The Wild Bunch soundsystem with Daddy G , Willie Wee, Nelle Hooper, Milo Johnson in Camden, London, 1985. (Photos: Beezer)
In Bristol, the location of the Dug Out on Park Row — a street linking the more affluent northern area of Clifton to the less prosperous east, where Easton and St Pauls are located — is often cited as a significant factor in helping to generate the diverse mix of music and clientele at the club.
This helped to mark the Dug Out as an in-between or liminal space, as Mike Crawford reflects: “The reason the Dug Out was seen as important was because it was halfway between Clifton and Redland and not that far from St Pauls. It wasn’t a posh club, so lots of people went there and lots of cultures rubbed up against each other.”
Sapphire, a well-known clubber in the 1980s, talks of moving from the gay club Oasis to the Dug Out wearing a dress and feather boa. As a black crossdresser, Sapphire stood out, but “nobody was being offensive”.
He also found the crowd very mixed. “The dress code was ‘wear what you like’ and the crowd was very different. You had your black men in trilby hats and their nice smart suits; you had funky ones with trainers and the street look; then you had the working girls. There wasn’t any prostitution going on in the Dug Out, but a lot of the girls when they finished working would go to the Dug Out. There was a great mix of people and then you would have your students. The Dug Out was a lot of people’s first experience of clubbing.”
The mixture of black and white clubbers at the Dug Out is often emphasised. Gill Loats estimated the white-to-black ratio at the club to be around 60:40. However, evidence from clubs like the Bamboo and other underground spaces and parties suggests that such intercultural or inter-ethnic mixing was not uncommon among Bristol’s clubbers and music lovers.
Clubber Tim Williams remembers his experiences of funk and soul nights run by Steve and Adrian Ashby at Bristol’s Guildhall Tavern: “From my earliest nights out in town, when we would go to the Top Rank and places like that, there was always plenty of black people present. That was the norm and the Guildhall was no different. Kids from all parts of town would come down. Obviously it was black music, there were plenty of black kids going to the Guildhall, probably 5% to 10%…
The Wild Bunch soundsystem decked out in Camden, London, 1985
“If you went to the Dug Out, the story from the middle-class side of town was that the Dug Out was great because it was multiracial. Well, that wasn’t unusual to us at all. Our shock about the Dug Out wasn’t its multiracial element, because that was something we had always got used to. It was more the fact that you could be all scruffy and hippy and be in there.”
The implication is that it was the mix of classes rather than skin colours at the Dug Out that surprised Williams and his friends. At the Guildhall Tavern, the clientele — better known as the “Avon Soul Army” — were primarily working class and drawn from outlying, working-class neighbourhoods.
“We were all working-class kids. The kids that went to The Guildhall came from all over Bristol and were primarily working class. There were one or two infiltrators from Clifton, but basically it was people from Knowle, Lockleaze, Brislington, Filton and Henbury. Usually there were warring factions from different parts of the city. Mostly fights would be between kids from different areas like, Southmead kids or Knowle West kids or something of that nature. Yet people got on: that was what was astonishing about it.”
Dressed in 1950s-style pegged trousers, mohair sweaters and plastic “jelly” sandals, people heading into town to the Guildhall Tavern experienced the club as part of an assertion of individualism and symbolic creativity, which appears to have been shared by a range of “alternative” nightclubbers.
“You didn’t want to be like anybody else. You wanted to be ahead of the mob. It was a really good time. If you had made your way in on the bus, in what was considered to be quite an outlandish style, and then you got there and there were other people who were dressed in the same way; it had a sort of brotherhood to it. People tended to get on, which wasn’t the case in pubs and clubs in town generally.” Williams says.
This sense of underground or alternative togetherness found among people who dressed differently from the norm is connected to the way that women may experience underground clubs as less of a “meat market” (or pick-up joint) than the larger commercial city centre clubs.
Furthermore, clubbers distinguish between the “underground” clubs such as the Dug Out and the city centre venues according to the music played. The big city centre venues played what was perceived to be safe and standardised mainstream music. This can be seen as a shared sensibility among the clubbers, DJs and performers that continues today.
This notion of distinctiveness and separation from the mainstream has played a major role in subcultural and post-subcultural theories. Early accounts of British working-class subcultures emphasised tightly knit groups, who could be easily identified by their stylistic appearance, but more recent work has identified a more fluid and flexible sense of subcultural identity, defined primarily by a common sense of distinction and opposition from the mainstream.
Writers like Sarah Thornton and David Muggleton have suggested that subcultural appearance and affiliation is much more fluid and contingent. Rather than pledging allegiance to a common set of stylistic rules bound to a particular subcultural group, the subcultural terrain is inhabited by diverse individuals who share a common sense of being outside the mainstream.
Although they might not all be dressed identically or even share the same taste in music, the collective sense of outsiderness helps to foster a certain affinity. In Bristol, clubbing produced a shared “underground” sensibility, which cut across ethnic, class and genre boundaries, as well as a sense of community marked out against the mainstream consumption of music.
Although music writers have tended to extrapolate from Bristol’s underground music scene, painting a picture of a tolerant, multi-ethnic city, black Bristolians found racial prejudice and hostility to be part of their everyday experience. In this context, locations like the Bamboo Club were important sites of community and leisure where like-minded people could gather.
Graffiti artist 3D, member of Massive Attack and of Wild Bunch, Bristol,1985. (Photo: Beezer)
One thing white members of subcultures, such as punk, had in common with these people was that they could experience the city as a hostile place where their appearance could have negative and potentially harmful consequences.
Mike Crawford remembers: “Back then [in the late 1970s] people were still quite violently opposed to the way you looked. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting excited about anything nowadays but I remember getting spat on in the street by people — women sometimes — for looking disgusting, they thought. So punks were the opposite of threatening. We were constantly being chased by other youth groups: teds, skins, football supporters. You would go out hoping that no one was going to lamp [hit] you, but still wearing absurd clothes.
In a similar vein, Lewi, from the B-Boy crew City Rockas, describes the threat of racism on Bristol’s streets in the mid-1980s: “Bristol was funny back then. I mean, we would never really travel outside of central areas really. We always thought of South Bristol as being racist; there was no reason to go there. The outskirts of Bristol (and even some central parts) were really racist — skinheads who really wanted to kill you or do some serious damage would literally chase you down.”
For people whose appearance marked them as “outsiders”, the city centre was often a no-go area that was associated with and policed by more “mainstream” youth. This undoubtedly made clubs located on the periphery of the city centre more attractive. Blues parties like Ajax and clubs like the Bamboo, both located in St Pauls, became safe refuges.
Crawford reflects on the Bamboo: “It became somewhere that you could go, where you didn’t have to go into town. Town was tricky on a weekend, because there were so many beer monsters out there looking for funny-looking people to beat up. You kind of gravitated towards places you felt relatively safe.”
Ten Cities (Spector Books/Goethe-Institut), a book on clubbing in Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Naples, Berlin, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol and Lisbon between 1960 and March 2020, is edited by Johannes Hossfeld Etyang, Joyce Nyairo and Florian Sievers. This extract, on the eclecticness of club culture in Bristol, is the ninth in a series of 10 weekly excerpts from the book