Smooching above the funeral parlour – or – death at the disco.

More years ago than I care to calculate, there was a time I enjoyed having my ears assaulted by music, walking on sticky floors and chasing girls of questionable reputation.

In my mid teens, the parents association of the school I attended laid on monthly discos for all the pupils. I can’t remember why now, but these discos were not held in the school hall, but at a hall in the town centre. Perhaps not the wisest of moves. We were turned out of the place at about eleven o’clock after the final slow dance – just in time for the last bus home. After one disco I was assaulted for no reason by an adult reveller who just happened to be travelling from one pub to the next. I have to confess, it hurt being suddenly punched in the mouth. It did however, give me a little celebrity for a while. Friday nights in Doncaster town centre were not for the faint hearted.

The hall itself was an upstairs room owned by the Co-operative Society. A tuck shop was held in a wide corridor, the windows of which overlooked the courtyard of the funeral rest home below. I’ll never forget the weak adhesiveness of the floor on my thirteen hole Docs as I walked over the spilt pop. The corridor was relatively quiet. Double doors led into the main hall from there and you could actually talk in a normal speaking voice unless the door was opened to let someone in or out. Our conversations must have seemed bizarre: normal talk suddenly punctuated with a blast of music and then all of us shouting to be heard.

You might remember, and if you don’t – trust me, the early eighties was not the zenith of pop music. Just like my kids now, I identified myself in dress and taste with a common group of friends. We were into late punk and a few mainstream bands like Adam and the Ants. When the DJ played what we considered mainstream, commercial crap, we’d retire to the tuck shop corridor to talk or sneak a drink from the odd can someone had smuggled in. Most times, we talked complete bull: which girl we fancied, (never the one we admitted to) which girls fancied us, (usually none, but bullshit has boosted the confidence of many a teenaged boy) or the same old crap about what music we liked and why the DJ never played it. These conversations were occasionally punctuated by a lonely set of headlights sweeping the dark courtyard below. There were nudges, points and shushes and we’d all watch through the window. Always the same: the van stopped and two men got out. One opened a large roller door while another opened the back of the van. Both men then pulled a gurney from the van, hoisted a plain coffin onto it and rolled the whole thing into the building. The roller doors would be pulled down and all would be dark and quiet again – except for the dulcet tones of some disco diva from nextdoor.

A quarter to eleven was about the time most of the disco goers started to eye up the opposite sex. Not having a last smoochy dance was for losers, even if the music we had to dance to was awful. We were only kids: sometimes we slow-danced, sometimes we snogged, but it never went much further than that. The thought of a fresh corpse below kind of dampened the ardour.

Perhaps the parents association knew what they were doing when they picked the venue for their discos after all.