Dancing Questionnaire (25): Mark, New York

Mark is 38 years old and works as an Advertising Executive in New York, following an odyssey from Tamworth and London via Sheffield.

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I think the very earliest was bopping around to Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ with my grandma at a family wedding reception near Walsall, but the one that really stands out is headbanging to AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ at a primary school disco in Tamworth, Staffs, where I grew up. I’d seen some older kids doing it at the previous year’s event - my first taste of youth rebellion aged 8! I remembered the names of the bands on the patches sewed onto their sleeveless denim jackets and over the next twelve months become an entry-level rocker, renting albums from the local record library and getting my own cut-off denim with patches and studs. Then eventually it was me and my mates’ turn to headbang at the disco when the token metal record was played. The DJ cut it off before the end as the teachers were concerned about potential brain damage.

What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while dancing?

Building a deeper relationship with music. I’ve devoted much of my life to music in all its forms and through dancing I enjoy exploring its qualities more deeply, amongst the thrills and spills. I remember dancing in Manchester in 1996 in the Village to ‘The Love I Lost’ by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and suddenly realizing that the dance music I enjoyed most had a particular combination of uplifting-ness and melancholy which then set the course ahead for many years.



You. Dancing. The Best of times...

New York 2007-2010. People say dancing in New York’s not what it was. Sure, over-zealous regulation has harmed the vibrancy and scale of the club scene but this has been replaced by an amazing DIY attitude for the past decade or so. This manifests in all-night semi-legal dance parties in lofts and warehouses mainly in Brooklyn often featuring an eclectic mix of music, DJs, performance and participation. There’s a real sense of excitement for me around something genuinely underground, unpredictable, community based and musically eclectic which has totally revitalized my love of dancing. It’s as if dance music has resumed its role in the city as outsiders’ music, which is how I’ve always most enjoyed it.

You. Dancing. The Worst of times...

When I first moved to London in the late 90s I found it hard to find a scene that satisfied me. DnB was too hard and fast, House had got too cheesy, Big Beat was too beery and everything was too segmented and focused on one style of music. Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough though at the time.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?

I started dancing regularly in 1987 at an under 18s discos in Tamworth at a club called the Embassy. It wasn’t really my scene though and things didn’t really take off until I discovered ‘indie’ music via John Peel and then started to make regular trips to Birmingham to indie disco nights and 60s psychedelic nights like the Sensateria at the Institute, as well as the odd hardcore rave. University in Sheffield in 1992 meant a headlong rush into house, techno, garage and funk with the poly-sexual scene around Vague [Leeds], Flesh [Manchester] and Sheffield’s Trash providing a little spice around the slightly-cheesy uniformity of the post-acid house scene up north at the time.

A move to London in the late 90s meant a hotch-potch of east-London fare – reggae, DnB, ragga, hip hop, a bit of house and the electroclash scene around Nag Nag Nag. Carnival weekend was always the highlight of the year, and I had a brief involvement with a north London pirate station. But gradually dancing died away. In 2005 the move to New York reignited it all again.

When and where did you last dance?

To a Robert Owens DJ set at Dalston Superstore, London last November.

You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make you leap up for one final dance?

‘I Want Your Love’ by Chic. The perfect combination of yearning, hope and melancholy that characterizes much of my favorite music to dance to.

All questionnaires welcome, just answer the same questions - or even make up a few of your own - and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires).

Dancing Questionnaire 23: Luc Sante

Luc Sante is the 23rd person to complete the Dancing Questionnaire. Luc has written extensively on New York cultural history, and much more, and as you might expect has savoured much of that city's legendary nightlife as well as clubbing in Paris and elsewhere.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

In 1963, when I was around 9 years old and in St. Teresa's School, Summit, New Jersey, our teacher would take us once a week to the adjacent Holy Name Hall to teach us square dancing. The tune was invariably "The Old Brass Wagon," and Mrs. Gibbs may have sung it herself--I don't remember a record. One week, though, she plugged in the jukebox and played "My Boyfriend's Back," by the Angels, and encouraged us to frug. I'm not sure the experience was ever repeated, but it left a permanent mark on me.

2. What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?


Oh gosh, that's a tough one... Possibly it was meeting Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Mudd Club, probably late 1978. I swear I knew at first glance that there was something exceptional about him. He moved in with one of my friends, and then another, and he and I were good friends until he became famous, circa 1983.

Basquiat at the Mudd Club in 1979

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…


From 1977 to 1982, roughly. Isaiah's, a reggae club in an upstairs loft on Broadway between Bleecker and Bond  approx. '77-'79; the Mudd Club from its opening on Halloween 1978 until it started getting press three or four months later (and then there would be huge crowds inside and out); Tier 3 on White Street and West Broadway (tiny, but excellent sounds), 1980-81; Squat Theater on 23rd Street around '79-'81, irregular as a dance venue but *the* place for the all-too-brief punk-jazz efflorescence; the Roxy around 1982--a roller disco that once a week would become a sort of hiphop-punk disco, often with Afrika Bambaataa on the decks. And sometime around '77 or '78 a gay friend once took me to the Loft, which I'm sure you've read about; it fully lived up to the hype.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…

White people attempting to dance to white rock, pretty much always the case until 1973 or so, when a great many people of my acquaintance suddenly "discovered" James Brown. And then the last three decades, when dancing opportunities have been few and far between.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?

My first real dance experiences were all in gay discos, early '70s (I'm straight, but had a gay best friend): the (old) Limelight on Sheridan Square, Peter Rabbit's on West Street, and the amazing Nickel Bar on 72nd Street - where Robert Mapplethorpe, among others, would go to pick up young black men, and where the level of the dancing was so amazing I didn't dare attempt to compete.

Summer of 1974 in Paris: Le Cameleon on rue St.-Andre-des-Arts, a tiny African disco in a barely ventilated cellar - but it was the summer of "Soul Makossa." Nine years later I was back in Paris and Le Cameleon had moved to a much larger aboveground space--an exhilarating experience.

Also, besides the venues noted in #3, the Rock Lounge (sleazy, but good music) succeeded in the same space on Canal Street by the Reggae Lounge, circa '82; the World on 2nd Street a few years later (too sceney for words, but you could shut your eyes); assorted after-hours spots such as Brownie's on Avenue A (not to be confused with the legit rock club of the same name that succeeded it), although drugs were more of a priority than dancing or music in those places. Post '83 I can only remember the short-lived but excellent Giant Steps--a jazz disco--and a series of retro-soul clubs (don't remember their names, alas).

