Why do bankers love techno?

Bankers and other assorted finance bros are an inescapable presence on the London nightlife scene. Industry, the British-made TV drama that follows a group of graduates on (and off) a City trading floor, begins its second series on BBC1 tonight and spares no detail of the drug-fuelled hedonism of its young bankers. One plot arc in the first series starts when the protagonist, exhausted after a long night on the powder, executes a trade in the wrong currency.

Some in the field have protested that the on-screen excess is unrealistic. But much of it is apparently inspired by real-world experience. Mickey Down, one of Industry’s creators, spent just over a year working at Rothschild at the beginning of the 2010s. Among his peers, working hard and playing hard was taken to extremes: ‘It’s not natural to do a 100-hour work week, but somehow your body acclimatises to it,’ he says. Those long days in the office turned into long weekends (often starting on a Thursday) of partying at high-end clubs such as Cuckoo in Mayfair, where bankers would spend thousands on bottles of Dom Perignon with sparklers strapped to them.