Pissed and Dancing

Photograph by depinniped

From The Spectator:

We took our drinks to the front row of empty tables and wondered whether to stand or sit. It seemed impolite to sit. But maybe Exmouth is a such a cool place, and the standard of rock’n’roll there so high, that sitting down is how they take their pub bands. So we sat down in the eye of a rock’n’roll hurricane with nothing between us and the band except ten feet of empty dance floor. An audience outnumbering the five-piece band by three had aroused a contrarian spirit in the band, and they were playing as if their lives depended on it. My friend is a rock chick and she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, nor the circumstances in which she was seeing it. She preferred their cover to the original, she yelled. ‘Society Rocks, darling,’ I yelled back.

The wall of sound collapsed. The number had finished. Deathly silence. Someone at the back of the room clapped half-heartedly or perhaps ironically. The singer said he was sorry if they’d woken someone up, and he hoped they were going to like this next one. Then the aural hurricane was restored with ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. Well, I for one didn’t intend sitting that one out. It would have been like sitting down to watch the closing of the gate at Hougoumont farmhouse. We tipped our gins down our throats and took to the dance floor, where we were immediately joined by an unkempt, elderly man whose principal dance move was to raise his arms and feel his way across the ceiling with his fingertips.

The band played for a solid hour and we got pissed and danced like dervishes in front of them. We had our mad night.

“What it takes to make Exmouth rock out”, Jeremy Clarke, The Spectator