6. When and where did you last dance?


The New Year's Eve before last, a private party in Tivoli, New York, a pretty good techno mix.

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?

Tie: "One Nation Under a Groove," Funkadelic; "Got to Give It Up," Marvin Gaye.

All questionnaires welcome, just answer the same questions - or even make up a few of your own - and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires).

Remembering Bloody Sunday 1972

On  January 30th 1972, the British state killed 13 unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Derry (a 14th died as a result of their injuries a few months later). The dead, who included seven teenagers, were:

John (Jackie) Duddy (aged 17)

Patrick Joseph Doherty (31)

Bernard McGuigan (41)

Hugh Pious Gilmour (17)

Kevin McElhinney (17)

Michael Gerald Kelly (17)

John Pius Young (17)

William Noel Nash (19)

Michael M. McDaid (20)

James Joseph Wray (22)

Gerald Donaghy (17)

Gerald (James) McKinney (34)

William Anthony McKinney (27)

John Johnston (59)

The Bloody Sunday massacre of 30 January 1972 came after four years of popular insurgency in the north of Ireland, sparked by the civil rights marches of 1968. The immediate lead up to the day was described in the text  'From Bloody Sunday to Trafalgar Square' which I had a hand in producing following the 1990 London poll tax riot:

"What became known as Bloody Sunday then has often been, and frequently still is believed to have been, an act of undisciplined slaughter perpetrated by blood-crazed Paras. This assumption though is wrong and to a large extent lets the British establishment off the hook. By assuming that soldiers "ran amok" it puts the blame on individual soldiers who pulled triggers and killed people. Bloody Sunday was a planned, calculated response to a demand for civil rights, designed to terrify organised protesters away from protesting. It fits easily into the catalogue of British involvement in Ireland as a quite logical and even natural event" (Fred Holroyd, ex-British Army Intelligence Officer.)

In August 1971 internment without trial was introduced. On the tenth, Operation Demetrius was launched. 342 people were arrested and nine people killed by troops. In this period experiments in sensory deprivation torture were carried out on some people arrested, with the aim of psychologically breaking them. With hoods placed over their heads, they were made to stand spread-eagled against a wall balanced on their fingertips. They were kept like this for four or five days, being bombarded with white noise and beaten if they moved, denied food, drink, sleep, or access to toilets. At intervals they were taken up in a helicopter and thrown out while just a few feet off the ground having been told that they were hundreds of feet up (they were still wearing their hoods).

In protest at internment, a rent and rates strike was organised which attracted the support of some 40,000 households. By October this had escalated to non-payment of TV, radio, car licences, road tax, ground rent, electricity, gas and hire purchase (this a good idea that we should imitate- after all why stop at not paying the poll tax?). In response to this crisis the Payments of Debt Act was passed, allowing debts to be deducted directly from benefits- no doubt our rulers remembered this idea when they dreamt up the poll tax.

The introduction of internment was accompanied by a 12-month ban on all demonstrations. Despite this, on January 30 1972 tens of thousands of people attended a demonstration in Derry. The state's response to this act of defiance was a cold-blooded massacre. CS Gas and water cannon had already been used by the time the Parachute Regiment came onto the streets and opened fire on the crowd. The Army claimed that they were returning fire, but forensic tests on the 14 people killed showed that none of them had had contact with weapons and no weapons were found anywhere near the bodies'.

The official Bloody Sunday Inquiry eventually concluded in 2010 that the dead were innocent. But for years, the authorities attempted to hide the truth, with an earlier official investigation (the 1972 Lord Widgery report) including all kinds of smears and false claims that the soldiers had come under attack from gunfire and bombs. The fight for the truth was carried on for years by the victims' relatives and their supporters in the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign.

1990s Bloody Sunday Marches in London

For many years the main mobilisation of the Irish solidarity movement in Britain was for the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march each January. I went on these marches in the 1990s, they typically attracted between two and five thousand people and started or finished in a north London area with a high Irish population like Kilburn or Archway.

Report of 1991 London Bloody Sunday demo from An Phoblact, 7th February 1991. The march went from Kilburn to Hyde Park, stopping at the Paddington Green police station in Edgware Road, notorious as the place where many people were taken after being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Speakers included Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who has been framed for bombings in the 1970s and released after a long campaign in 1989.

Report of 1991 demonstration - Troops Out, March 1991

A feature of the Bloody Sunday marches was that the far right (BNP etc.) often mobilised to oppose them, so that in the pubs and streets surrounding the demonstrations there would be skirmishes between anti-fascists and racists. In 1990 for instance, three Anti Fascist Action (AFA) members were jailed after notorious Nazi skinhead Nicky Crane was dragged out of a taxi in Kilburn in the vicinity of the Bloody Sunday march.  The biggest trouble was on the Bloody Sunday march in 1993, when hundreds of fascists attempted to attack the march at the assembly point in Hyde Park and then again along Edgware Road. 376 fascists were arrested before the march made it to Kilburn where the speakers included Gerry Duddy, whose brother Jack was killed in 1972. 

1993 flyer for march called by Bloody Sunday March Organising Committee
(Troops Out Movement, Irish in Britain Representation Group, Women & Ireland Network,
Black Action and the Wolfe Tone Society)

Report of the 1993 Bloody Sunday March in London 

(written at the time by European Counter Network, London)

'On Saturday 30 January 1993 around 2000 people took part in the annual Bloody Sunday march in London. The march commemorates the day in 1972 when 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry in the north of Ireland.

This year the British National Party and other fascist groups had announced their intention to stop what they called an "IRA march". For weeks before the march they leafleted football matches and other venues in an attempt to mobilise support.

On the day more than 350 fascists were arrested by the police, although only five were subsequently charged. The police delayed the start of the Bloody Sunday march, supposedly because of the fascist presence along the route. Eventually the march organisers informed the police that the demonstration was going to start, whether the police allowed it or not. At this point the police backed down and made no further attempt to stop the march.

As the march made its way from Hyde Park to Kilburn, small groups of fascists made occasional pathetic attempts to attack and provoke the march. However nobody was injured, and no demonstrators were arrested.

At the rally at the end of the march there were a number of speakers. These included the brother of one of those killed on Bloody Sunday, a speaker from Sinn Fein, Jim Kelly from the Casement Accused Relatives Committee (whose son is serving life imprisonment in relation to the killing of two soldiers at a Belfast funeral in 1988), and a speaker from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism who compared the situation in Ireland to the rise in fascist attacks in Germany and elsewhere'.

