A year ago, Mischa, Meera, Matthew and Lily were all pretty disillusioned with Cambridge’s shoddy nightlife. Students here “tended to flock to pretty run-of-the-mill places”, especially compared to other University towns, “you can’t move for student nights in Bristol, York, Oxford and so on”.

The difference between them and most of us, however, is that they did something instead of just moaning about it. By the time of Saturday’s House Party, Backtracks won’t have even celebrated its first birthday but its name will ring familiar to many. The premise is simple, a musical time hop through the past half-century straight up to the noughties, meaning a night of “garage, grime, R’n’B and hip-hop, as well as a lot of disco beforehand”.

The team behind the night do it on the side, “I don’t think any of us want to do it for a living”, but still “a nice alternative to, y’know, essays and work”. Although expansion is “definitely possible”, there’s an advantage to keeping it in Cambridge. “It’s nice to keep the operations sort of in-house”, perhaps in part because their success is so reliant on what Mischa describes as the “wonderful network of reps and DJs” that Backtracks has created.

The relationship with other student-run nights is good, apparently there’s not too much competition in vying for the attention of what is still a pretty niche slice of the Cambridge market. “It’s a reasonably small circle, and we get on well with other groups”, ArcSoc DJs have played at Backtracks before, and Saturday is, after all, a collaboration with Fever.

But what does a dress code of ‘artistic licence’ mean, exactly? Mischa asks me to “picture Craig David giving Michelangelo’s David a party hug and you’re on your way to our dream vision”. The idea behind it is that “people come as two contrasting groups – popular musicians and artwork”. If you’re not confident enough to pull off an ambitious aesthetic interpretation of a David-on-David encounter that’s fine, but just “don’t be the person who shows up to the bop in jeans”.

On music, Mischa refuses to reveal too much about the 70s, 80s, and 90s DJs, but the 00s set that he’s playing with Matt  will be the “usual selection of RnB and hip-hop classics, but with some surprises, for sure”. If that’s not an incentive to keep grinding away on the dance floor until the end of the night then I’m not sure what is.

Tickets for Backtracks and Fever's 'House Party' this Saturday are still available.