Someone asked me recently if I missed going out on the
lash and pubbing and clubbing. I honestly hadn’t given it much thought, having
been so busy since the time when I guess you could say that I ‘stopped’ doing
all that.
Giving it some reflection though and casting my mind back,
I have to say that initially (i.e. the first three years worth of clubbing) I didn't really enjoy it at all.
I’d been drinking in pubs for years – my first time being
half a Guinness that my dad bought for me at the St George Inn in Portslade
when I was about 4 years old. I was sitting at his feet at the bar and he opted
to hand me down a half of the black stuff rather than a coke for that
particular round!
But in terms of clubbing, I first went in November 1993.
Most (though not all) of my friends used to go to The Event nightclub (now called Prizm) in West Street, Brighton but in
truth I virtually had to force myself to go, as I really wasn’t fussed about
going. I had glandular fever and anaemia around the ages of 17 to 19, so maybe
that explains my nonchalance to it all! Not that the first night I went
clubbing was uneventful though…
I remember that first walk down the stairs into the club
and seeing a particular girl from school – a girl that virtually everyone
fancied – walking towards me and my mates. Now I’ve never been keen on girls
being too heavily made up with garish lipstick etc. and have always preferred a
more natural look, but she looking stunning and it struck me that we were no
longer kids in a playground.
I didn’t get drunk, but that was mainly because I hadn’t
really found my tastes in alcohol yet. I’ve never really liked beer, and I
hadn’t discovered spirits at that time, so I tended to just push and tolerate
my way through a few bottles of Budweiser and peel the labels off just waiting
till midnight when the ‘decent’ music started. This would be a forty five
minute session of 80’s music or commercial chart songs. I was never into the
heavy techno, trance or garage music that was played for most of the night. I
was far happier listening and dancing to Michael Jackson, Madonna, Wham!,
Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners etc. than the other stuff on offer. They even
played Beatles and Stones songs on occasion.
Pretty much that became the pattern for a few years. Save
money, go clubbing, drink poor beer, enjoy 45 minutes of music, eat takeaway
chicken and taxi home.
Hardly exciting times, but just to add to my indifference on
that first night, on the way home one of the lads in our cab was sick which
meant the rest of us chipping in to pay the cabbie the ‘clean-up’ fee. Deep
joy.
And if that wasn’t enough, when I got home I found I had
great difficulties in taking out one of my contact lenses. I kept trying to get
hold of it and pinching and missing before eventually being in tremendous pain.
It turned out I must have been at least partially inebriated as I’d actually
already got the lens out, and was in fact pinching my eye-ball. Eventually I
went to a&e, and after a few hours and scans later, the doctor said I had
three scratches across my eye and put a few drops over them to ease the pain…
though I had to put up with triple vision for a few days.
After a few years of trudging through boring nights out,
things finally improved as I started to find other club nights, like 80’s nights
and student nights (with music I liked played endlessly)…and the cheap
spirits and mixers offers often helped!
It was mainly about the music for me, but once I worked
out what drinks I genuinely liked (dark rum and coke / southern comfort and lemonade)
I found my enjoyment of the nights out increased immensely.
And I believed I’d
found the answer to clubbing enjoyment in one word:
Friday
Such a different group of people would go out in Brighton on a Friday night compared to a Saturday night.
The atmosphere was so much more relaxed and you didn’t have to actively try and
avoid the people who couldn’t handle their shandies.
My Friday
nights between the ages 22 to 26 took on a life in itself. Work pending, I was
out with a certain group of friends every other Friday. It possibly looks
uninspiring looking back, and I didn’t travel the world and change lives etc…I just
had a really enjoyable social life with my friends, with such a simple routine:
- Get ready between 4-5pm – music a-blaring throughout
- 6pm: With a full wallet (£60) make way to friend’s house for a few alcoholic 'tasters'
- Get to the Pull & Pump Pub at 7pm-ish and await the arrival of others in the crew
- Move on to the Quadrant Pub for 8pm (cart wheeling through the Imperial Arcade on the way) - insist on the bar staff putting THIS on the jukebox and gently mocking the Bryan Ferry and Mark Owen look-alikes
- Down to The Event (by 1015pm to avoid the queues)
- Get hammered on cheap booze, do a circuit of the club to see who is about.
- Dance ourselves sober
- Get hammered again (do another
circuit - week after week we would contrive to not pull a single girl- this is why >>>
- Leave at about 130am to avoid the crying girls who invariably had lost their purses
- Go to Hungry Years night club (RIP)...
...to meet with others in the crew - Head to Subway for a foot long double (quadruple) cheese, double bacon, single turkey, BBQ sauce and salt fest… served by a kid we called Andy. But that wasn't his real name… or was it? He might have been called Bob.
- Walk as far as we could before we were just too knackered to go on... and hail a cab with whatever change we had left, and get dropped off wherever the money ran out
- Leg it across Easthill Park kicking an imaginary football into the goalposts that were set up for the Saturday morning league games
- Get home at around 3am and go on ICQ to talk again to the people I’d spent all night with
- Start to eat Subway...fall asleep
- Wake at 7am to finish Subway and down a glass of strawberry milkshake and rejoice at yet another night out with no hangover!
Happy days… the trend stopped during 2001, and after that I had children and
priorities changed!
When I stopped
going, I definitely missed it, but I think I’d had my time and in particular I thoroughly
enjoyed the latter part of it. Many of my other mates who didn't come along used
to give me tremendous stick for my habitual routine, but I couldn't care less…
it was my music and my time and I loved it.
And tellingly, whenever they came
with us, they tended to love it too.
I went many years
before going clubbing again, but relived a few good nights nonetheless. When
Michael Jackson died in 2009, during a period when I was going through
something of a personal breakdown, I went to The Event (by then renamed Oceana)
as where better to go to grieve on various levels than to somewhere that was
celebrating his musical legacy. They didn’t let me down and literally every
other song that night was a Jackson
And this boy was
last seen leaving a nightclub in August 2009, with Black or White playing in the background…
Update!
Rummaging around I came across the song list for that first night clubbing - the aforementioned '45 minutes of decent music':
Boom! Shake The Room - Fresh Prince & DJ Jazzy Jeff
We Will Rock You - Queen
Right Here - SWV
Grease Megamix - John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John
Summertime - Fresh Prince & DJ Jazzy Jeff
Satisfaction - Rolling Stones
Out Of Space - The Prodigy
Leader Of The Gang - Discredited 70's artist
Baggy Trousers - Madness
Atomic - Blondie
Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners
People Everyday - Arrested Development
Moving On Up - M People
Informer - Snow
Jump Around - House Of Pain
Relight My Fire - Take That & Lulu
Just don't ask me why I still have that play list to hand!
Update 2016!!!
Remember the girl on the stairs at
the Event near the start of this blog?
Well in August 2016, I bumped into her for
the first time in years at a friend’s birthday party.
Many mutual friends from
back in the day were there and as 40 year olds we drank, laughed and danced to 80’s / 90’s
music galore, just like before. And for completeness I thought it might be nice
to offer up this little soundbite that she told me:
“I
miss nights like these…”
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