Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP.
Last week's gossip columns reported that Pixie Geldof and rock's current most-wasted, Donny Tourette from the Towers of London, were out partying at London's 3Rooms. Now, a casual tabloid-skimmer might assume that 3Rooms is some fashionable new bar to house London's zoo-like hipsters as they hoover up suspicious powder and smack each other in the face. Intriguingly, it's not.
3Rooms is, for want of a better word, a "brandspace". It was built, at great expense, in the middle of Shoreditch's sprawling Truman Brewery complex. And it's intended to be a spiritual home and marketing launchpad for Sony's PlayStation 3, as it launches in Europe this March.
One imagines that, on visiting 3Rooms, the obsessional gamer feels the same sort of spiritual completeness a Muslim might feel on visiting Mecca.
Downstairs, attractive young people recline on chaise longues, sip free drinks, watch films on the PS3's Blu-ray disk player, and casually wield wireless controllers in the direction of gigantic widescreen televisions showcasing PS3 games such as Fight Night: Round 3 and Resistance: Fall Of Man - games that the rest of Europe won't get a sniff of until March.
Upstairs, nervous-looking games journalists push through thick velvet curtains into a dimly lit inner sanctum to ask questions of a visiting Japanese games developer. Visit the toilets, and you'll find not one but two hand-held PSP consoles to play on while you do your business.
It is, as 3Rooms manager Simon Browning puts it, "an aspirational pad", a palace to modern excess.
Given this and the PS3's sponsorship of La Bohème, it's hard to think of another brand extension's that's been so ridiculously lavish. But why?
Simple. When the PS3 launches in limited numbers in the UK on March 23, it'll retail for £425. No amount of paper rounds is going to cover that - but the idea is that right now the PS3's not really for kids anyway. Fitted with cutting edge Blu-ray disk technology, online capabilities, and offering digital connectivity to a stack of other Sony gadgets, Sony is aiming the PS3 at that cash-rich 25-34 bracket. They're aiming it at people who like to read about Pixie Geldof and Donny Tourette on the daily commute. They're aiming it at people who go to the opera.
Quite possibly, they're aiming it at you - and the future of Sony depends on whether you bite. So, will you?
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