What makes youth clubs so uncool?
 Little Richard - definitely not youth club endorsed in the 1950s |
It must have only been a couple of years after my mother finally abandoned her attempts to make me attend mass at St Helen's on Sunday morning that she developed her obsession with youth clubs.
Why was it, she wondered, that I chose to spend my evenings with Vinnie and Den hanging around the chippie in Endbutt Lane rather than following the example of other decent boys in the neighbourhood and enrolling for the twice a week get-togethers at the Brownmoor youth club?
She had a point. Hanging around the chippie was not a stimulating way to spend an evening. There were occasional pleasures to be had: the minor thrill of persuading the man in the shop to add extra scraps to your sixpenny bag of chips, the comfort of finding a doorway which was deep enough to protect you from the wind and cold, the somewhat distant hope that this might be the night when you could catch a glimpse of some of the girls with short red skirts from Streatham House school.
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But in truth, the real attraction was much simpler. The chippie was not Brownmoor Youth Club. Vinnie and Den and I were hardly radical teenagers. We wouldn't have known the meaning of the word. But we were bound together by the sense that there was something uncomfortable, even disturbing, about allowing ourselves to be categorised as youth, as suitable subjects for a youth club and a youth leader and youth activities.
Each of us at one time or another had been to Brownmoor Youth Club. Each of us had joined in such youth activities as the table-tennis competition and the general knowledge quiz and the Friday night "youth dance" in which relations between boys and girls were carefully regulated by the youth leader whose periodic blasts on a whistle were a signal that existing foxtrot or quickstep partners should disentangle and choose a new partner from the nearest couple. (Den, who'd read about these things in a medical dictionary, called it the coitus interruptus dance)
|  The sight of such unfettered free movement made me regret every second I spent earning my bronze medal for the quickstep  |
There was, though, one youth club we all rushed to attend. When I was about 16, news came through that somewhere in Queens Drive, there was this place where the leader played all the latest records. There were no waltzes, or foxtrots or quicksteps. You could just stand there and listen or do the sort of crazy dancing that was banned in all the local dance-halls (I can still remember the large sign on the pillar nearest the stage in the New Brighton Ballroom which read "No Jitterbugging".)
Everything we'd heard was true. Our 61 bus dropped us outside a pub and then an arrow led us to an upstairs room which was bursting with the sound of Little Richard. We soon learned that the club's leader only played Little Richard. He'd take Rip it Up off the turntable and replace it with Good Golly Miss Molly and then get Tutti Frutti ready for the next play. And how people danced! The sight of such wonderful unfettered free movement instantly made me regret every second I spent the year before earning my bronze medal for the quickstep.
The place never had a name but it soon became a regular haunt. One night, Den, who had the same sort of trouble with his mum as I did with mine, asked the man who put the records on if this was "a proper youth club". The man, who never revealed his name, came straight to the point.
"If it was a youth club, mate, they wouldn't let someone like me inside."
And with that, he flipped Lucille off the turntable and replaced it with Long Tall Sally.
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