Scharf (1928) by Wassily Kandinsky
The “dancefloor” is a Union Jack flag. To my left is a teenage girl with NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF inked on the back of her West German army surplus parka. To my right is a genuine skinhead, twenty years older than us, an old man, in his mid-thirties, with a blue prison teardrop inked under his left eye. In front two friends sweat in the dry ice: one like me with hair down his back, ripped jeans, black eight-hole Doc Martens, and a lumberjack shirt; the other, a rangy, semi-pro middle-distance athlete — hair short — in a black wool overcoat he bought last week from a charity shop. There are other people I don’t know behind me and around, including a squad of Glaswegian hardmen who have an hour earlier asked me where they could find pills and house music. Everyone is smoking a cigarette in 1994. Everyone is intoxicated. But the doorman has postponed my bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale — to prevent glassing injuries. And as the feedback and howl at the end of the Nirvana song Rape Me crackle away into a suicidal nothingness, we stop fighting.
I say fighting but it is more like some form of postmodern street dance routine. Those of us with long hair — most of the boys, some of the girls — have been windmilling our heads, and in-between these runs of brain violence we rejoin the melee, the shove, the headlocking. No punches connect but there is shouldering, there are elbows. There are gestures you could accuse of being dance gestures but they are not obviously about coupling or joy and seem instead to evolve from a rebellion against niceness until they take the form of an ugly and impossible gracefulness. This is a seaside town with some of the worst indicators of poverty in the nation, but most of us are not here to actually brawl. We are here to love music. And our drinking is religiously useful. I am sixteen and weigh about sixty kilos and when I am thrown down onto that booze-gummy flag, or throw myself down, my big mate hauls me up again. Nobody stays down long. Nobody is seriously injured.
And as the first notes of Disorder or Been Caught Stealing or Angel of Death or Bullet In The Head fill the rank purple spaces between the stage and the bar, a few older punks, antique creatures pushing forty, including one with nostalgic green head-spikes and leather bondage gear, emerge from the smouldering booths and propel themselves with glee into the cuboid of rioting. I go for an eighth, a ninth, a tenth beer. Soon there is only one other person trying to get the attention of the barman but you cannot really have a conversation under that weight of L7 or Soundgarden or Napalm Death and the skinhead is not someone you want to have a staring contest with. He is anti-relaxed, non-negotiable. He has already broken your nose in his mind.
We’ve missed the last bus so maybe there’s going to be another ninety-minute walk at two in the morning through the haunted suburbs.
Outside the nightclub, Friday night and Saturday morning are doing battle. Absurd and short, some rucks will be nauseating in their shirtless vociferousness. And many other clichés are true: police officers well beyond their elastic points are going to knuckle desperate maniacs into the cold piss chambers of riot vans; sooty pigeons with medieval claws are going to peck up kebab vomit from shop doorways; and psychotic gulls are going to land on your crown and try to beak into your brainpan. I have seen violence in this town but anyone who spends a weekend evening in the pubs and clubs sees violence in this town. Violence is a weekend sport here, if only for the minority, if only for the kidneys and the livers. As are alcoholism and drugs, and dancing of all qualities. This is a good place if you want to get plastered for less than a tenner or need whizz or gear or tabs or soap-bar or squidgy black or acid. But I always feel safer in the nightclub, with the bikers, the pill-heads, the goths, the low-key gangsters, the dipsomaniacs, and the death-metal headbangers. If you fall down through the tobacco fumes and the stratus of the solid carbon dioxide, you are more likely to be picked up than stamped on. This is not true in other local “nightspots”, where it is not unknown to have your hand gashed open stopping a pint glass landing in your eye socket. I am also a fast runner and a good observer. I can sense when someone is about to “start” and we three have been chased like in a silent movie through the Victorian alleyways down to the promenade and then onto a pier and out over the seething brown waves. There are places open late for pale scholars to hide among the psychedelic fruit machines and the one-armed bandits. But you do need to be careful about making jokes in this town in the middle of the night under disco rays. An unblinking man once told me he had swallowed a large dose of LSD and now the strobes were leaving trails and when I asked him what he meant he turned immediately and inconsolably paranoid, collecting my jaw in his fist, and asking me just what in the name of fuck I meant by that then. Nothing, I said. And when he started laughing, and did not stop, for an hour, his whole body became a ghastly, threatening portrait of freshly-minted psychosis. Not interested in dancing or violence, he just wanted to lose his mind.
I moved away decades ago and rarely visit but when I did return I walked the route I used to walk when I was sixteen and the future was still ahead and I went to where the nightclub used to be. I stood alone on a roundabout, emigrated, married, a father, long hair long gone. It was summer so it was cold enough for the West German army surplus parka I have kept and still wear every winter in Catalonia only fifteen hundred kilometres south. Of course the old building has been demolished and now you can find a cathedral supermarket there instead. But I do not think time works like that and I do think we live in a universe where all times exist forever and the nightclub will be open on Friday night and I will have long hair and no shame about throwing it around and we will be there on the violent dancefloor, resurrected and immune to the frailties of schools and jobs and the dangerous experiment they call growing up.
That was certainly a big part of my growing up around Washington D.C. It had a good punk scene in the 80s and 90s, and its venues were a regular part of any respectable East Coast tour. If I had to choose, I don't know if this could be considered an ideal adolescent culture, but it's what we had and I'm thankful we had it.