Up the Youth Club - and my punk period 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 The youth club disco has been replaced by studios, adding to the discography of UK music'.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 an important transition in those years when I wanted to get out and socialise but was too young for the adult world of pubs and clubs. I started going to Biscot Youth Club in Luton in when I was 14, a club linked to the adjacent Biscot Church of the Holy Trinity and indeed which met in in its hall. 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 upstairs attic 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 our friends through this was called 'Bela the Goose is dead' and painted this on a t-shirt.

• 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 to 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 the world of pubs and gigs, 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 (the Vic, the Vine, 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, Reverand 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. 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. But perhaps it was from those tracks listened to 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