Up the Youth Club - and my punk period Luton youth club memories

Emma Warren's 'Up the Youth Club: illuminating a hidden history' is an enthusiastic account of 150 years of recreational provision for young people. This has taken many forms, but she identifies a number of common themes:

'A central quality connects all the spaces in this book, whether they're attended by five young people or five hundred, in a shed or a purpose-built centre. A youth club, as far as I'm concerned, is a broadly warm and welcoming space where those who are in their second decade of life can gather regularly, in person, without compulsion, to do things they like doing, or to discover what they like doing, where restorative 'hanging out' is welcome. Some of these are officially designated, others less so. Youth clubs are places of mutual aid, not easily flipped into private profit'.

Warren doesn't shy away from the fact that many such initiatives have been motivated in various ways by attempts to influence or control young people amidst panics about 'juvenile delinquency', lack of patriotism or religion, or the physical fitness of the next generation of workers and soldiers. But she is less interested in the motives of funders and organisers than in what happens when young people are given, or sometimes take, a space of their own.

She is particularly interested in connections with music, with clubs not only hosting music events but sometimes giving access to music production equipment. Examples highlighted include the Holyhead in Coventry, attended in the 1970s by some of those later involved in the ska scene, and the Basement in Bristol in the 1990s, where Roni Size started out his DJing/music production career. Warren notes that: 

'There are significant youth work histories in UK music and culture, particularly those that relate to global majority creative expression. Think, for example, of the youth clubs across the UK that hosted reggae sound systems in the 1970s, or the widespread practice in the '80s of using the space as a practice pen for hip hop, dance, DJing or MCing. The youth club disco has been replaced by studios, adding to the discography of UK music'.

Luton youth club memories

Of course reading the book makes you reflect on your own experiences.  For me, as for many of my peers, youth clubs were important transitional spaces in those years when I wanted to get out and socialise but was mostly too young for the adult world of pubs and clubs. I started going to Biscot Youth Club in Luton when I was 14, a club linked to the adjacent Biscot Church of the Holy Trinity -an Anglican 'High Church' in the Limbury area of town, where my parents had got married.  The youth club met in the church hall, a converted stables building with the former hayloft upstairs a secluded den. At the time I was obsessed with sport, with my diary recording of that first visit 'there is snooker, table tennis and darts. Upstairs in the loft there is a room where you sit and listen to music' (there was also bar football upstairs). All this for 5p a week. 

Biscot Church Hall - with the youth club loft window upstairs

For the next few years I was a regular there on a Friday night, with my interests transitioning from games to music.  The club sometimes had discos - I recall dancing in a circle with linked arms to Jeff Beck's 'Hi Ho Silver Lining' - though the discos further afield at the St Joseph's youth club (linked to the local Catholic church) which we occasionally went to, were a bigger event.

A key feature of the Biscot club was its small upstairs loft reached by a ladder where the 'older kids' (maybe 14+) were trusted to hang out without any adults venturing in.  There was some seating and a kind of DJ booth - one turntable behind a wooden counter - where we took it in turns to play our records. This was in the punk period, and we were soon conducting a teenage cultural revolution against the slightly older teenagers with their Genesis and Barclay James Harvest records (actually they were now old enough to get served in pubs so were moving on).

On our pocket money and paper boy-girl/Saturday job income nobody could afford to amass a huge vinyl collection, but between us we covered all the bases of  the 1977-80 punk/post-punk moment . I can still remember which of my friends had which records, and the circumstances in which I bought mine. To give a few examples:

• The Saints - 'This Perfect Day' - my 14 year old diary from 14 July 1977 mentions seeing this on Top of the Pops along with The Sex Pistols 'Pretty Vacant'. The next day somebody had the 12" of this at the youth club which had an extra track (Do the Robot). I phoned round every record shop in Beds and Herts trying to find a copy but failed. But I did get the 7" - my first punk single and still one of the greatest. Never heard Do the Robot again until recently on Spotify.

• The Clash first LP - August 1977 was momentous for me,  I started reading NME and bought this, my first proper album from HMV in Luton. I can also vividly remember buying the Clash 'Complete Control' from FL Moore on the day it came out (thanks to Wikipedia I now know this was 23 Sept 1977). We went on a school trip that day to see David Lean's Great Expectations at Luton Odeon, just down the road from the independent record shop where I bought most of my punk singles. My diary records that at the youth club in February 1978, 'Gordon Charlton offered me £1 for my Clash Complete control picture sleeve'. I declined; he went on to work in A&R for Polydor I think. A friend recalls a similar experience of a school trip to see Wuthering Heights at same cinema and sneaking off to buy Squeeze 'Cool for Cats' on pink vinyl.

• Coloured vinyl was a big deal. I remember another friend bringing 'Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts' to club, 12" of red plastic and singing of 'Bored Teenagers...watching the planes burn up through the night like meteorites'. Well we weren't far from Luton Airport.

• The Stranglers - Black and White LP - there was an annual trip to St Marys church, Meppershall, in the north Beds countryside where we camped in the grounds and went on long walks. One of our number turned up late having just bought this freshly released album (in May 1978). Nice'n'Sleazy on the vicarage record player.

• Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead - the younger brother of one of my friends thought this was called 'Bela the Goose is dead' and painted this on a t-shirt complete with said goose.

