Nostalgia*

Just after Christmas 2012 I bought myself a new toy. Nothing very exciting. Just a gizmo for cleaning vinyl records. I'd tried listening to a few of my old LPs whilst my esteemed other half was training with the International Drinking Squad in Manchester a while back but, strange to say, for some reason they didn't play too well due to the accumulation of over 30 years of alcohol splodges, fingerprints and stains that I'd rather not know the origin of... Suffice it to say that it's much safer for your music collection to take downloaded tracks on a memory card to a teenage party than to cart your precious records (or CDs for that matter) there.

I also read a post by someone who had just agreed to let his daughter have her first teenage party and, in the carnage that ensued, he'd ended up sitting up in casualty 'til the early hours whilst one of the kids had his stomach pumped. Ah, that brought back memories - not that any of us ever ended up in hospital and we always made it up for church on a Sunday morning. But we certainly weren't drinking soda water, several houses were trashed by gatecrashers and many of us spent the night in the loo (or if it was already occupied, down at the bottom of the garden) doing more informal stomach emptying before we learnt our limits. There were many po-faced responses to that post of the 'kids of today type', (to be honest, I was amazed that they still did alcohol and not drugs!) but I just remembered what we'd got up to at that age (over 30 years' ago now) and smiled and thanked God that I will never have teenage children - because I know what we did at that age and I'd be a gibbering wreck every time they left the house until they came home safely.

So, this has given me the opportunity to inflict on you, dear reader, excerpts from my record collection as I clean and listen to them - in some cases I think it really is almost 30 years since they've been near a turntable. That will give you something to look forward to over the coming months, won't it? ;0) It has also given me the chance to wallow in nostalgia for my night-clubbing teenage years.

I hope you won't be disappointed, but you won't be getting any Northern Soul classics here as Wigan Casino had closed long before I was allowed out into town on a Friday night. Although, as children, we did used to see the queues to get in as we left the cinema (on the other side of the road). My tastes were firmly mid-80s indie (she says, whilst surreptitiously pushing that Duran Duran album behind Meat is Murder and hoping that no-one noticed...).

The first record to hit the decks after cleaning was Blue Rondo à la Turk's Chewing the Fat (1981), which I bought especially for 'Klactoveesedstein' which was played constantly at our nightclub of choice, The Turnkey. The jazz aficionados amongst you will recognise several levels of homage here. "Blue Rondo à la Turk" is one of Dave Brubeck's tracks on Time Out whilst 'Klactoveedsedstene' was a Charlie Parker composition. Blue Rondo split in the early '80s with band members going on to form the much more successful, but worse, Matt Bianco (rest assured that there are none of their records in my collection!).


My nightclubbing started before I joined the 6th form, so from the tender age of about 16 we were getting into over-18 and over-21 clubs on a weekly basis. I moved schools to do my A Levels; to one in the centre of Wigan which all my friends from church attended, so I knew lots of people there already and seemed to settle in quite quickly. Friday nights were spent in town, every Saturday there was a party at someone's house and Sunday evening was spent at the Cherry Gardens pub which was a 5 min walk away from all my friends' houses.

Our Friday nights in Wigan started in the bar of a hotel near the parish church - my memory fails but it was possibly the Grand on Dorning Street - at about 8.30ish. Did every teenager's Friday night out in the '80s include visiting a drag act? No? Well, you missed out. Once all the troops had assembled we headed for Angels just round the corner to get a couple of drinks in and a good spot by the stage before the drag act started. There were several acts that used to come to Angels but the best one was Legs Up Lucy who, I believe, is still performing. I can't remember what age you had to be to get in but I was nowhere near it when, after at least 18 months of our group being a fixture to the right of the stage, some bright spark thought it would be a good idea to tell the DJ it was my birthday. So I fetched up on stage with the drag act (sadly not Lucy that evening) whilst the DJ introduced me and asked how old I was. Sutto voce and off-mic I replied, "Not old enough to be coming in here!" which he translated into, "And she's 18 today!!!". We spent every Friday night for 2 years standing at the table at the side of the stage looking up at the drag acts, performing in often very skimpy dresses or swimming costumes which left absolutely nothing to the imagination, and I still don't know where they put it. I seem to recall that my favourite red hat got nicked from the cloakroom one week, c'est la vie...

Then it was on to the Bee's Knees. Some pubs are just dire during the day, they really only work as busy evening pubs, and the Bee's Knees was one such. 'Cos it was close to school we'd occasionally go in for a sandwich at lunchtime, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. The big spaces around the bar and the small 'snug' rooms at the back that worked so well on a Friday night turned it into a dark, gloomy wasteland during the day - walking across the deserted wastes made all the more difficult by the fact that your feet stuck to the carpet. But come Friday night it was buzzing (bee, geddit? Oh, suit yourselves...) and you could have done with a lot more space around the bar and loads more 'snugs' at the back. Its USP was that it sold Merrydown cider by the 75cl bottle for 75p (it may even have been 50p when we first started going out). So our group would split into twos and threes who would club together to buy bottles to share and retire to one of the back rooms. Usually only one bottle because we were just waiting for other friends to arrive before moving on to either the Officers' Club or The Underground. I seem to recall the manager receiving an award from the cider maker for achieving the most sales in the country; glad to have contributed my bit to his success!

The Officers' Club was the new kid on the block and was perfectly in tune with the mid-'80s. It tried to emulate a colonial club with rattan furniture and cream décor. It was a bit more up-market than we were used to, with a no trainers policy and men had to wear a tie. We hadn't realised this because our lads always looked smart (it was the '80s remember, all suits and ties) but one night RB went out with the jacket but no tie and we got stopped. Luckily, the strap of my handbag was detachable so we dragged him round the corner and made him tie the strap into a bootlace tie (him protesting that it was so obvious and we'd be bound to get stopped again). We weren't and the evening progressed as normal.

The main destination of the evening was The Turnkey. It had been a restaurant, of the same name, which I'd visited as a child but by the time we were doing the rounds it was a nightclub. There was another club on the same street, 'Charlies'?, which was over 21's and seemed to be full of old pervs trying to pick up younger girls and had crap music so we generally avoided it.

Despite the '80s pop that was the mainstay of most clubs, Sister Sledge and Hazell Dean spring to mind, there seemed to be a more alternative and eclectic mix on the turntables at the Turnkey - so as well as poppy hits I also remember Red Lipstique's 'Drac's Back', Ellie Warren's 'Shattered Glass', Iggy and, God help us, The Sweet's 'Wig Wam Bam'. You might be getting some of those as I work my way through the record collection with the cleaning fluid.

So, that was Friday nights during my 6th form years and the records would be taken to parties on Saturday nights. And I'd stagger into church on Sundays and try not to fall asleep during the sermon. By the time I was 19 we'd been doing the nightclubs for 3 years and it was all a little stale. I've rarely been in a nightclub since - all that shouting over the music, and the music itself, ugh! I pretty soon decided that I'd rather be in a pub/house talking nonsense to my friends with decent music in the background.

So, apologies for this boring middle aged ramble down memory lane, oh and apologies for the lack of embarrassing photos of a 16 year old me - I did look for them but, of course, I was always behind my camera so my albums are stuffed with pictures of my friends and I'm not sure they'd like their permed backed mullets displayed to the world! (Well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!)


* And, of course, those of you with excellent musical taste will have instantly recognised this as the title of one of the tracks from David Sylvian's first solo album, Brilliant Trees, released in 1984.