Report from Troops Out, March 1993. Speakers on 1993 London Bloody Sunday demo included Jim Kelly of the Casement Accused Relatives Committeee, Unmesh Desai (Campaign Against Racism and Fascism), Ken Livingstone MP, Mick Conlon (Sinn Fein) and Gerry Duddy whose 17 year old brother Jack was shot dead on Bloody Sunday

1994 demo leaflet

The 1994 London Bloody Sunday demonstration

Report of 1994 demo with speakers including Ken Livingstone MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Hossein Zahir of Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (from An Phoblact, 4 February 1991)

1998 London demo flyer

1998 demo in London

Martin McGuinness speaks in London on 1998 Bloody Sunday demo

Bloody Sunday March in Manchester 1995

In 1995 the national Bloody Sunday march took place in Manchester. I noted at the time: ‘The march went well, it was as big as any of the recent London ones (about 2000), and there were four flute bands from Scotland. Two of them were right next to each other which made an amazing soundclash especially when we stopped under bridges'. There were clashes between AFA and fascists in the Clarence pub and along Oxford Road.

'Justice for the Casement Accused' banner in Manchester - an infamous miscarriage of justice case in Belfast.



Derry 1992: the twentieth anniversary 

In Ireland, one of the biggest remembrance mobilisations was in Derry itself in 1992 on the 20th anniversary. I was there and wrote this report for the 56a Info Shop Bulletin (May 1992):

'My first real taste of the British military presence came when the bus bringing us from Blefast was stopped at an army checkpoint outside of Derry. Troops boarded the bus, with one soldier walking slowly up the bus pointing his rifle at the heads of passengers.  In Derry itself the 'security forces' were keepong a low profile (by Irish standards), presumably because of the large international press presence. A low profile involved three helicopters in the sky, armoured police land rovers following the march and heavily armed RUC officers overlooking the route.

The march, organised by the Bloody Sunday Initiative, came at the end of a week of events in the city on the them 'One World, One Struggle' to mark the anniversary of the massacre. Thousands of people marched from the Creggan Estate, through the Bogside and into the Guildhall Square in the City Centre - the planned destination of the 1972 demonstration. As well as contingents from different parts of Ireland, there were supporters from Britain, Germany and elsewhere. A huge 50-foot long banner proclaimed 'We are the people of struggle, ours is the culture of chnage'. Relatives of those killed in 1972 marched at the front, and pictures of the dead were carried by marchers, as well as being displayed on murals along the route). At the end of the route a large crowd listened to speeches from Gerry Adams and Bernadette McAliskey.

Young children threw bottles and stones at the police vehicles (already colourfully decorated by paint bombs), but apart from this traditional local custom there was no trouble. However on the way back to Belfast, a window was smashed in our bus by Loyalists. Two people had to go to hospital to have their eyes examined for glass injuries. Within ten days of the demo three people had been killed by an RUC officer at Sinn Fein's Falls Road offices in Belfast, and five more people had been killed by a pro-British loyalist gang in a bookmakers shop in Belfast's Ormeau Road'.

Relatives lead the 1992 Derry march

So is Bloody Sunday now only of historic interest? No, it is a reminder of the murderous ruthlessness of the establishment when it thinks it may be losing. Prime Minister Edward Heath and the top brass of the army sent the soldiers in that day, and none of them were ever held to account. And in these times when we are supposed to believe that all soldiers are 'heroes' and to welcome the army without question into our schools and our streets, we should not forget that one of their historic functions is to kill civilians when the police lose control.

Bernadette McAliskey told the 1992 rally: ' I remember coming down that hill on that day 20 years ago. People were thinking "What can they do to us?", we are still here after internment and after gassing. But Billy Gallagher said to me "There will be murder in this town before the day is out'. And there was... On that day we knew real, naked fear for the first time. When the bullets were fired, people dived to the ground and crawled away like dogs in fear of their masters... Something else, an innocence died on Bloody Sunday. It was then that we realised that governments kill people'.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

The best known song referring to the events is U2's somewhat ambivalent Sunday Bloody Sunday. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a different song with the same name on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City:

Is there any one amongst you
Dare to blame it on the kids?
Not a soldier boy was bleeding
When they nailed the coffin lids

Bloody Sunday (This is a Rebel Song) by Hot Ash (1991):

At the Free Derry Corner the slaughter began
Some people fell and some people ran
Our civil rights banner was stained bloody red
At the barricades there they shot three people dead

[post updated 10 June 2022 with additional photos - I have donated photos, leaflets etc. to the Mayday Rooms archive, who are collecting material related to the Troops Out Movement and related Irish solidarity organisations].

More posts on Ireland

The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town: Luton 1980-81

May Days in Dublin 1994

Time for Peace, Time to Go: demonstrations in Belfast, Dublin and London 1994

The Art of Parties

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of anarchism, poetry, literature and essays edited by Cantine, with contributors including Paul Mattick, Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman. It was reprinted in the Portland-based journal Communicating Vessels (Fall/Winter 2008-9). There are more Retort articles here - it was published in New York in the 1940s and 50s.

A 1950s report of a 1920s retro party might seem obscure even for this site, but there are some interesting reflections on the art of parties.

'On last March 24th, in Greenwich Village, a party, was thrown for the ostensible purpose of commemorating the 1920s. The editors of Retort, being at the time on one of their occasional visits to New York, attended. It was a fairly large party — upward of 100 people, most of them costumed in the styles of the period — either authentic or reasonably faithful representations. There was a competent Dixieland jazz band and an adequate amount of drink, the price of admission being a bottle. The party was held in a commodious sculptor's studio on the top floor of a loft building in a non-residential section of the Village, so there was both plenty of room and sufficient isolation to permit complete freedom from the usual urban inhibitions about noise.

Yet, in spite of all these manifest advantages, the party, as a party, and especially as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the '20s, didn't really come off. There was a good deal of boisterousness, some fairly wild dancing, and a determined effort on the part of the sponsors to keep things moving, but the atmosphere was not at all that of the period that was supposed to be commemorated, and the level of intensity that a really good party attains was never observable. The present writer, who has a very warm feeling for the '20s, perhaps because he was just a little too young to take part in the revels of that era, but old enough to have witnessed some of them, stayed on to the bitter end, hoping that  something might turn up, but unfortunately the evening just wilted away, and when at 3 or 4 in the morning the last remaining revelers began looking for their coats, it was as if nothing had happened.

