He was way ahead of me. He wore the signature chiffon and makeup to college and spoke knowingly of Kerouac and Zimmerman. One of his songs bore the enigmatic title “Newhaven to Dieppe (And No Wonder).”

Dada had hit a wall and would go no further. Now I wanted to be in a band with Steve, but I was going to need reinforcements.

I suggested Steve meet Nick Bates.

Like everyone else that year, Nick had wanted to play guitar, and I was supposed to be showing him how. Talk about the deaf leading the blind.

13 Barbarella’s

We walk through the double doors. The music is louder inside, the smell of beer and cigarettes. Pay the entrance fee to the girl at the table. One pound thirty. We fumble to count out our money, mine earned at a local supermarket, Nick’s working weekends at his mother’s toy shop. Get the look-over from the bouncers. Be cool and don’t attract attention, like that scene in Saturday Night Fever. The age limit at nightclubs in England is eighteen. I’m seventeen and Nick is fifteen, but we’ve been here often enough to know we can get away with it. We walk down the carpeted hallway, the music ahead already at an impressive volume. At eye level, on the wall to our left, the place announces itself: “The biggest nightclub in Europe, Barbarella’s.”

Everything is shades of dimly lit red. It feels red. It smells red. The carpet is orange-dark, and it’s nice and warm inside after our twenty-minute walk through the city center to get here. Walk another twenty feet or so past the entrance to a small bar into which I have never been—and don’t remember ever being open—past the loos (avoid if possible: One is always vulnerable standing there, open to attack, especially after the alcohol has had its way with the more violently minded punters). At the end of the red tunnel, Nick and I turn into the main club room.

The music is now so loud that everyone has to shout to have an outside chance of getting heard. Communication adjusts to a new level of minimalism. Instincts surge. The DJ, Wayne “the Plastic Poser,” is playing reggae—“Cocaine in My Brain” by Dillinger, music that is dark and black and dangerous.

Music has never sounded better than it sounds in this room.

Beneath the DJ booth there is a dance floor the size of a double-width garage, filled with punks and new-wavers. Nick and I definitely qualify as the latter. We both still wear our hair quite long, and I’m still in glasses, a punk no-no. No more glam-rock duds. He has on a plain white shirt and skinny black tie, I have a black shirt on which I have stenciled “1977” across my heart, in homage to the Clash.

To the right of the dance floor are a few tables and chairs, and immediately in front of us are three dimly lit steps that lead up to a long, bright bar packed with kids aged between eighteen and twenty-five, all trying to get served. Looking across the dance floor from where we now stand is the stage, about three feet off the ground, where tonight’s band will be appearing. Already there is a group of punks gathered at the stage, waiting. They are taking up valuable dance floor space ’cos they ain’t dancing.