This unheard-of West London village, really a transplanted rationing-era seaside town, is, strangely, home to a hunched house of sin known as the Prince Albert. In the Irish tradition, the name of landlord M. McCarthy esq. is emblazoned several times larger than the pub’s own name. This scene at the Thursday music session is one of a pagan ritual. Shadowy figures gather round in a candle-lit grotto. The rough bumps and lumps of the slapdash stipple walls makes the space feel like a cave carved out of the mountainside, a shrine to the pre-scientific elements where water and fire are worshipped. The music cascades onto you, abundant as these elements. As in clandestine cultish veneration, the session plays out veiled in darkness, the blinds being pulled shut early in the evening and the lights turned to black. Beneath this veil, multitudes are shattered and there is only the beersoaked monad. Fall to your knees, multitudes! The modern and self-conscious shrivel into the ancient and spontaneous. Hooded figures can be imagined parading votive offerings of flaming torches. The music nods to appropriately pagan observances. Hypnotic reels hammer on for hours into the early morning without pause or stumble, and in that pulsating darkness the ego might just drift away and something ancient might be summoned.