A Non-Catholic Walks Into a Gay Bar...
How the UK’s GenX Indie Kids Came Together
My older step-brother, Rick, loved to say he was a punk.
He was born in the last years of the boomer generation and was just about old enough to buy records when the Sex Pistols made it big. So that’s what he and his friend (Creepy Ade) did, and they called themselves punks.
But the most punk thing Rick ever did was wipe bogeys on the wall by his bed, and he ditched the whole genre when he realised that New Wave was the way to go. Out went the Pistols, X-Ray Spex, Buzzcocks and Sham 69, and in came Blondie, the Police, Elvis Costello and XTC. These were the trending, popular New Wave artists in the UK at the time, but among Rick’s bogey-covered records were less popular gems by artists like Devo, the Stranglers, Flying Lizards, Lene Lovich, Tubeway Army and various outfits with umlauts in their names.
Rick was no role model, but his record collection was sound. And as one of the first flush of UK GenX kids, I’m glad those tunes swirled around me at such a formative age.
It could have been different; I also had two sisters, one of whom was heavily into Motown and R&B, the other firmly into prog-rock. And while I appreciate the sophistication of Diana Ross, Billy Preston, the Commodores and Rose Royce, and the kooky virtuosity of Yes, Genesis and King Crimson, the girls were even older than Rick, so I obviously had to reject anything they liked.
Rick joined the military straight from school, because he was a fake punk who wanted to kill people for the Queen, despite calling her a fascist a couple of years earlier. He took his records with him but their vague alternative vibe remained.
Late-night radio and free music magazines took Rick’s place, educating me about Siouxsie Sioux, Mark E. Smith, the Cure, and the Bunnymen. That alternative vibe was amplified and it rattled around my toys and comics as they started to gather dust.
A handful of school friends shared this vibe, and our guts twitched at every sickly, overly processed offering on the daytime radio shows of the early 1980s. We shared copies of the music press and turned to experimental electronica, jangling post-punk, and various outlying oddities, old and new.
But we didn’t really know what to do with that vibe. We certainly didn’t think we were cool. In fact, I remember going to my school’s model railway club and whispering about the new Smiths album with my mate Keith. We were sixteen and not the slightest bit hip. The vicar (pastor) who ran the club kept throwing me suspicious looks all evening, as if he thought I was about to stuff the Flying Scotsman into my vintage cardigan and sell it for a pair of suede desert boots.
One day, Keith randomly invited me to his rowing club. His coach was looking for new blood, and current members were instructed to bring along any friends with the right physical build for the sport. I was tall and skinny and matched the brief perfectly.
I was freakishly useless at it and didn’t enjoy it at all, but I was fascinated to find that same off-trend music vibe among the younger rowers. They all had annoyingly cool t-shirts, demonstrating a solid familiarity with bands I was curious about. And they exchanged mix tapes and bootleg recordings of the same radio shows that I was listening to, alone and isolated on the other side of the galaxy it seemed.
Of particular relevance was the fact that there were a dozen girls in the club with these same interests. This was pivotal, not just hormonally, but also because I was tired of getting the same old male interpretation of everything about the music. So, I started to go along regularly to help with the boats and gear, and hoped that some of their coolness rubbed off on me.
It took me a while to realise that the reason I didn’t recognise any of these kids at all was that they went to St Mary’s, the local Catholic high school, and this had originally been the St Mary’s Roman Catholic High School Rowing Club. Keith’s connection to the club was through his neighbour, Girvan. Girvan had sisters, so Keith started rowing. Unlike me, Keith was an excellent rower.
My Mum did not approve of Catholics, having disposed of her very own Catholic by divorcing him several years earlier.
So, for me, with almost no knowledge of Catholicism outside of my big sister’s re-telling of The Exorcist, this was another world. An alternative dimension. Down the rabbit hole. But this setup was tolerated by my Mum as she knew Keith’s parents and assumed there would be no shenanigans.
Little did she know, but Keith and I started to join the St Mary’s kids (and their wider group of school friends) specifically for such shenanigans, absorbing the music of Lloyd Cole, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, The Violent Femmes and others, between fights and kisses at the local Irish Club. This was the second roughest bar I ever frequented, but was typical of the drinking holes you find near the dock-gates in port-towns.
A suggestion to find a new venue came up mid-brawl one night, when Tony Logan yelled, ‘They don’t treat you like this at Schubert’s!’ as the Club’s landlord dragged him out of the door into the soft Welsh rain to give him a fat lip. The Pogues sang ‘Sally MacLennane’ as maybe twenty of us abandoned our punch-ups and walked out in unified protest at Tony’s treatment.
It was a long walk in the rain from the dock-gates into town, but together we made it in good time, passing around ancient hip-flasks of cheap whiskey that made the boys shudder and the girls dance in the puddles.
The bouncer at Schubert’s looked us up and down as we arrived. It was down an alley, off a side street, behind some lock-ups, on the wrong side of the tracks in a town that didn’t have a right side. We were all giggles, thick ears and damp vintage clothes. We were obviously committed to entering.
He opened the door wide.
I don’t think any of us really knew at the time that Schubert’s was originally established as a gay bar (the owner’s term, not mine). But if you didn’t know before, handy signs on the dark green walls and above the bar spelled it out explicitly. Often with diagrams.
