Eat, sleep, rave, ribbit! How Tribe of Frog became the UK’s trippiest, happiest club night

Playing the oft-reviled subgenre of psytrance, this Bristol event is celebrating its 25th year. Amid the UV paint and crochet frog hats, we find out why it’s thriving

Saturday’s sunset has long gone, but there’s so much UV paint glowing in Bristol nightclub Lakota that I feel I might end up with a tan from it. A throng of ravers throw shapes while a shamanic selector, flanked on stage by two dancers, pumps out squelchy beats. Colourfully daubed faces light up with joy and arms swirl into spacey lasers, ready to break through into a different dimension. For one night only, I am an initiated member of the Tribe of Frog, a Bristolian club night that’s been putting on mind-boggling parties like this for the last 25 years.

To mark the occasion, the team has gone mad as a box of proverbial amphibians with the kaleidoscopic decor, but the soundtrack is the same as ever: psytrance. This is a 135bpm-plus, four-to-the-floor, knowingly melodramatic, multi-layered offshoot of trance with mesmerising refrains and epic drops. Tristan Cooke, a DJ and legend of the scene who speaks to me a week before the party, explains that it “grew out of partying on beaches and nature,” specifically amid the trance scene in Goa, India, in the early 1990s. He says that psytrance enhances the effects of LSD. “It’s about attempting to achieve a peak experience. In a nutshell, it’s spiritual raving.”