scene memoryThe invitation came through the radio.
Capital Radio, to be exact — the station that had been pouring into my headphones all through the walking years. The Capital under-18s disco at the Lyceum: the Best Disco in Town, they called it, with the total confidence of people who knew they were right. A legendary West End ballroom, opened up in the daytime-into-evening hours for kids exactly like me. No pretending to be older. No blagging the door. They were actually inviting us.
I went with Nina, my school buddy from Sydenham Girls. The plan was the plan of the era: agree a time, agree a bus stop, and then stand there on faith.
I waited ages. It was snowing.
I want you to picture it properly — a girl at a South London bus stop, snow coming down, no phone, no way of knowing if her mate was two minutes away or still doing her hair, stamping her feet and refusing to leave, because leaving wasn't an option. The night was too big to abandon. And then Nina appeared out of the white, and the waiting evaporated the way it always did, instantly, completely, and we piled onto the 171.
Top deck, obviously. Our bus, the one that had been carrying me toward the music for a year — but this time it wasn't taking us to the edge of something to watch. Over Waterloo Bridge in the snow, the river wide and dark on both sides, two girls absolutely fizzing, all the way to Aldwych. This time we were going in.
music that goes into your chest
The Lyceum was huge. That's the first thing. I'd spent two years with music as a private world — headphones, bedrooms, one earphone shared at a bus stop — and suddenly here was a room the size of my entire imagination, full of it. Noisy. Overwhelming. Hundreds and hundreds of kids, all of whom had heard the same invitation on the same station, all of us let loose in a proper West End ballroom with a proper sound system, years before any of us were supposed to be anywhere like it.
It was bloody fabulous.
I could pretend I stood there coolly assessing the DJ's selections with my George Benson-trained ear. I didn't. I was gone. The noise, the lights, the sheer mass of people my own age — the room did something to me that headphones never could. Music through headphones goes into your ears. Music through a system that size goes into your chest. It moves your actual organs. Nobody warns you about that the first time, and I've been chasing it ever since.
the confession
And now, a confession, because if this blog is going to be worth anything it has to include the embarrassing truths as well as the credible ones:
Kajagoogoo played. And I irritatingly kinda liked it.
Yes. Me. The girl with Evelyn King and High Gloss and the entire Motown catalogue on hand-recorded C90s, the keeper of Jimmy's collection, secretly enjoying Kajagoogoo. I'd like to say I fought it. I didn't fight it very hard. Snobbery is for people standing still; it's very difficult to maintain your musical principles while your whole body is having the best night of its life. Every serious music head has a skeleton like this in the closet. That one's mine. There are worse.
a problem identified
I got home after 10pm, high as a kite.
Not on anything, I should say — this was the under-18s, the most innocent version of the night there would ever be. High on the room. High on the noise and the snow and the top deck and Nina and the feeling of having finally been inside the thing instead of listening to it through foam earpads. It was, I now understand, the first hit of a feeling I would spend the next five years chasing through warehouses across London. The first one was free. It even finished at a reasonable hour.
Although not reasonable enough. Mum was up.
She cussed me — properly, the full performance, the after-ten-on-a-school-night special. And I stood there and took it, snow melting off my coat, ears still ringing, and here is the honest truth of what was going on in my head. I was not thinking I'm sorry. I was not thinking never again.
I was making a mental note: find a solution to going out late without Mum knowing.
That's it. That's the moment. Not a lesson learned — a problem identified.
Somewhere between the front door and the cussing, the good girl with the good marks quietly opened a new file, and everything that follows in this blog — the cover stories, the 7am crawls upstairs, the shoes in the bag, the Sunday resurrections for EastEnders, the black feet and the royal title they earned me — every bit of it grew from the engineering project I commissioned that night.
Mum thought she was ending something on that doorstep. She was at the launch.