Sorry, Polish party is over. Gone west

Hoodoohat is playing hard in the Jadlodajnia Filozoficzna, a nightclub in Warsaw's University district, but the band's music is echoing off the walls of an almost empty room.

As the group takes a break between sets, top-hatted lead singer Konrad strolls over to the bar. The problem, he says, is that mass migration of young Poles to western Europe following Poland's 2004 entry into the European Union has knocked the stuffing out of the local music scene.

"It really killed the night life here, man," he says, leaning on the bar. "It used to kick ass but now it's dead. All you have to do is go to London and you can see everyone there. It's sad, dude."

Poland has seen one of the largest peacetime migrations in history as about 1m people, many of them young, have moved west to find work, although there are no hard official numbers. There are estimated to be 250,000 Poles in Ireland, about 500,000 in Britain and more than 600,000 in Germany.

While those numbers include doctors, plumbers, welders and office workers, a large number of migrants are young people fresh out of university looking for foreign experience and wages four or five times higher than they could earn at home.

Sitting in the Jadlodajnia Filozoficzna (which translates as the Philosophical Diner), Beata Tymkoff says that the effects of the migration have been even more dire in eastern Poland, where wages are lower and where there are very few foreign investors. In Lublin, in Poland's north-east, "the nightlife there died. Everyone left," she says. "The bands that played there and the people that listened to them, they're all gone."

The missing clubbers are recently graduated 20-somethings, a generation that in former times would have been enjoying its first pay cheques. Their migration is causing labour shortages, even though Poland's official unemployment rate is 14.9 per cent, the highest in the EU. The real rate is probably much lower once people working at home or abroad but still officially on the unemployment rolls are discounted. Many others, particularly former workers at now dissolved collective farms and older miners and workers in communist-era heavy industries, are often unemployable.

Last year the construction industry began to notice a shortage of manual labour, while other professions, from computer programming to nurses and doctors, are having to hunt harder for workers. Wages have risen, but not enough to turn back the tide of people flying west.

The government has woken up to the population drain. A poster campaign compares young people who have decided to stay with veterans of the wartime underground.

Nightclubs, especially in Warsaw, are taking aim at a slightly younger set, which is still keen to party, says Marcin Majewski, in charge of booking acts at the Jadlodajnia Filozoficzna. The migration has opened new possibilities, with some of his DJs playing London clubs and bringing cutting edge music back to Warsaw. "We've got a finger on the pulse and we play the things that are played there," he says.

If Poland's young migrants return home, attracted perhaps by rising wages and increasing demand for their labour, they'll be able to find the same kind of music they partied to in London, Glasgow and Dublin.