• Joy Division 'Transmission' - I got this from Matrix, a short lived (1979-81) shop in John Street behind Luton Arndale Centre run by Luton punk band UK Decay and associates. The band had a rehearsal space in the basement which 'once housed a memorable after tour party with The Dead Kennedys. During the proceedings Jello Biafra from the ‘DK’s and the UK DK’s, ran amok amidst the Arndale car parks where Jello graffiti-ed his name over the place' (the tour was in 1980). I'd seen UK Decay by then, and we played 'California Uber Alles' at the youth club, but I didn't know the Dead Kennedys had been in town (albeit not to actually play a gig) until years later.

Although quite a few of us did go to the church for a while, there was no religious content to the club as such and the only vaguely religious music I remember was the time we went to sleep over in a disused church in Chellington, north Beds, where the only music on hand was a copy of the Jesus Christ Superstar album! 

(A few years ago after reminiscing online with some friends I made a playlist of some of the records played at the club - check it out on Spotify).

All of this is a long way of saying that the youth club was a major formative influence on the music taste of me and my friends, where we educated and enthused each other by pooling our records on a Friday night. It wasn't just the sounds we were picking up on but politics and attitude. It was quite a momentous time in music with the punk and post-punk explosion and for those of us slightly too young to fully participate in gigs and drinking, youth clubs were a place where in our own more limited way we could collectively participate in the culture.

Walking back from the club we would often head to the chip shop in Birdsfoot Lane, but before too long we were getting served as underage drinkers in the Biscot Mill pub and other hostelries. What started out as a drink on the way back from the club soon gradually became the main event, as (still underage) drinking in Luton town centre began to supplant the youth club at pubs including the Vic, the Vine and the Richard III. I moved on from the church too as I got more involved in radical politics, before I was old enough to legally drink I had helped set up a local branch of CND, joined Anti-Nazi League protests and become vice-chair of the local Labour Party Young Socialists, though I didn't stay there long.

I think the the church played a role in my politicisation. The vicar, Reverend Eric West, ran a short course he called 'Charlie Brown's Three Steps to World Revolution', based around readings from New Internationalist magazine and some liberation theology-lite, most notably 'Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger' by Ron Sider. Me and my mum both went along. The basic idea was that food shortages were caused by the unequal global economy, not any kind of natural scarcity.  On another occasion,  I think following an Easter pilgrimage walk, one of us gave a reading in St Albans Abbey of that great prayer, 'A worker reads history' by Bertolt Brecht! All good stuff, though in one of the familiar contradictions of much Anglo-Catholic leftism the vicar was an adamant opponent of the ordination of women. Perhaps it was from those tracks listened to and discussed upstairs in the youth club that I imbibed a more hard hitting critique and call to action.  

See previously:  

Out to the Dancers - Emma Warren and Femi Koleoso 

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Opposing the National Front in Hitchin, 1971

Today, as in the past, the fight against the far right has to be taken to small towns as well as to city streets. Back in 1971, the town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire was one such place. On this occasion the openly racist National Front had been refused permission for a rally in London's Trafalgar Square so they landed 40 miles north in Hitchin instead. On 27 March 1971 around 400 NF supporters from around the country took part, countered by between 1,000 and 2,000 anti-racists mobilised by Hitchin Indian Workers Association and other groups. The NF were led by a pipe band from Wolverhampton (something the local Wolverhampton seemed almost proud of - see below!). Smoke bombs were thrown into their ranks as they passed.

 

'Let us uphold human dignity' - Hitchin IWA placard

Socialist Worker, 3 April 1971

(photos from there too)

(I grew up not far away in Luton and at the end of the 1970s got involved in countering the National Front there - see earlier post)

'When it's time to be blunt, we be blunt. And when it's time to be poetic, we be poetic' - Fugees interview (1994)

Quite an early interview with the Fugees from Minneapolis anarchist paper 'The Blast'  (March 1995 - though interview was at time of their December 1994 show in MN).

' I was telling you about that whole immigration rap thing. You know what I'm sayin', it's like people hear refugees and I want people to know it's not a gimmick. My mother was really pregnant and immigration was knocking on her door, and they broke the door open. The baby that was in her stomach was my brother...  they wasn't legal, you know what I'm sayin'. Yeah, It was immigration tryin' to deport them back. Man, my father had to run from immigration. There was a time in New York where it was a chase, man' (Wyclef Jean)

'you've got to understand, this whole thing is not even between Black and White, its between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor. We're trying to keep people aware, and it's not a contrived thing we are doing' (Lauryn Hill)

Justine: 'We were talking outside about the way hip hop has in some ways become commercialized. How do you define hip hop and what does it mean for you versus what  it's become in the mainstream?'

Lauryn: 'It really doesn't matter to me what it's become because I know what it'll always be: little knucklehead kids who rhyme in the corners of parties and form circles. I mean, hip hop is like a folk expression, believe it or not. It's all about for the people, by the people, and to basically stay with the people. Now the man, the system, gets his hands on everything, you know what I'm sayin', and anything he sees he can make a little money off of, of course he's gonna take and exploit it. But that's ok because every time he thinks he gets his hands on it, it changes to something else because hip hop is an ever-changing form of music. It moves so quickly that the system can't really get its hands on it'