To the connoisseur of parties — and in the '20s, the party was an art form with many zealous devotees, not a few of whom gave their lives as a result of their single-minded dedication to art — a party is not really successful unless something happens other than the usual banalities of passings out, corner seductions, et al. Exactly what is supposed to happen is impossible to foresee (this is the chief charm of the party as an art form). At some point in the evening, usually well after midnight, when the more inhibited guests have gone home and the rest are sufficiently liquored up to be ready for anything, a sort of spirit of the party begins to take over, fusing the participants into a spontaneous organic whole which is capable of very curious and memorable acts.

At the party in question, the focal point of the evening was the so-called Charleston Contest, and had the party been sufficiently alive, this could have been the spark that started things moving. As it turned out it was merely an exhibition of rather extreme dancing (none of it the Charleston) with most of the people reduced to spectators while a dwindling number of couples competed. I can recall parties in the '20s when an event of this nature suddenly evolved into a mock revival meeting or voodoo ceremony, with everyone taking part, or at least experiencing the excitement — a sort of pseudo-religious ecstasy that could be quite breathtaking.

Of course, such a performance is only possible in an entirely spontaneous andabandoned atmosphere, and the heavy aura of self-consciousness that hung over this party was a serious detriment to even bogus spirituality. Perhaps we who have endured the terrible '40s are unable to recapture the fine, free and essentially naive gusto for wickedness that characterized the lighter side of the '20s. The '20s, despite the fond belief of its Flaming Youth, was — at least in perspective — a very innocent period. There was something ingenuous and good-natured about its revolt against Victorianism. The bottomless pit that the First World War had opened up before the Lost Generation was a shallow ditch compared to that which our generation has witnessed, and the consequent cynicism was childlike and lighthearted, in comparison to the numb apathy that is characteristic of the more advanced youth of today.

The "wild" party was the perfect vehicle for expressing this spirit, especially since, as the result of Prohibition — that last desperate stand of the forces of Puritanism — the simple act of taking a drink was transformed into a wicked and excitingly illegal event. (Today, the youth must resort to the more deadening narcotics to achieve a similar thrill). A party in the '20s that commemorated the '90s was a lively, good-natured spoofing of the previous generation's foibles; we of the '50s, with our prevailing atmosphere of doom and disintegration, are hardly in the proper mood to give the same sort of treatment to the youthful follies of our parental generation'.

Police use UV ink at Occupy Montreal

Bouncers tricks and bass lines at the eviction of Occupy Montreal:

'Occupy protesters “branded” with UV ink: Montreal police borrow tactic from club bouncers to stop protesters from returning to public square


Occupy protesters in Montreal were dismayed to find they had been marked by police with a special ink that is only visible in UV light after being arrested during a raid of Victoria Square Friday. Police told CTV Montreal they borrowed the technique from bouncers at clubs and bars and it is meant to mark protesters who might return to the square.

But they apparently weren’t so forthcoming with at least one protester. “They wrote on my hand with a permanent marker and then after I felt something pointy and metallic scraping across my skin,” wrote protester Nina Haigh on Facebook, continuing: 'I immediately asked “What are you doing” and they simply said we wrote on you with a pen and showed me a bunch of various pens in her hand. I didn’t argue about it and I was unable to look at my hands as they were tied behind my back with zipties. As soon as I was released I looked at my hands and there was no ink on them from a pen. …

This morning we tested my hands under a black light and sure enough there was a number 2! The freaky thing is this is IN my skin, washing my hands and scrubbing with abrasives will not get this off…. perhaps in several months of my skin cells renewing themselves if will eventually fade.What ever ink that is in there is irritating my skin slightly and its a very terrible feeling that they put a substance in my body with out my consent and then later lied about it' (Salon, 30 November 2011).

This took place during the eviction of the Occupy Montreal camp on 25 November, as reported in The Link, 29 November 2011:

'In the end, Occupy Montreal didn’t go out with a flash bang, but with a bass line. Exactly six weeks after the global Occupy phenomenon came to the city, Victoria Square was a place transformed, then transformed again.  Gone was the intricate maze of shelters and structures. Gone were the kitchen and library areas. And gone were many of the inhabitants of the tent city, kicked out by members of the Service policière de la Ville de Montréal on Nov. 25.

Still, despite the naked landscape of the square compared to the bustle and crowds that had been a mainstay for the past month and a half, on Saturday afternoon, a few hundred people came back to the site to discuss what they had been a part of, and where the movement will go now.  Unlike the violent end to the Occupy camps in New York, Oakland, and UC Davis, Montreal’s version didn’t end in clashes with the cops—instead, it ended with a concert. Local legends Bran Van 3000 performed a stripped-down set marked with the refrain, “Love is in the air.” [Bram Van 3000 are best known in the UK for their track Drinkng in LA]...

Today, the tents have been torn down, and the inhabitants have all gone back to wherever they came from. All that’s left is the question that’s been levied at the movement since the beginning: what’s next? What do you do when a protest predicated on the physical occupation of a location no longer physically occupies that space?

“That’s a good question,” said di Salvio. “Even in the middle of summer we were wondering what was going to happen in the winter. We’re human, and it gets very cold". Rather than look at the winter as a time for bonds to weaken, di Salvio, who had also paid a visit to New York City to check out Occupy Wall Street, thinks that breaking up the camp will result in different kinds of organization—digital and physical—that will lead to bigger things when the temperatures rise again in the spring...It’s almost like a tour: you go and reinforce and recharge to meet up again next summer.”

Swing as Surrealist Music

Cultural Correspondence (1975-83) was a remarkable US-based radical journal with a particular focus on popular culture. Its entire archive is now available online and is a real treasure trove. I've been browsing through a 1979 special on surrealism, which has lots of music and dance related content. The following text is by the American philosopher Horace Meyer Kellen (1882-1974), an extract from his 1942 book Art and Freedom. I would certainly take issue with its association of jazz and swing (and by implication black people) with the 'primitive' - these developed as modern urban musics created by sophisticated virtuoso musicians. But the text does express very well the enthusiasm of its followers in that period for a music that seemed to embody liberation:

SWING AS SURREALIST MUSIC

'The musical equivalent of surrealism in painting and literature is not obviously connected with either its theory or practice. It develops as a practice entirely innocent of theory, as an unwilled expression of alogical spontaneity, of irresponsible, personal invention unenchanneled by form, unchecked by musical knowledge or learned tradition; develops thus with all the differentiae which the connoisseurs ascribe to surrealist creations. The name for it is Swing. Its native habitat is the United States of America, and it is indigenous to the southern portion, especially to the Mississippi riverfront at New Orleans. Unlike its literary and pictorial parallels, which sustain a local life already below the level of subsistence among selected groups of intelligentsia, Swing has attained a world-wide diffusion among all classes and occupations. The event is natural enough. Verbiform and graphic symbols require interpretation; sheer sonorous rhythm does not. Swing is caused in a medium which issues from and speaks to Dr. Freud's Unconscious direct, without disguise, without distortion...

