It was late 1979, or early 1980, and I was leaning against the back wall reading a Marxist analysis of drugs in Rotterdam in a smartly-stapled student journal. When I looked up, I found the room filled with a dangerous mixture of skinheads and artists of the kind you couldn’t take home to your mother but could rely on to vote for Thatcher.
There were precious few women, and they mostly wore knit caps and demure jackets. The men around them created the slightest pockets of empty space, parade grounds which their nervous boyfriends would inevitably attempt to defend while anchoring themselves physically to the girl in question. A hand on the shoulder. A jerky slip of his palm into hers and an awkward squeeze of self-reassurance.
As the music began there came the customary throwing of bottles, the spitting, ironic and unironic Nazi salutes intermingled with cries of “oi!”, but it was a tired spectacle for me in comparison to the protective dance those men “keeping” their women performed to discourage even the briefest of sidelong glances. I spent the evening enraptured.
On the walk home a pair of drunk teen-agers ripped the sleeve of my overcoat in attempting to rob me and I spent the rest of the weekend struggling to mend it. Some time later I read in the same student journal that the musicians who had played that night were splitting up, claiming to have run out of ideas.
February 26, 2009, 2:33am Comments
