Pizzas galore!

"At first I thought it was part of the show, along with everybody else I think, but I noticed the look of terror on the people's faces on the actual stage and I instantly realised it wasn't."

Mr Hall pushed Waranya ahead of him as they tried to flee, shouting to others to leave. "I could feel the heat almost straight away, but people weren't reacting," he said.

"There was a girl behind the bar who was more concerned with getting the cash register out."

As he starting moving towards the exit, he noticed a man had fallen and wasn't picking himself up. Mr Hall tried to pull him along, and then all the lights went out, and he lost his grip on him.

"It was pitch black, it was burning my back, I put my hand behind me on my head, and on the way to the hospital, the skin was dropping off my hand."

There was only one way down from the balcony that ringed the top level, and one way up from the toilets in the sub-ground floor, he said. All the windows were barred.

"The flames spread very very fast," he said. "It went straight along the ceiling."

Mike Macdonald, a Canadian who lives and works in Bangkok, was lucky enough to be near the door when panic set in and was able to help to carry some of his friends clear of the chaos.

“I was there with friends ringing in the New Year and know all too well the firetraps these things are,” Mr MacDonald wrote on his blog, mikesbarguide.com.

He was standing on a landing between the main floor and the upper level when the fire broke out. “I felt a blast of heat and looked above the stage to see huge flames. At first my friend and I thought it was a special effect but the heat was too strong. At that point people had already started to move outside, and we were carried by the crowd out the main front doors.”

Once outside he went to a smaller front door which opened on to a veranda, where he joined others lifting people over a 1.5m high water feature.

“Within minutes I recognised my other friend being helped out and I immediately jumped up and swept her across the feature out into the parking lot. Her friends followed in worse shape, and I had to carry the friend’s boyfriend about 100 metres, after which I stood and watched the sea of helpless patrons standing over dozens of barely conscious bodies.”

He said that most of the people killed were in the pit area and washroom.

Tos Maddy, a Thai guest, said: “Everything went boom and people started running. The fire went very quickly,”

“We were all dancing and suddenly there was a big flame that came out of the front of the stage and everybody was running away,” said Oh Benjamas, another witness, who added that clubbers were given sparklers shortly before midnight.

Others described flames licking the ceiling before it caved in. “I was in the bathroom and when I walked out, I saw flames in the roof and it fell to the floor,” said Montika Boontang, 28.

“People started running for the doors and breaking the windows,” she added.

Andrew Jones, a British teacher in Bangkok who arrived at the club shortly after the fire erupted, said he saw corpses charred beyond recognition, and people with burns over 90 percent of their bodies fleeing the club.

"Bodies, some of them probably alive, were falling off the stretchers as the rescue workers rushed them away. The flames were glowing through the broken glass windows," said Mr Jones. "A part of the building had already collapsed," he said.

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