...Swing arrived as the latest phase of a progression from Ragtime through Jazz. The trick of heightening emotional tension by opposing one rhythm to another became conspicuous as a practice about the same time that post-impressionism made its start. The matrix of Swing is said to have been opposed and mixed body-rhythms of the pasmala as danced in New Orleans bawdy-houses and honky tonks. The manner of mixing and opposition was carried over from dancing bodies to  sounding musical instruments. Popular songs so treated were said to be "ragged," and the treatment came to be called Rag-time. The singers and dancers and players who devised Ragtime were American Negroes with remnants of an eroding African culture in their body-rhythms, in their social habits and in their personal outlook. They were primitives indigenous to industrial civilization, with its timeclocks, its rigid divisions of the hours of the working day, its patterns of machine-logic and rationality. Negro Ragtime was the beginning of a break from that. In less than a generation the Negro's social heartbreak was absorbed into Ragtime's terpsichorean breakdown and Ragtime transmuted to Jazz. The vehicles of the American Negro's heartbreak is the Spiritual and Jazz, which is said to derive from jaser, an Acadian word meaning to gabble, to chatter, is the compenetration of the rag and the spiritual. Body, voice, wind and percussion instruments are its vehicles.

Jazz began to spread through the great industrial cities of the North American continent about the same year that the First International Exhibi-ion of Modem Art began its epoch-making trek across the States. This exhibition, which for the first time brought before the unaccustomed eyes of Americans the works of all the schools and cults that Europe had bred in two generations, had been arranged under the auspices of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Ragtime, which might be said to correspond to the cubist phase of the pictorial and verbiforrn arts, spread to Europe while modernist painting and poetry were acquiring a vogue in America. The four years o' the First World War were a plowing of a cultural soil wherein Jazz could take deep roots, and when the War ended it flowered indeed. . . .

The metronomic noises of the railroads and factories, the monotonous roar of the cities de-manded their rhythmic compensation. Even  formal music brought them forth. Percussion and wind instruments — brasses, saxophones, trombones, xylophones, bells — became more noticeable in orchestras. To atonality or to polytonality, which dropped modulation, which set key against key and scale against scale, was joined a continuous shift of rhythm or a contrapuntal opposition of many rhythms. In 1893, Dahomey Negroes, beating tom-torns for the entertainment of gaping Americans at Chicago's World Fair, had, by using feet and heads as well as hands, produced a triple cross rhythm which constituted an unconscious counter-point of rhythms. . .

Formal professional music, however modem, somehow failed to release the emotions which the industrial workday blockaded and starved. Night, that so long had been the time, not for living, but for sleeping away the fatigues of the living day, became conspicuously the time for living. The existence of the folk of the industrial cities is now a cultural schizophrenia of day-life and night-life. Day is the time when they earn their livings, night is the time when they live their lives. During the day most people are producers, disciplined to the machine, their bodies held to its rhythm, their minds constrained to its motions. By night, they are consumers; their body-rhythm seeks to recover its native physiological patterns, their movements search to resume the human form appropriate to autonomous human function. The extraordinary spread and influence of Swing testifies that in it the seeking and searching come to a haven; that it owns the power of gratifying the needs which launch them. Also its well-spring is the Negro of the urban jungle in New Orleans; also its centers of power are the great industrial areas — Chicago, New York, London, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo.

Atonal, polyrhythmic, Swing cuts itself loose from every rule and canon that tradition has brought down or craftsmanship confirmed. It asks of the performer two things, a maximum of virtuosity on his instrument, a maximum of spontaneity in his performance. That must needs be sheer, unrestricted improvisation, the free, the anarchic expression of his Unconscious, undisguised and unashamed. Nor is the expression sonoriform only. His whole body collaborates: as he plays, he dances, he acts, he sings, he leaps and twists and weaves like an acrobat, and the different behaviors pass seamlessly into and out of one another. He becomes the leader, not only of his band, but of his audiences: they step from their seats into the aisles and dance with him in an ecstasy — orgiastic or mystical or both according to the observer's lights — of release and self-recovery. It is the liberation of Dionysos from Apollo, of the living organism from the automatic machine, an insurgence of the depths into a conscious experience without connection and without analogue, though perhaps revivalist religious gatherings do enfold likenesses wherein convert and jitterbug are one under the skin. Swing might with good reason be called surrealism in excelsis'.

(full text below- click to enlarge)

Halloween in London

London Halloween
Costume 2011

Halloween weekend in London, and the streets were full of zombies, witches and men wrapped in bandages. White make up and fake blood. The fancy dress theme seems to have spilled beyond horror into generic carnivalesque costume. On the way to a house party in Brixton on the Saturday night a pantomime horse crossed the road in front of us, and a man ran down the road dressed up as a flying squirrel.

At the party a DJ dressed up as a penguin span the obligatory Michael Jackson's Thriller to a party including a crocodile, a parrot, the snow queen from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (handing out Turkish delight), a bat, two suicide bombers, Amy Winehouse and somebody dressed up in a take on one of Louise Bourgeois' costumes from her performance piece Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts (seemingly somebody had a similar idea at a feminist art themed Halloween ball in New York in 2010).



Louise Bourgeois in 1978

 

Erica Magrey, New York Halloween Costume 2010

 

New York 1977: when the lights went out

The Trammps' disco classic The Night the Lights Went Out (1977) commemorates an actual historical event in that year - the New York blackout. In The Trammps' account this was an occasion for sex in the unlit darkness:

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, I wanna know)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City

Don't you know that I was making love
(She was making love)

I remember on the 13th of July
The only light was the light up in the sky
New York had black-out for 25 hours or more
And nobody really knows the reason why...

Politicians said it was a pity
But that was the night they call it love city
So I took my lady by the hand
And led her to love me, love me, love me!

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, yeah)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City



But sex wasn't the only thing on New Yorkers' minds - the power cut also prompted mass looting. John Zerzan celebrated this aspect in an article published in the Detroit-based radical paper Fifth Estate (August 1977):

New York, New York

“Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time; Seeing the City Disappear”, Wall Street Journal headline, 15 July 1977

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great Bastille Day break-out unfolded: “People are going wild in the borough of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload.” Another cop added later: “Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they looted, they burned.”

