“Oh, what a night!”: the existential hell of freshers week.
It is September 1999, my first week at university. None of my flatmates are into punk rock, I’ve already looked.
Some have brought less than 10 CDs with them and one has a Jamiroquai album. This is not the bohemian paradise my parents promised me.
And now, against my better judgment, I am dressed in school uniform, along with a thousand or so other freshers, and swigging aftershock at Uropa. It is heaving and about a million degrees.
Oh what a night/ Late December back in 63/what a very special time for me/as I remember what a night
Some disgusting posh boys are trying to talk to us. I can’t decide if they’re taunting us or trying to get in our pants. It occurs to me they were probably wearing actual-for-real school uniform a matter of weeks ago, back at boarding school. That feels a bit fucked up.
Oh, what a night, you know I didn’t even know her name/ But I was never gonna be the same/ What a lady, what a night
Seriously, what is this fresh musical hell? I’m trapped inside the Brady Bunch soundtrack, spattered with cheap sambuca and choked in a fog of Lynx. I could even bear some contemporary shit hits, but it’s all Build Me Up Buttercup and Abba.
We paid to get in here. Is this what the next three to four years of my life are going to be? Like going to a bad wedding disco every bloody week?
What have I done?
Oh, I, I got a funny feelin’ when she walked in the room/ Oh my, as I recall it ended much too soon
All those years I spent writhing around in teenage self-discovery, finally shedding the snakeskin of what everyone else in my class deemed cool and embracing my velvet jackets and fusty-smelling jumble sale clothes.
Finally being brave enough to strut into the pool room of the Old Angel on my own and hang out with the skaters.
Finding my people in disco 2 of my local rock club, all doing the “looking for your contact lens on the floor” mosher dance, only semi-ironically.
It was all for nothing BECAUSE NOW I’M DRESSED LIKE A WANKER DRINKING £1 REEF AND DANCING TO THE GREASE MEGAMIX WITH PEOPLE I HATE.
Oh what a night, hypnotizin’ mesmerizing me/ She was ev’rything I dreamed she’d be/ Sweet surrender, what a night
The subtle, beautiful flowering of my teenage identity smashed with a cheesy lump-hammer mere seconds into freshers week. Scene points traded in for social acceptance and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.
It’s like an out of body experience. I watch myself despairingly as I scramble to fit in with people I don’t like and have nothing in common with.
Humanity stripped back to its most basic need — that to find its pack, or any pack at all.
I felt a rush like a rollin’ ball of thunder/
Spinnin’ my head around n’ takin’ my body under
And now I stand at the foot of a seemingly impossible mountain, the prospect of years like this ahead of me, surrounded by heaving bodies, ties tied around heads like Golding-esque savages, groping hands crawling up bodies, the floor slick and sticky with bad lager, and Stayin’ Alive as our pumping soundtrack.
The only answer is another shot —
Oh, what a night
Oh, I, I got a funny feelin’ when she walked in the room
Oh my, as I recall it ended much too soon
— and black sick.
This post was written as part of the #write52 community writing project, run by Ed Callow, the Grandmaster Flash to our Furious Five. If you like writing, and only wish you could compel yourself to do it more often, you should check it out.
I’m Penny Brazier, a copywriter and communications strategist who did finally discover the rock nights in Leeds, thank goodness. Follow me on Twitter here or on Instagram here.
