Steel Mills and Saturday Nights in a One Club Town

Weekends in a small-town mostly consist of waiting. Waiting for the bus that takes you to the neighboring town to the only cinema within twenty miles on a Friday night. Waiting for your friend with a bumfluff mustache and smart school shoes to emerge with cider and cigarettes from the cavernous Tesco on the outskirts of Kettering. Then, the next day, waiting for the afternoon to fuck off, in a fug of Football Focus and vague arousal. Waiting for Saturday night. Saturday night when you'll get as drunk as your fifteen year old mind allows. Saturday night where you'll get sozzled to the point where you feel like you're Gary from The Libertines. You are not Gary from The Libertines. You're not even the Gary tribute from a Libertine's tribute band.

Gary from the Libertines wouldn't get called a cunt as soon as he walked through the doors of your small town's only club. You do. You get called a cunt. You're a cunt in a cardigan. Everyone from school is there, including your English teacher. The next day you debrief, Ocean's Eleven style, and swap tales of aborted snogs and being sick into bushes. Sunday afternoon sees you waiting for something close to death, ridden with anxiety, awaiting the full horror of a two-day hangover that'll ruin the start of this school week, and every subsequent week for the rest of your life. You don't realise it until later, that this constitutes a dress rehearsal for something not known to you yet. It's the dress rehearsal for becoming your parents.

It was Corby that acted as the waiting room of my adolescence. Nestled in the East Midlands, it was a steel-town, and many people, my grandparents included, moved down in the 1960s from Glasgow and the surrounding areas. A recent article in The Guardian focuses on Corby's attempts to move away from "the ashes of post-industrial decay", but growing up in Corby in the 2000s felt more like stasis than decay. I've since moved to bigger cities and my life has changed dramatically, but it was in this weird Northamptonshire town that I learned about "going out" and all of the noise, fun, frustration, horror and ridiculousness that it entails.

Corby is an outlier in the Midlands. Reporters are sent from London under the instruction of "just find out what the fuck it is and come back on an off-peak train". They usually stand, bewildered, in front of the statue of a steelworker that watches over the town centre like a disappointed uncle, a sentinel of disapproval. They talk to camera about "Little Scotland", and ask a man in a butcher's shop that specifies in the ancient Scottish art of preparing and selling pink meat to comment on various referendums. To comment on anything, really. Just to explain himself. What the fuck is your town, mate? And why should I care?

Shortly before I moved away from Corby, the police raided Storm nightclub and found that 60 of the 100 or so people partying were underage. In a town with no train-station, no cinema, and nothing of any discernible appeal to teenagers without a doctored ID, the precarious position of that one, semi-despised club in town would have a dramatic effect on all those weekends we had hurtling towards us.

Going out in Corby usually culminated in a visit to Storm (R.I.P). On Saturdays I made my way past the bouncers, the Muay Thai trained WWE tag-team champions. The caged smoking area of Storm provided the very real opportunity to be in a cage with a person who regularly gets paid to fight in one. It wasn't just the threat of MMA combat that made Storm a vital Saturday night spot. In towns like Corby, which until recently did not have a train station, the prospect of seeing everyone you have ever met in the same place is magnified. A strange sense of isolation, familiar to many people from small-towns, fosters a bizarre desire to drink Sourz with the guy who biannually tried to throw a javelin through the PE teacher, and the guy who tried to set fire to the cornershop near school.

Going back in my twenties—now armed with an ID that lets me legally buy as much room temperature lager as I can stomach—is a strange and nostalgic experience. Corby has changed. It has a music venue now, so fewer punk gigs take place in Rangers pubs. It has a Nando's, so the finest Portuguese cuisine is available. It has a cinema, next to the Nando's, so a teenage date does not rely on making the bus to neighboring Kettering. Corby feels, much more than ever, like anywhere else in the UK. The sense that you're literally living nowhere lessens with each bite of a #Merky burger.

Around three years ago I went to the Photographers' Gallery. It was at the tail end of my second year at Goldsmiths. My hometown had never felt so distant. I saw that the main exhibition was called Deeds Not Words. Walking up the stairs I mentioned that this is Corby's motto. None of my companions answered, or seemed to care. Expecting that the name was a coincidence, I arrived in the space, and was faced with something I did not expect to see on any wall in central London, or any wall for that matter: a large photograph of the guy who played in goal for my Sunday league football team, steaming, on the dancefloor of Storm, emboldened by ice-pole blue VS and Carling, a totem of dutch-courage. Here, in this metropolitan space, a cultural galaxy away from my small Northamptonshire town, I got pangs of something familiar, something overly familiar, oddly, painfully familiar.

Mark Neville's Deeds Not Words reflected a twisted mirror of every teenage Saturday night I'd ever experienced. Seeing it there, among the chin stroking tourists and bored, meandering invigilators, I felt a pang. The faces were all there, the faces that I'd always known, but they looked nothing like I remembered. It was a night I had seen before, a night I was probably part of. I felt far away from the town I grew up in, far away from Saturday afternoons spent waiting, and Saturday nights spent learning what it means to go out and grow up.

As a teenager in a small town a night out is a family party where you don't like everyone in the room. You are there because you have to be. It feels important, almost compulsory for you and your friends to pour the same neon liquid on the frustration and boredom and isolation of another week. Somehow, years removed from nights like the one I saw in that picture, 'going out' became less significant and less important for me. In the gallery that day, my pretensions of having become more cultivated and metropolitan were punctured. Staring at the photo, I wanted to be there, in Corby. But maybe I wanted to be then, before the clumsy mix of adolescence and adulthood that I stumbled into when I left my childhood bedroom for a city which nagged me with the promise that more stuff is out there. Now, 'going out' is a different proposition, albeit an occasionally invigorating, tragic, and hilarious one. But the exhilaration of those early nights out in Corby, the anxious, nervous excitement of being a teenager with nothing else to do, seems out of reach and far away.

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