Punk Girls

To be a young man living in Basingstoke in the eighties was to be in awe of Punk Girls. They offered excitement and the gift of promise and they never, ever delivered: that was their secret. Beneath the peroxide and the visible bra-straps they were just ordinary country girls who just happened to work in Our Price or weekends as bar-maids in a country pub. But what they mean't was an erotic otherness; the possibility new and exotic worlds: under-arm hair, merrydown cider and brightly coloured under-wear. The headiest of cocktails and utterly intoxicating.




It was summer in Basingstoke and Ian, Robin, Dietch and I were lying in the long pale grass outside the Caribbean Club, drinking the rice-wine that Ian had stolen from his father’s cellar. Our usual tipple was Southern Comfort, swigged from the bottle; the burning sensation rising in our chests like we’d had a day at the beach drunk on ozone. The burnt orange syrup was never pleasant but Dietch had a singular talent for producing these bottles so it became our tipple of, if not choice, then certainly necessity. Today he had come up dry so we were on the home-made rice-wine.

There was rice in the wine. Grains of rice bobbed up and down past the green glass of the bottle, behind the handwritten label displaying its recent vintage. This called into question Ian’s dad’s efficacy as a vintner: I didn’t know much about the wine making process but I knew it shouldn’t have bits of rice floating about in it. It was a Saturday night and seismic bass notes were emanating from the Caribbean Club. This meant two things: the Red Stripe, sold in cans, would be prohibitively expensive so we would have to take care of intoxication before hand. And there would be punk girls in attendance.

Basingstoke had a scant Afro-Caribbean community in the 80s. Beyond the proprietors of the Club and a local punk called (helpfully) Black Eddie, owner of the very first afro-mohawk I had ever seen, it was difficult to see who the natural patrons of the Caribbean Club would be. In fact it seemed at the time there were more “UK Gladiators” living in the town than black people (we had two: Falcon, the woman with the god-awful mullet and one of the blander men: Hunter? Trawler? Ostler? ).

So The Caribbean became the town’s premier indie venue. We had them all in there: The Flatmates, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Bark Psychosis: a veritable “Who’s who” of the mid-eighties indie scene; if you were to drop a “who”. Its biggest coup had been booking The House of Love to play on the Saturday after their first NME cover. Predictably nobody was there. They finished with a cover of “I want to be your dog” which I, in my youthful naivety, thought was a total rip- off “Elves” by the Fall; an a opinion I trumpeted to all and sundry to surprisingly little derision. There were no punk girls in that night. But we lived in hope.

The rice wine was taking hold. It was astonishingly unpleasant; evaporating on the tongue with an aftertaste of Vosene. But after a few short swigs, spitting out the rice like worms from tequila, we were starting to get a buzz. In those days I hardly ever drank beer. When it was party-time my mother would dutifully buy me a six-pack of Tesco’s own-brand beer, which was called “Norseman”. I would do my level best to ditch said six- pack behind the sofa on arrival, helping myself to a real drink as soon as possible, safe in the knowledge that when that ran out I still had a six-pack of “Placebo-brau” tucked away. But I was spotted too many times earning myself the nick-name “Norseman” for years to come. My name in Gaelic means “Norseman”. Though I suspect that had little to do with the branded lager my forebears were drinking. They were probably on the Harp.

None of it’s there now. The Caribbean Club was demolished to make way for custard-yellow flats that stand empty to this day. Ian, Robin, Dietch and I have gone our separate ways and I haven’t had rice wine since. Especially not rice wine with rice in it.