On The Town

"The night was glorious, out there. The air was sweet as a cool bath, the stars were peeping nosily beyond the neons, and the citizens of the Queendom, in their jeans and separates, were floating down the Shaftesbury Avenue canals like gondolas. Everyone had loot to spend, everyone had a bath with verbena salts behind them, and nobody had broken hearts, because they were all ripe for the easy summer evening. The rubber plants in the espressos had been dusted, and the smooth white lights of the new-style Chinese restaurants — not the old Mah Jongg categories, but the latest thing with broad glass fronts, and Dacron curtainings, and a beige carpet over the interiors — were shining a dazzle, like some monster telly screens. Even those horrible old Anglo-Saxon public houses — all potato crisps and flat, stale ales, and puddles on the counter bar, and spittle — looked quite alluring, provided you didn't push those two-ton doors that pinch your arse, and wander in. In fact, the capital was a night horse dream. And I thought, 'My Lord, one thing is certain, and that's that they'll make musicals one day about the glamour-studded 1950s.'"
Colin MacInnes
"Absolute Beginners" (1959)

And make a musical out of it they did, though sadly it was a real stinker, unlike the novel which is still wonderful and stylishly captures London coming out of it's drab post-war cocoon and becoming the young, hip, and multicultural city that it is today.

Anyone who's ever been young and hit the town on a Saturday night with money in their pocket and wearing their sharpest clothes knows the feeling he's talking about above. Those glorious moments when you feel like you're at the centre of the universe and there's nowhere else in the world to be at that moment: The city, the lights, the people, the music, the clubs, the buzz — you just drink it all up. For me it was London in the 80s and early 90s, stepping out of Leicester Square tube station with my mates, heading into Chinatown for a few drinks at the Dive Bar, then off to a nightclub for hours of dancing to fantastic music and flirting with beautiful girls (very occasionally getting somewhere with one), then maybe a late night coffee at Bar Italia or more drinks at one of the after-hours bars on Hanway Street before catching the Night Bus from Trafalgar Square (and eating one of the nasty, greasy hamburgers the street vendors sold there while waiting), sometimes not getting home until the sun was coming up. Even with a skinful of booze inside me I never felt more alive.

Now, of course, I'm an old geezer who flakes out after a few drinks at 11pm. But back then, well, to quote William Wordsworth: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!

The film might have been a load of rubbish but it did give us the best record David Bowie made in the 1980s (post-"Scary Monsters" anyway). This is the mega-long, 8-minute version.

Download: Absolute Beginners - David Bowie (mp3)