At about 9:00 p.m. on July 13 the power went out in New York for 24 hours. During that period the complete impotence if the state in our most ‘advanced’ urban space could hardly have been made more transparent. As soon as the lights went out, cheers and shouts and loud music announced the liberation of huge sections of the city. The looting and burning commenced immediately, with whole families joining in the “carnival spirit”. In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a Pontiac dealer lost the 50 new cars in his showroom. In many areas, tow trucks and other vehicles were used to tear away the metal gates from stores. Many multistorey furniture businesses were completely emptied by neighborhood residents.

Despite emergency alerts for the state troopers, FBI and National Guard, there was really nothing authority could do, and they knew it. A New York Times editorial of July 16 somewhat angrily waved aside the protests of those who wondered why there was almost no intervention on the side of property. “Are you kidding?” the Times snorted, pointing out that such provocation would only have meant that the entire city would still be engulfed in riots, adding that the National Guard is a “bunch of kids” who wouldn’t have had a chance.

The plundering was completely multi-racial, with white, black and Hispanic businesses cleaned out and destroyed throughout major parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Not a single “racial incident” was reported during the uprising, while newspaper pictures and TV news bore witness to the variously coloured faces emerging from the merchants’ windows and celebrating in the streets. Similarly, looting, vandalism, and attacks in police were not confined to the City proper; Mount Vernon, Yonkers and White Plains were among suburbs in which the same things happened, albeit on a smaller scale.

Rioting broke out in the Bronx House of Detention where prisoners started fires, seized dormitories, and almost escaped by ramming through a wall with a steel bed. Concerning the public, the Bronx District Attorney fumed, “It’s lawlessness. It’s almost anarchy.”

Officer Gary Parlefsky, of the 30th Precinct in Harlem, said that he and other cops came under fire from guns, bottles and rocks. He continued: 'We were scared to death... but worse than that, a blue uniform didn’t mean a thing. They couldn’t understand why we were arresting them'.

At a large store at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue, the doors were smashed open and dozens of people carried off appliances. A woman in her middle-50s walked into the store and said laughingly: “Shopping with no money required!”

Attesting to the atmosphere of a “collective celebration”, as one worried columnist put it, a distribution center was spontaneously organized at a Brooklyn intersection, with piles of looted goods on display for the taking. This was shown briefly on an independent New York station, WPIX-TV, but not mentioned in the major newspapers. The transformation of commodities into free merchandise was only aided by the coming of daylight, as the festivity and music continued. Mayor Beame, at a noon (July 15) press conference, spoke of the “night of terror”, only to be mocked heartily by the continuing liberation underway throughout New York as he spoke.

Much, of course, was made of the huge contrast between the events of July 1977 and the relatively placid, law-abiding New York blackout of November 1965. One can only mention the obvious fact that the dominant values are now everywhere in shreds. The “social cohesion” of class society is evaporating. New York is no isolated example.

Of course, there has been a progressive decay in recent times of restraint, hierarchy, and other enforced virtues; it hasn’t happened all at once. Thus, in the 1960s, John Leggett (in his Class, Race and Labour) was surprised to learn upon examining the arrest records of those in the Detroit and Newark insurrections, that a great many of the participants were fully employed. This time, of the 176 people indicted as of August 8 in Brooklyn (1,004 were arrested in the borough), 48% were regularly employed. (The same article in the August 9 San Francisco Chronicle where these figures appeared also pointed out that only “six grocery stores were looted while 39 furniture stores, 20 drug stores and 17 jewelry stores and clothing stores were looted”). And there are other similarities to New York, naturally; Life magazine of 4 August 1967 spoke of the “carnival-like revel of looting” in Detroit, and Professor Edward Banfield commented that "Negroes and whites mingled in the streets [of Detroit] and looted amicably side by side....”

The main difference is probably one of scale and scope — that in New York virtually all areas, even the suburbs, took the offensive and did so from the moment the lights went out. Over $1 billion was lost in the thousands of stores looted and burned, while the cops were paralyzed. During the last New York rioting, the ‘Martin Luther King’ days of 1968, 32 cops were injured; in one day in July 1977, 418 cops were injured.

The Left — all of it — has spoken only of the high unemployment, the police brutality; has spoken of the people of New York only as objects, and pathetic ones at that! The gleaming achievements of the unmediated / unideologized have all the pigs scared shitless'.

Mona's San Francisco: 1940s lesbian club

'After 1920 women who occasionally wore men's clothing and those who passed as men began to socialize more openly in cafes and night clubs. In Chicago two night clubs, the Roselle Club, run by Eleanor Shelly, and the Twelve-thirty Club, run by Becky Blumfield, were closed by the police during the 1930s because "women in male attire were nightly patrons of the places". Many of the couples who frequented these clubs had been married to each other by a black minister on Chicago's South Side. In San Francisco, lesbians met at Mona's, where, it was said "Girls will be Boys"'.

Source: San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project 'She Even Chewed Tobacco: A pictorial narrative of passing women in America' in 'Hidden from history: reclaiming the gay and lesbian past' by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey (Meridian Books, 1989).

This advert for Mona's Club 440 (440 Broadway, San Francisco) comes from San Francisco Life 1942:



This advert mentions Gladys Bentley, described as "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs" and "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Artist."

In his A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem, Eric Garber mentions Bentley's appearances in New York in the 1920s/30s:

'Perhaps the most famous gay-oriented club of the era was Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a narrow, smoky speakeasy on 133rd Street. The Clam House featured Gladys Bentley, a 250- pound, masculine, darkskinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat. Bentley, a talented pianist with a magnificent, growling voice, was celebrated for inventing obscene Iyrics to popular contemporary melodies. Langston Hughes called her "an amazing exhibition of musical energy." Eslanda Robeson, wife of actor Paul Robeson, gushed to a friend, "Gladys Bentley is grand. I've heard her three nights, and will never be the same!" Schoolteacher Harold Jackman wrote to his friend Countee Cullen, "When Gladys sings 'St. James Infirmary,' it makes you weep your heart out."

In the 1950s she appeared on Groucho Marx's TV show:

Occupy London: first thoughts

The various Occupy actions around the world at the weekend have varied in scale, intensity and political mood. Rioting and huge crowds in Rome, a big demonstration in Madrid, and an extension of the Occupy Wall Street movement into the heart of New York, with a demonstration in Times Square.

