8:45PM last Saturday night, and I find myself in the upstairs room of St Dominics Catholic Working Men's Club, a short number 12 bus ride East of Newcastle city centre. I have made the pilgrimage to my native city partly so that Frankie can catch up on the family gossip with his grandparents- but the main purpose of my visit is to attend only the second-ever staging (as advertised in the previous post) of Popklubb, the self-styled 'indiepop social' being hosted by my good friend David, along with his associates Cath and Bill, fellow devotees of so-left-field-it-is-nearly-falling-off-the-edge Swedish electropop and wilfully obscure early Wedding Present singles. Bill (it will later transpire) has even more in common with me, in that as young boys we used to run around his back garden in Fenham NE4 together while our mothers sipped that new-fangled instant coffee and discussed church jumble sales and suburban house prices. More of that later. What I came here to tell you about was the fantastic Saturday night experience that was Pop Klubb.
The evening, it must be said, got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. The night had been advertised as starting at 8PM, so I had planned to make a fashionably late arrival at 8:30. In the event (I had been waylaid in Rosies Bar at the top of Chinatown by a man with some rather insistent theories as to the unworkability of Ramage and Taylor as a central defensive pairing) I made my entrance a quarter of an hour later- but still found myself only the second paying customer of the night. I joined the first customer at the bar- clearly a St Dominics member, resplendent in the northern pensioner's 'Night Down The Club' uniform of blazer, white shirt and tie-emblazoned-with-vaguely-military-crest. The fellow had clearly missed the Popklubb flyers, so was somewhat bemused to find that his usual Saturday night of dominoes, darts and six pints of Exhibition had been rudely commandeered by a shambolic-looking college graduate playing a scratched vinyl of 'Talulah Gosh' by Talulah Gosh at the wrong speed for the apparent amusement of nobody whatsoever.
My assurances that the evening would surely pick up once DJs found the box with the cutting-edge Swedish electropop in fell on deaf ears with our aged first-footer, who proceeded to stumble out of the function room, noisily demanding his money back and complaining about the absence of live music from the itinerary ('three pund fifty on the door and nee bloody band on- I'll be having a word with the secretary, bonny lad'). DJ David, breathing a sigh of relief, handed over the decks to Fenham Bill, and, as the opening chords of Crawl Babies by the Pastels echoed across the empty rows of copper-topped tables, the first few indiekids to climb off the evening's eastern-bound number 12 buses- unmistakeable with their jet black floppy-fringed hair, checky retro skirts and polka-dot shirts- started to amble into the room and form an orderly queue at the bar for pork scratchings and subsidised cans of Red Stripe. Nine o'clock, and the night was starting to look up.
Four hours later the room was empty and stark with light again, but for myself, the twin DJs, and a smattering of burly indiekids who had stayed behind to carry the equipment down the stairs. I would have given them a hand but an evening of club-priced Newcastle Exhibition and twirling around the dancefloor to classic Juniper Moon singles had taken its predictable toll and, happy in the haze of a drunken hour I was fully occupied brandishing my last twenty pound note in the general direction of the bemused barstaff, pleading for 'just a couple of broon ales, man, to take home for the lads- haway!'.
They let me have eight in a carrier bag in exchange for my crumpled note- but being an indiepop kid raised on shandy, unrequited love and unspeakably twee Talulah Gosh 'B' sides I only managed a bottle-and-a-third before falling asleep on DJ Bill's couch in the leafy Eastern suburbs. Somewhere along the way I found out that me and Bill grew up in the very same Fenham street (although we attended different schools). We couldn't remember each other at all, but the next morning back by the Swalwell roundabout my mam, presented with the family name, knew exactly who I was talking about, as I knew she would.
'Oh William S? Charming little boy- I knew his mother from the church playgroup. I called in one time for for coffee and you and Abby were running about with your teddy bears with the boy and his sister in the back garden. The dad worked down the shipyards, didn't he?'.
And the funny thing is, all of a sudden I remembered that particular autumn Fenham afternoon from near on twenty years ago with absolute cinematic clarity. I would be maybe ten, DJ Bill a year younger and our respective little sisters a couple of years or so more our juniors. The whole scene, as I now recall it, is played out to the backing track of 'So Little Deserve' by Heavenly- which I realise is taking artistic licence a trifle too far, not to mention the remit of Pop Klubb's playlist. But then perhaps, with our teddy-bears-instead-of-action-men , floppy Christoper Robin-esque fringes, perfectly-coiffured pig tails and mothers exchanging suburban chit-chat the other side of the net curtains, that genteel coffee-and-cakes existence was always going to lead us children inexorably into the realms of indiepop, all four of us, whether we liked it or not.
That's right, it's the parents who are to blame for this sort of wanton Rock and Roll hedonism. Popklubb will be held monthly (or as regularly as my indiepop friends can get it together), most likely at St Dominics Catholic Working Mens Club, a short bus ride East of Newcastle-upon-Tyne city centre. The night starts at 8 -but unless you want to be inveighled into a game of dominoes and an impromptu brawl with an enraged pensioner, I would arrive fashionably late if I were you- aim for the number 12 leaving Rosie's Bar at 8:52. When you get to your destination, you will find Newcastle Exhibition at one pound sixty-five a pint-and eight pints of Brown Ale in plain late-night wrapping and service included, a snip at your last twenty pound note only and no change on account of 'we've shut the till already, man- now bugger off and leave us alone you flamin' piss-artist'. Never mind. The price of a taxi home is something we can worry about tomorrow morning, at the earliest.
Recent Comments