The Readers Wifes commemorate 60 years of buzzing yer tits off…
When Italian movie icon and “most beautiful woman in the world” Gina Lollobrigida cut the ribbon on a new coffee shop in Soho’s Frith Street in 1953 she couldn’t possibly have known she was actually lighting a touch paper that would ignite a new kind of youth culture in Britain. Neither could she have guessed that that culture and its related nightlife would burn for six decades and counting. It’s a fire that rages on today.
From today’s perspective it seems puzzling, and possibly even a little quaint, that coffee (coffee!) and the subsequent proliferation of cafés and bars spotted across our nation’s post World War II landscape heralded in a lot of things we’ve taken for granted ever since. That is, a particular type of nightlife fuelled by loud music and substances, and characterized by youthful abandon and frantic late nights.
And yet, combined with the emergence of the teenager as a recognisable social group (unbelievably, the term ‘teenager’ didn’t even exist until it was imported from the USA, along with superheroes and Elvis, at some point in the mid ‘50s) the zing from those exotic, imported coffee beans, fizzed up in a Gaggia machine, made for an explosive combination. Overnight, the kids were out en masse, wide awake and up for it until the wee small hours, to the extent that Her Majesty’s Soho constabulary were constantly rounding up gangs of them and dropping them home in a van. Let’s face it you just didn’t get quite the same effect from a milkshake.
Since that time, most – if not all – moments in youth culture have been associated with one stimulant or another, or sometimes a combination of legal and illegal highs. Those iconic ‘70s punks speeding through the night on a cheap amphetamine wrap had a lot more in common with ‘80s gays grinding along to Divine, poppers clenched firmly in fist, than either group would probably have realized. What they both shared was a determination to enhance the experience, to turn up sensation/brightness/contrast/volume and make the night last as long as possible – and to hell with tomorrow. Based on The Who’s album of the same name, the Mod movie and morality tale ‘Quadrophenia’ still best illustrates the heaven and hell of the drugs/nightlife/comedown experience.
“It’s a fire that rages on today”
Those Mods of the early ‘60s preferred their tidy little pills, their Dexys, Blackbombers and Purple Hearts (all legal at the time), to soundtrack frenetic nights of Motown and Ska, while the Hippies who followed them eschewed uppers entirely (looked down their noses at them, in fact) and blew their minds out to early Pink Floyd and Hendrix on lab-strength LSD and other assorted hallucinogens originally developed in pharmaceutical labs to treat all sorts of conditions from anxiety to childbirth.
In the mid ‘80s pioneering ravers returned from Ibiza and New York with MDMA and ecstasy tablets and set-up Acid House clubs, changing the soundtrack again and forging a DJ culture we can still recognize today. In the ‘90s, it all seemed to be about cocaine. Once the exclusive preserve of the jet set, coke suddenly went low grade and mass market, making dance nights edgier, harder, some would say nastier, not to mention fuelling a thousand Britpop gigs and gobshite after-hours conversations in the Atlantic or the Met Bar. By 1998, or so it’s been said, you could hear the sound of the teeth grinding in Central London all the way to Bournemouth.
And every time youth culture’s changed, the music from that culture has appeared to reflect the recreational drug of choice. Would The Sex Pistols have sounded so vicious and intense had their world not been steeped in lager and speed? Would those early house records have been so rushy and euphoric if they weren’t trying to mimic and enhance the effects of MDMA? It’s an interesting thought and one we’ll be debating at Readers Wifes present ‘On the Lash’ which is part of a bigger Duckie event called ‘Vauxhall Bacchanal’. Hosted at The Southbank Centre on the 10th August, Duckie will be exploring the pleasure and pain of getting off your head in a 12-hour event, involving David Hoyle, Neil Bartlett, Amy Lamé, The Caezars, Stewart Who, drugs agency Antidote… and we’ll be celebrating the 150th Birthday of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to boot.
• Readers Wifes present ‘On The Lash’ as part of Vauxhall Bacchanal at the Southbank Centre on Saturday 10th August at 5.30pm.
• They also DJ at the Duckie Summer Party on the same night from 9pm – 2am.
• More info at www.duckie.co.uk
