Follow the tune

London, March 18: It’s 7.17 pm on the platform of Paddington station, on a typical grey winter night. I glance up nervously at the clock, desperately thumbing the controls of my MP3 player as it grinds through its start-up process. Then, just as the clock hits 7.18, the shuffle function comes up trumps. The opening beats of Another One Bites the Dust thump through my headphones and slowly, awkwardly, I start to dance.

I am not alone. A sea of people — 200 at least — have descended on a bemused Paddington. All have, at this seemingly random minute, started bopping to their different beats, iPods and headphones firmly attached. As the commuters look on, we dance, and dance, and dance. After about 20 minutes, someone starts a conga line.

This type of event is called “mobile clubbing” — referring to the way it pops up in random locations, rather to than any use of mobile phones. As in flashmobbing, when a crowd of people gather to perform some action (burst into synchronised applause, or ask an identical question of a shop assistant) before melting away, its participants have nothing in common beyond the receipt of an instruction by email or text message.

“I don’t think it would be possible to organise this without the web,” says Ben Cummins, who thought up Mobile Clubbing (mobile-clubbing.com) with a friend, Emma Davis, in 2003. “It’s so big now that even the police have signed up to the email list.”

When it started, Mobile Clubbing was designed to “break the flow of consumers and commuters”, in Cummins’s words, by spreading 15 or so dancers over a concourse. It has become a giant, grudgingly tolerated disco.