Playing for the first time at a great club like Fabric will always be a special moment, but playing there on the opening Saturday and meeting your future wife that night make it an extra special place for me. I proposed to her a few months later on the same dancefloor at midnight on 31 Dec 1999.

When my in-laws, a retired headmaster and French teacher, wanted to see what I did for a living, the staff at the club opened the VIP room especially for them, gave them a bottle of champagne on the house and escorted them down to the DJ booth. My mother-in-law loved dancing there: “It’s so dark no one can see how old I am!”

Then there were the many times I turned up at 10pm to play the warm-up set in room 1, only to find managing director Keith Reilly playing his bag of records with all the enthusiasm of a kid with a new toy. Fabric is no ordinary club.

But even though this feels personal there are wider issues that go beyond one club in EC1 that is currently shut with its future looking uncertain following two tragic deaths and the suspension of its licence. Over the past 10 years we have lost nearly 50% of our club spaces. The change in licensing laws has meant the free entry bar has affected paid entry to nightclubs, as has the rise of festivals, but spiralling rents, intransigent councils and avaricious developers have also played a part.

Nightclubs can be liberating, transformative spaces. For gay men and women, a nightclub is often the first step they make into a safe space as they come out. Nightclubs have been the motor that has driven the best of British fashion for over 30 years. Great clubs – and DJs – can define the sound of a city. Bristol, with its bass-heavy sound, produced Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and Roni Size. Glasgow’s fierce electronic eclecticism is a direct product of the Sub Club, Optimo and the sadly recently closed Arches.

Of course, they are also great places to go and get hammered or pull, but nightclubs have been responsible for transforming previously unloved urban areas. Fabric (and Turnmills, also now closed) brought life to soporific Clerkenwell, a place where it had previously been impossible to buy a bottle of water late at night without breaking into a shop. Now it hums with activity. The recently closed Dance Tunnel and its sister venue Dalston Superstore performed the same function in E8, while Peckham’s Bussey Building is the fulcrum of a newly buzzing scene in south-east London. Most importantly they are incubators for new musical styles and movements. From disco to hip-hop and house, there is not a single genre of dance music that would exist today without without the testing ground of the nightclub dancefloor. Given the fact that we export far more music than steel or cars these days, it should be valued and cherished.

Governments and arts councils fall over themselves to lavish grants fatter than a diva’s waistline on opera, but anything remotely connected to the black community, from jazz to electronic music, is either starved or derided. In 1985, in the wake of inner-city riots, government minister Oliver Letwin urged Margaret Thatcher not to give money to black businessmen, claiming “new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade”. More recently, a government spokesman told the BBC: “The current regulations strike a fair balance between making sure we have music entertainment for the public and preventing crime and disorder, whilst keeping the public safe.”

Drug-taking is endemic in British society and there’s not a shred of evidence anywhere to suggest closing nightclubs will somehow either lower drug harm or eliminate consumption. It’s a smokescreen for a drug policy that has consistently failed over a 50-year period. Short of performing a colonoscopy on every clubber, it’s impossible to eliminate all drug use in clubs (and, indeed, anywhere else). Only last December, Fabric’s drug policy was described by district judge Allison as a “beacon of best practice”. Given the fact that drugs are rife in prison, where theoretically some form of security exists, what chance do clubs have to control this issue?

We could be bold, like Amsterdam and Berlin, which regard nightlife not as a social disorder issue but a tourist attraction.

Or we could be like New York, where neoliberal policies have all but destroyed what was once the most musically innovative and vital club scene in the world. If we want our cities to be modern, vital, vibrant, inclusive spaces that are available to everyone and not just a gaggle of oligarchs, we need to save Fabric.