It was deep, and dark, and the air was thick with patchouli and cigarette smoke. Alien Sex Fiend’s ‘Trip to the Moon’ played in the background as we bunched up inside the door. Girvan mentioned something about not being in Kansas anymore, and I agreed with some excitement.
A short, pale barman with a Guana Batz t-shirt and red hair spiked forward like an ironing board gave us a surprised smile from behind the bar.
A few of us asked for Guinness but found that there were no beers on tap. Schubert’s, it emerged, was also known as a bier-bar, and had a reputation for its imported high-end European beers.
Keith and I couldn’t afford the posh stuff and opted instead for their roughest rum. Somehow, all the St Mary’s kids seemed happy to pay for the Chimay, Duvel and La Trappe.
We were the first to stumble up the couple of steps to the seating area, where maybe thirty more kids of a similar age crowded around a long table that was busy with empty glasses and full ashtrays. Every one of them seemed to be dressed in black, jangling with bangles and necklaces, with outrageous frills spilling from the necks and cuffs of their leather jackets and mohair sweaters, their heavy makeup peeking through huge plumes of back-combed hair. The glowing tips of their cigarettes danced slowly in the dark, avoiding the heavily-lacquered hair-dos. They were curious and cheerful, and we smiled a hello to them.
We guessed this must have been a birthday gathering or something, and we pulled up chairs at one of several unused tables nearby without disturbing them. A deep, smoky voice rose from their table.
‘Hey, fellas,’ it said. ‘Don’t sit on your own.’
The whole group shifted around and made space for us, and we were beckoned with smiles and greetings. Keith and I slotted awkwardly into the gap they made, and the same voice called down to the bar.
‘Richard! Turn the lights back on!’
The barman with the hair laughed, apologised and switched a switch. A few dim house lights faded up, revealing a crowd of happy, beautiful, smiling goths*, chattering and laughing like pixies at a picnic. One of them was gleefully cutting a blood red birthday cake covered in pink candy penises and handing around slices (and extra penises) on black paper plates. Everyone introduced themselves to us, clinking glasses and offering cake. The St Mary’s kids joined us from the bar and were absorbed with the same chirpy hospitality.
The Smiths’ ‘Hand in Glove’ blared out, and we became a single, joyous unit.
*Our new friends were what would nowadays be called Trad Goths, and wouldn’t resemble modern day goths much at all.
This Schubert’s Crowd expanded further over time and became one of the foundations of the local alternative and independent (‘Indie’) music scene. We also had a well-known art college and an extremely famous music venue, and each had an alternative crowd of its own. All three groups would combine regularly at the evolving indie club nights and gigs, creating an overall local scene that was regularly referred to in the music press.
Many of us played in bands or acted as roadies and security for others. We would go to gigs and festivals en masse, take over whole restaurants for the night, book a hundred tickets whenever the Rocky Horror Show was playing, and some even braved joint holidays (the photos of goths on the beach were always amusing).
There were always stylish, connected and well-known people around us, and although we wouldn’t personally claim to be at the beating heart of the alternative scene, we were often told that if the Schubert crowd weren’t there, the scene wasn’t complete. We understood that we were moderately-sized fish in a pretty small pond, but we were connected to some huge fish in some global ponds, and we were credible and respected. And what had we been just a couple of years before? Weirdos, oddballs and nerds.
We frequented Schubert’s for around four years until Richard drank all the money and closed it down. We all matured and things changed, but we remained indie kids. I went up north to university and found the indie kids there, and when I became a postgraduate at another university closer to home I did the same again, hooking up with some of the old crowd for more grown up and serious shenanigans. Others moved around the globe and maintained their indie ways to the inevitable embarrassment of their own kids.
I mustn’t underplay the St Mary’s element of the story.
Catholics, and particularly Irish Catholics are in the minority where I come from. Attending the ‘Cafflick’ school made a young person statistically unusual, an alien in their own street, and immediately different. And in the last few decades of the Twentieth Century, Irish Catholics in the UK were distrusted, routinely abused and openly discriminated against. For people who were already inclined toward bigotry, the Troubles amplified that, but the sentiment had been around in the UK for centuries.
I mentioned my mother’s dislike of Catholics. I asked her why she would marry my Irish Catholic father if she felt that way.
He was apparently ‘too handsome to resist’, which I always thought was quite a shallow and offensive thing to say.
The St Mary’s kids had that experience of being different in common with us non-Catholic oddballs. But they had known that feeling for their whole lives, perhaps learning from generations of difference. And they had leaned into it, discovering a relative upside of being different well before the likes of Keith and I, with our petty preferences and whims rather than any actual demographic distinction.
This experience-of-difference seems to shine out of people who have been involved in alternative music scenes. Hopefully, we’re more able to understand the non-standard experiences of others and help prevent the discrimination that people with diverse characteristics go through. This has always been part of my world view and professional career, and I feel that it’s also identifiable in the career choices of other indie kids, who went into public services, the arts, healthcare, teaching and local politics.
Independently-minded kids (whatever their background) will often come across dissonance with their personal vibe, and people who might lean toward alternative lifestyles will always be given a side-eye by more conservative folks. But in my experience, it’s these kids who most quickly understand collective topics, community sensitivities and holistic approaches, and are fundamental to an empathetic and progressive society.
And if the people stare, then the people stare.
Thank you for stopping by. I hope everyone understood the Britishisms — I try to keep them to a minimum but let me know if you didn’t get something. Supportive comments and feedback are appreciated as ever.