Anti-austerity protests based on the occupation of public spaces in the heart of the city have been building for months (Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, Syntagma square in Athens, not to menton Tahrir Square in Cairo and Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv). This weekend can be seen as a conscious internationalisation and that counts for something when a major trend in relation to the crisis of the global economy is a resurgence of populist nationalism.

The London action was smaller than New York, Spain or Italy, but respectable in terms of numbers - I would say there were a couple of thousand but difficult to be sure, as the crowd was split up by the police cordon. Unsuprizingly, police lines prevented entrance to Paternoster Square, home of the London Stock Exchange, but the crowd did manage to occupy the steps of St Pauls Cathedral. There were some surreal scenes such as people dressed up for weddings in the church making their way through the crowd, and tourists variously frustrated and entertained. I heard one American woman complaining about the protests say that she had come here to help our economy but she wouldn't be coming back!



Compared to previous actions in the City, Occupy the London Stock Exchange felt a bit lacking in energy/intensity. But then again while Stop the City in the 80s and J18 in the 90s aimed to cause havoc for a day and then disperse, the Occupy movement is in for a longer haul, with many people staying there all weekend (and we shall see how much longer). So maybe some conservation of energy was in order.

There was a mix of people there, good, bad and ugly according to your taste. It would be very easy to listen to a few of the latter and dismiss the whole movement out of hand, as for instance Ian Bone does ('One Thousand Cultists Kettled at St Pauls'). But I would say that it is currently too diverse, fluid and open to give up on - there's plenty of room for discussion and development.



And there's certainly plenty to argue about... The adulation of some for Julian Assange, who turned up on Saturday, certainly made me feel uncomfortable, as the guy seems to have a bit of a messiah-complex combined with some incoherent politics (leaving aside the rape accusation - he hasn't been tried yet after all).

A movement without visible leaders is not one that has necessarily solved the problem of leadership, i.e. how to create direction and momentum without giving rise to a self-serving elite (whether elected or self-appointed). Without consciously tackling this issue, the lack of leaders can just mean that the 'leader's chair' still exists even if it remains empty, just waiting to be filled by the first plausible demagogue/celebrity that comes along .

Likewise a movement that disdains politics is not a movement without political assumptions. There is a fundamental shared feeling of 'enough is enough', of the refusal of austerity, and the search for an alternative to a life subject to the fluctuations of the economy. That's all good, but then what?



There are some odd alternative economy models around in the occupations, notions of capitalism without finance capital (the 'real economy'), of monetary reform, of a resource-based economy that is beyond capitalism and communism (this is the line of the new-agey Zeitgeist Movement who had a banner on steps of St Pauls). It is not just that some of these ideas seem to have very little understanding of what capitalism actually is and misrepresent it as a conspiracy by a few rich bankers rather than a global mode of production and exchange. It's far worse than that, because some of these ideas have very murky antecedents and indeed dubious present-day associations.

A lot of 'monetary reform' notions just read like recycled 'Social Credit' ideas, as developed before the Second World War by CH Douglas. As Derek Wall pointed out in his article Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools (Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2003), Douglas was not only an extreme right wing racist, but his monetery ideas are saturated with an anti-semitic world view. Likewise, the Zeitgeist Movement basically rehash the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, simply subsituting the word 'bankers' for 'jews' (see Zeitgeist Exposed at the Third Estate).

At the Bristol occupation at the weekend this racist conspiracy theory view of capitalism was openly articulated by someobody telling the occupation that 'Zionists want a new world order'. What was disgraceful about this episode was that people dutifully repeated this poison and cheered him rather than kicking the guy out. And that whoever was responsible for 'Occupy Bristol update' on youtube thought this was uncontroversial enough to give the guy a platform.

The 'human microphone' thing in the occupations is in danger of becoming an absurd fetish. In Wall Street people repeated the phrases of speakers to make sure that people further back could hear speeches when a microphone was banned. In most cases where there is no ban it would be surely be better - and very simple - just to set up a PA or use a megaphone, like people have been for years. By the looks of the Bristol occupation, there was no need for anything as the crowd seemed small enough for everybody to hear. It did look like a religious 'call and response' exercise, and involved people in the bad faith exericse of speaking nonsense which on reflection I would hope many would prefer not to utter.

I know that there are plenty of good sound people camping out at St Pauls now, and I think it is very important to get involved and challenge reactionary ideas. To just walk away holding our noses could allow some of these dangerous ideas to get a foothold in the very high profile occupation movement.

Oh yes and this poster on Saturday really got on my tits: 'Go to work, follow fashion, watch TV, spend money, look happy, act normal, repeat after me. I am free'. Patronising activist superiority complex nonsense, looking down on the 'duped' proles. People who work, follow fashion and watch TV (I am guilty on all three counts, your honour) know when we get out of bed every morning that we are not really free, and we know when we have to spend money we haven't got what the economy is all about in a visceral way. And until we move, the 'movement' against capitalism is going nowhere.



See also: Occupy London Second Thoughts

1987: dancing in Brixton and beyond

The Acid House moment of the late 1980s, like the Punk moment a decade or so previously, is often presented as a kind of Year Zero where something entirely new exploded against a backdrop of boredom and mediocrity. To sustain this narrative it is necessary to pretend that nothing much was going on beforehand. Simon Reynolds' (generally excellent) Energy Flash is a case in point: 'In 1987, London clubland was as crippled by cool as ever. The Soho craze for rare groove (early seventies, sub-James Brown funk) represented the fag-end of eighties style culture, what with its elitist obscurantism... and its deference to a bygone, outdated notion of 'blackness''.

For me personally, the house and techno scenes of the early 1990s were a period of unprecedented intensity. But was the time before it really so dull? Not for me. January 1987 was the time I first moved down to live in London, initially squatting on Brixton's Tulse Hill Estate while working in Lambeth Council libraries by day. I remember that year as being a time of great musical innovation, as well as appreciation for some fine older music.

It was a time of amazing electronic beats - 1986 saw the release of Janet Jackson's 'Control' (produced by Jam and Lewis), 'Who is It?' by Mantronix and Joyce Sims' 'All n All'. A time when the possibilities of sampling were first being explored - 'Pump up the Volume' by MARRS and Coldcut's 'Say Kids What Time is It?' both came out in early '87, as did KLF's notorious '1987 - what the f*ck is going on?'. It was the golden age of Def Jam, with 'License to Ill' by the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy's debut 'Yo! Bum Rush the Show' both coming out that year too. I remember lying on the beach in Majorca that summer listening to it - if that was 'outdated blackness' it sounded good to me (though the big track that summer in Majorca was 'I Found Lovin'' by the Fatback Band, must have danced to that every night). And yes, a time of house music breaking through - Steve 'Silk' Hurley's Jack Your Body went to number one in Britain in January '87.

