I think if you have the budget, you should use as many mics as possible as well as a line out feed as this will allow you to choose which channels to choose to create your own mix.
To get a good the best sound, I recommend that you place the mic's in various locations in the venue.
Placing mic's in the crowd may be tricky, so, if I were you, I would try and get to the venue while it is empty to see if it is possible to place mic's in places that will not get disturbed by disturbed dancers and test how they sound with the club empty.
The sound will change as the venue fills up, as people will absorb a certain amount of the frequency content as well as add to the reverb refractions and ambient noise.
Placing a mic in the crowd is called ambient mic'ing and there are several factors that you should consider when setting up an ambient mic in your scenario.
These include:
Health and Safety, sound quality, equipment safety and signal synch (this applies to only large sound reinforcement installations, such as found at the main stages at Glastonbury, as sound takes time to travel, anyway, don't worry about this one for smaller venues).
The types of mic's should be considered as well.
As different microphone models offer different frequency range and unique characteristics according to model and make (and some times use).
Also, some mic's are more suitable for location recording than others, especially in a scenario where the mic's may get knocked.
I would probably steer clear of using any super sensitive and expensive large diaphragm condenser microphones and perhaps use a good quality dynamic microphone. Sure make loads of great ones, many which have been the industry standard microphones for live sound recording and reinforcement for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone
http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/ ... ew_content
The Shure SM series of pro audio dynamic microphones should be enough for a good quality recording.
Check out their dynamic range in the individual mic's spec for more information.
These mic's are not only dynamic, so do not need any extra power (such as fantom power or specialist pre amp not included on basic mixer), but they are also designed to be more robust than studio microphones.
I would imagine for a straight forward recording, all you would need is a couple of SM mic's, good quality leads, a mixer, and a line feed, ideally, all feeds being fed into a recording medium individually (i.e. one channel per mic / line out channel).
This will enable you to mix down at a later date, and perhaps take out any bad feeds.
Anyway. hope this helps.
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