Golden Memories: Nightclubs #3

Even though I had two or three favourites, my introversion had the strange effect of compelling me to sample every nightclub opportunity presented to me. They were many and varied.

Most of them only really offered extended drinking hours and the occasional decent record to cavort about to. One club was not only musically shallow, but physically shallow too, as a very tall friend split his head open on a dance floor light fitting (the final leap to Jimmy Page's guitar solo on 'Stairway to Heaven'). It was the only good song all night and it cost him two stitches.

As always, though, mediocrity often disguised hidden gems. There was an early art house session at a hotel with sixteen students playing weird jazz as dancers and jugglers made desultory appearances from the wings. A hard core punk club in Leeds, with ferociously aggressive young women in transparent blouses and Mohican hair cuts prowled the place looking for unwise eye contact. In Harrogate, there was a strange mix of strip clubs and tiny jazz joints with earnest saxophonists playing for hours without a break. TV personalities from 'Emmerdale Farm' would roam the wine bars, draped in sicophants.

But perhaps my preferred venue from the early 80's would be 'The Iron Balls' rock club.it was located in the cellar of a a vast tenement building, incongruously guarded by an ancient termagant at the pay desk and her two bodyguarding bouncers dressed in dinner suits. It was heavy metal heaven, with Jimi Hendrix look-a-likes, grungey blokes with fashionably greasy hair, a packed bar, and a gent's toilet which almost defied description.

Beery urine smells, fungal growths on the sweating walls, moans and groans from retching forms draped over toilet bowls, pills passing, and turds floating.

Yes, definitely my favourite.

As it would be for any discerning dilettante!