(Public Enemy actually played at the Brixton Academy in 1987 with Eric B & Rakim, as did on another night Run DMC and The Beastie Boys. I didn't go to these gigs though did see Public Enemy there a couple of years later)

In clubs you would hear an eclectic mix of all this with earlier soul and funk sounds. The latter was partly being rediscovered as a result of checking out the source of hip hop samples. For instance I remember dancing to Jean Knight's Mr Big Stuff at Wendy May's Locomotion at the Town and Country club in Kentish town, a Friday night feast of Stax, Motown and Northern Soul. Like many people, I'd first heard the chorus as a sample in 1987's Mr Big Stuff by Heavy D and the Boyz.

A Wendy May chart of tracks from the Locomotion - not sure of source of this, evidently a 1980s music paper!

'Free bus to Trafalgar Square from 1:00 am'

One of the first clubs I went to in London '87 was a night called Wear it Out, in a room above a pub in Brixton - the Loughborough Hotel. Music was a mixture of classic soul/funk and new beats. I know it was there that I first heard Prince's Sign o' the Times, which also came out that year. The same venue became a big part of Brixton nightlife in the late 1980s/early 1990s, going on to become a gay club where they played lots of Stock Aitken & Waterman dance pop and then from 1989 to 1997 the home of the Mambo Inn, legendary Latin & African music club.

Wear it Out flyer posted on Twitter by Ian Marsden, who recalled: 'We lived above the taxi office opposite and got a  mainly local crowd from leafletting  in Brixton and Camberwell. Prince was a staple. Collaborators/DJs were @deborahmarsden1, @WyattBedford, Susie Bonfield, Gin Murphy and @LucyOBrienTweet' (Lucy O'Brien, sometime NME journalist and author of books on women's music, recalls that she played Sign O' The Times DJing there. Apparently fellow NME writer Stuart Cosgrove also DJ'd there).

Danse Chase (or Dance Chase) upstairs at the Alexandra at Clapham Common had a similar musical mix of old and new. I remember hearing tracks there from Michael Jackson's Bad LP, another 1987 classic, on the day it came out. The image on the membership card, with its Keith-Haring-meets-the-Aztecs figures, was repeated on banners around the walls. I believe they were designed by promoter Kev Moore.

Danse Chase diversified into Northern Soul with what became the Southside Soul Club (some good memories of that place at Soul Source - photos of Dance Chase also sourced from there). They also had a jazz night (Hi Note), which was where I once saw Slim Gaillard.

This short film of dancer Keb Darge was shot at the Alexandra in that period:

Another Northern Soul night was Agent 00-Soul at the George IV in Brixton Hill. I remember there being some serious dancers there, including a guy in a wheelchair who put my wannabe Wigan Casino moves to shame.

Also went out sometimes to the 121 club in Brixton, the squatted anarchist centre at 121 Railton Road (later home to Dead by Dawn). Some friends of mine from the South West London Direct Action Movement put on a party there that year, I recall flyering the Prince Albert pub and then dancing to disco in the basement at 121.

One of the biggest nights was Dance Exchange at The Fridge on Saturdays in Brixton, a big dancefloor with banks of TVs around it. 1970s 'Rare Groove' was a big part of the sound there, with great tracks including Maceo & The Macks 'Cross the Tracks', Bobby Byrd's 'I know you got soul' and The Jackson Sisters 'I believe in Miracles'. But plenty of contemporary sounds too. And yes I wore the uniform of black denim (bought from Allders in Croydon) and Doc Marten shoes, with flat top from Andy's/Haircut Sir? at bottom of Tulse Hill.

Fridge programme, March 1986 (from Phatmedia)

It was a similar mix of the old and new at the PSV club in Manchester where I went a couple of times in that period (the club in Hulme, also known as the Russell Club and the Caribbean Club had previously been the location for the first Factory club). This flyer from 1987 gives a sense of the variety of music to be heard out in that year: Tackhead, Trouble Funk, Sly & Robbie, Eric B, Joyce Sims, Mantronix, Prince etc. (there's an account of PSV by Mancky, who recalls tracks including Jocelyn Brown ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’, InDeep ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’, Gwen Guthrie ‘Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent’, A Certain Ratio ‘Shack Up’ and Funkadelic 'One Nation Under a Groove').

The PSV - I didn't realize until recently that stood for Public Service Vehicles, it being at one time a social club for bus workers (photo by Richard Davies via Paul Wright on twitter)

Finally in Brixton there was the Prince of Wales, a gay club on the corner of Coldharbour Lane. A cheap night out - £1 in rather than £5 for the Fridge - my main memory of it is dancing to extended mixes of Madonna and Hi-NRG tracks like Taffy's I Love My Radio. There's still a pub there, but it's half the size of the old gay club which occupied that whole corner, including where the KFC is now. I think the club closed down in the late 80s having achieved some notoriety in the 1987 trial of serial killer Michael Lupo, who was arrested after being spotted in the place.

That gloomy ending aside, 1987 was a pretty good year!

(a really good take on London 1980s nightlife is You’re too Young to Remember the Eighties – Dancing in a different time, which Controlled Weirdness wrote for Datacide. Great tales of warehouse parties, the Wag, Mud Club etc. and the times when almost all legal clubs closed by 2 am)

Update, October 2021:

Found at archive.org, a review of London nightlife from issue no. 1 of LM magazine, January 1987 (pretty terrible Lifestyle Magazine not to be confused with later Living Marxism). The article mentions some rubbish clubs but does big up both Locomotion and The Fridge, the latter 'the hippest club outside the West End' with Jay Strongman playing 'Washington DC go-go, New York hip-hop, Chicago house music, old R&B and more traditional soul and funk in a cold but packed venue. While Brixton is not normally associated with trendiness, the multiracial mix that characterises today's club scene is no better expressed than here. Wear your Levi 501s'.  The Harp Club in New Cross (later the Venue) also gets a mention, didn't go Flim Flam night there but did go to indie/post-punk Million Rubber Bands/Totally Wired nights there.

@TheJazzDad on twitter noticed this article was written by Simon Goffe, later manager of Roni Size and working with Giles Peterson at Mistral Productions. 

'Come down to the Alexandra opposite Clapham Common tube... and blow your brains on a mixture of Northern and funk. Drinks are pub prices. Arrive early or you won't get in' (Black Echoes, 14 March 1987). Steppers at 414 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton also gets a mention - later Club 414.