establishments walking the lines of legality.

But what is it like to party in a club there?

None of us in the office knew. When it came to clubbing, most of us were the typical oh-let's-go-to-Zouk-and-drink-plum-shots-while-hoping-they-play-Steve-Aoki.

So somehow they decided to send us (Andrew and Tanya) to go check it out and see if it would really be all that different from a typical club.

Don't ask why it was us. The answer will probably hurt our feelings.

Orchard Towers at 1am

We reached Orchard Towers at 12:30am, alighting from our hired car at the back entrance.

The first thing we noticed once we planted our feet on the ground was how the back entrance was lined with women.

Dressed in short, tight body-hugging dresses, it was like they were forming some sort of guard of honour for whoever wished to enter Orchard Towers.

Every now and then one would be approached by a man off the street and the two would slink hand-in-hand into a nearby bar.

A party bus also happened to pull up in front of us. Out stumbled a group of party-goers, clearly well-inebriated but not quite done for the night.

We must be at the right place, we thought, since party buses are a sign of a thriving social life and people looking to thoroughly enjoy themselves.

And off we went on our exploratory clubbing adventure.

The first club we went to was really empty

The first thing we noted was that most of the Orchard Towers clubs only admit guys who are aged 25 and older. They're pretty strict about it too.

The next thing that was of interest was that there isn't any cover charge for any of the places we went to.

Instead, you just need to buy one drink each to enter.

It was already 1am when we entered the first club. Most clubs would typically start getting crowded by this time, but this one happened to be really empty.

We downed a tequila shot each (read: how to spend S$38 in two seconds) and decided to sit at one of the tables to enjoy the live band. Yes, unlike most other mainstream clubs that feature DJs and house music, this one actually had a live band.

The music was actually pretty decent too and quite an eclectic mix.

They played Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water, and a few Latin-inspired pop songs that were probably Jennifer Lopez hits (though neither of us can confirm this).

Despite the excellent music, nobody seemed particularly interested in the live band, though. In fact, most of the other patrons seemed like they were... in their own world.

From what we noticed, most of the men in the club were either there by themselves or with one or two other guys.

They were sitting at tables, quietly talking among themselves, intermittently shovelling ice into each other's cups and filling it with liquor from bottles bought and opened.

The women in the club either gathered in groups around a table, or sat in a line by the bar sipping drinks.

Some of them would invite the men for a dance, or if they were rejected, pole-dance on bar tops. Others were seen leading men into booths where things got hot and heavy.

After about an hour of sitting around and with no signs of the club getting more crowded, Andrew asked the bartender if the club is usually this empty on a Friday night.

He told us that it would only start getting really crowded from 4 or 5am, because that's when the other clubs start closing and patrons looking to continue partying would come since it closes at 9am.

Since we weren't intending to party until 9am, we decided to go somewhere else.

The second club was way more happening

We entered the second club around 2am after again purchasing a drink each.

This club was not only larger but also way more crowded compared to the first club we entered. It was also filled with people who did not appear to be local (but to be fair, that is of course our assumption based entirely on cursory glances).

We headed straight for the bar to get our drinks, where one standard drink, like at the club we were at earlier, cost between S$18 and S$19. Sure, the drinks weren't the cheapest, but at least one of us suspects that most of the people who were here weren't here because of the value-for-money drinks.

Not your typical club bathroom

An interesting feature of this particular establishment is its toilet.

Andrew noticed that in the male toilet, as he was washing his hands after a visit to the loo (personal hygiene is always important), he was greeted by a small shop selling entirely-relevant nightclub essentials such as condoms, breath mints, potato chips, and of course, muruku.

Apparently, this shop had set itself up mostly around the sink of the men's toilet and on adjacent walls.

Convenience points plus 100.

We could actually dance here

Just like the first club we visited, this club had a live band as well.

They covered Bon Jovi, Queen, Guns N' Roses and even a personal favourite, Roxette's "Listen to your heart" — which happened to be the closing song for the set. (I turned to Andrew and literally yelled when they started playing this song, "OH MY GOSH I LOOOVE THIS SONG!" At this point I'm pretty sure he judged me, but I couldn't care less. Roxette is life.)

After the live band was done with their set, some run of the mill club music featuring the likes of Rihanna, Robin Thicke and Shakira started playing.

Amazingly, the dance floor was actually spacious enough to comfortably accommodate dancing club-goers.

And by dancing, I mean legit dancing with actual limb movement, not just a bunch of bodies vibrating on an overcrowded dance floor. Which is a nice change from the typical sardine-fest that many of us have grown used to.

...But not everyone was into dancing

Perhaps this could be attributed to the fact that most people in the club weren't that much into the whole dancing thing anyway (this means more dancing space for us, woohoo!).

Most of them seemed to prefer drinking at their table, where sometimes, women would approach the tables and ask if they could join them.

Similar to the previous club, a lot of the women, clothed in very tight dresses, sat in chairs lining the wall. It almost seemed like they were there by themselves.

But instead of approaching the men, here they just waited, drinks in hand.

We would observe middle-aged men staggering up to them and whispering in their ears before bringing them to a table where he and his friends already had opened bottles of liquor.

We actually talked (yelled) to a Singaporean

Unlike other mainstream clubs where people tended to be a bit friendlier, we noticed that most people in this club generally minded their own business and kept to their own groups of friends they were there with.

We were largely left alone save for a handful of people who glanced at us (me?) curiously.

It also seemed to us (again, from our potentially-questionable observational analysis) that there weren't all that many Singaporeans in the club. We did, however, meet a duo comprising a 27-year-old Singaporean and an older Australian man.

The 27-year-old claimed that it was his first time at Orchard Towers. He told us he was accompanied by his boss and mentor, who had supposedly suggested they check out this club.

And like every quintessential clubbing experience, we exchanged superficial information by yelling over the sound of the music ("WHAT'S YOUR NAME/DO YOU COME HERE OFTEN/HOW OLD ARE YOU/NO REALLY, HOW OLD ARE YOU").

Good stuff, but RIP ears.

A fun night's a fun night — no matter where you end up

Due to the (higher-than-usual) age restriction for men, many people in the club tended to be a lot older than the typical Zouk-going crowd.

At 25 and 26 years old, it felt like we were easily the youngest people in the room, but that hardly got in the way of us having a good time.

It was slightly past 3am when we left the club, completely exhausted from a full day of work followed by this (how do you working clubbers do it, really).

See Andrew for accurate visual representation:

But #noragrets.

Frankly, we were somewhat jittery with the prospect of going to Orchard Towers. After all, the possibility that drunken patrons could turn violent seemed quite real given the perceptions of the place as a site of vice and gang activity.

To be fair — this isn't an anxiety limited to Orchard Towers, as plenty of fights have broken out at other drinking establishments as well.

Thankfully, however, in the two (-ish) hours that we spent at the clubs there, we never once felt that our safety was potentially being compromised.

We didn't encounter any threatening behaviour (there were people who glanced at us curiously, but that hardly counts). As far as we could tell, most of the drunk people there were looking to have a good time rather than pick a fight.

And from our clubbing experience at Orchard Towers, we concluded that the night didn't seem so different from an experience at a typical club — there was loud music, (attempts at) dancing and overpriced drinks.

However, sadly for both of us, there was no remixed version of Mr Brightside.

Other soft truths to keep S'pore from stalling: