SlinkyMike
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- Joined
- Aug 26, 2021
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Bristol's remarkable clubbing legacy: A safe place for the absurd
How liminal clubbing spaces helped to carve out Bristol’s alternative sonic identity, while providing a haven for a mix of races, classes and ‘scruffy hippies’
mg.co.za
One of my enduring interests has been underground music and as such I found this article to be a great read.
The stories here so closely resemble my memories of Cape Town in the 80s/90s that I felt a strange nostalgia for a Bristol I never even knew.
I wonder how many of us on this forum can identify (at least in part) with some of what is expressed here because I think that there is a universal truth to sections like this one:
Dressed in 1950s-style pegged trousers, mohair sweaters and plastic “jelly” sandals, people heading into town to the Guildhall Tavern experienced the club as part of an assertion of individualism and symbolic creativity, which appears to have been shared by a range of “alternative” nightclubbers.
“You didn’t want to be like anybody else. You wanted to be ahead of the mob. It was a really good time. If you had made your way in on the bus, in what was considered to be quite an outlandish style, and then you got there and there were other people who were dressed in the same way; it had a sort of brotherhood to it. People tended to get on, which wasn’t the case in pubs and clubs in town generally.” Williams says.
I'd love to hear your stories below.