Love on the Dancefloor

by Liam Livings

  I found myself sucking on my cheeks for no reason. Once before I’d bitten the inside of my mouth to pieces. I couldn’t stop chewing due to the red-and-black cap I’d dropped as we’d arrived at the field.

  Paul handed me some Juicy Fruit chewing gum. “All right?”

  “Yeah.” I chewed in time with my dancing and the music, and all was well with the world again.

  “Wicked.” Paul hugged me.

  Rob joined in the hug, shortly followed by his girlfriend, Sinead.

  “Where’s him, beside me, in the back?”

  “Alec,” Rob said.

  “That’s him.”

  “Last I saw, he was stage diving off the speakers next to some Transit vans.”

  “Then where?”

  “Dunno. He’ll turn up. He can wait by the car and we’ll see him. It’ll be fine.”

  ***

  The first time I realised this whole orbital party scene wasn’t quite like anything else I’d experienced was in the back of Rob’s car, a few weeks later. We were following little signs at roundabouts that didn’t say anything, just tiny red arrows, but the people who needed to know what they meant just knew.

  “What’s it mean?” I asked, pointing to the second red arrow we’d followed.

  Rob, who really was sound as a pound and definitely safe as fuck, said, “It’s where we’re heading. It’s where our whole week’s been leading to. And it’s gonna be…” He paused.

  Paul said, “Wicked?”

  “Fucking right, it is.”

  A few more roundabouts, turnings and red arrows later, we arrived at a field full of new-age travellers’ vehicles—old school buses, caravans and double-decker buses with the seats ripped out and replaced with beds, some of the windows blanked out. The rust was mixed with coloured painted flowers, CND signs and general statements about love and peace.

  “Is this it?” I looked around.

  The field stretched as far as I could see, the near side filled with travellers’ vehicles, beyond that cars parked in rough lines, marshalled to their resting place by men waving orange flags, and beyond that were two white marquee tents.

  “You got tickets?” I asked.

  “Follow me.” Slinky Simon led us to the booming with music, strobing with lights, filled with sweaty people, dance tents, where we were met with a man taking money and stamping hands.

  It cost a fiver each, and we were there for twelve hours. Twelve hours of solid dancing and partying and talking and laughing and soaring above the clouds.

  And it was fucking brilliant.

  I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, when the normal rules of drug selling didn’t seem to apply. Once inside the tent, there was a row of men shouting out what they had for sale, bumbags of money and pockets filled with plastic bags and drugs. “Come and get your ecstasy, acid, dope. Come and get it here. Pills a fiver, acid a tenner and dope fifteen for a tenth. Come on, you lucky people, come and get what you want.”

  The man next to him was shouting a slightly different version of basically the same patter, a queue of people in front of him asking for supplies, handing over money, then moving on to the next person.

  They were selling drugs like they sell fruit and veg on a market. That thought hit me, suddenly, as they shouted about their wares, and people queued up with their hands ready to accept the purchases, like customers waiting for a couple of pounds of apples and pears.

  I looked over my shoulder, expecting a bouncer or someone to stop the men selling. But no. No one came, and they didn’t come for the whole night. Don’t get me wrong, it was well organised—parking, hand stamps, even an area for first-aiders when the clubbers had gone too far and needed a lie down, or to be taken to hospital, mercifully rarely. But as for police or anything like that, not so much. People danced around huge bonfires, ran around swinging balls on ropes, or twirled batons. There was a man on a unicycle, and another on a pair of six-foot-high stilts. No one batted an eye at anything; they just kept right on dancing and chewing and chatting and getting lost in the music.

  After eight hours of dancing, the sun came up, a large, golden orb appearing on the horizon, covering everything in an orange light, and a gentle warmth that contrasted with the cool of the night. As the morning properly greeted us, the crowd I was with, outside the tent, continued dancing, throwing shapes, moving, always moving with the music. A few of the new-age travellers emerged from their old buses, caravans, school minibuses.

  A woman leant against the door of her bus, staring at us dancers. She didn’t say anything, but that long stare, followed by a slight shake of her head said it all. She’d been there before; she’d been to Woodstock; she’d danced semi-naked around a bonfire in the moonlight. But she’d not taken quite as many drugs as we had to have stayed up for twelve hours of solid dancing.

  As the music reached a crescendo and everyone lifted their hands above their heads, waving in time with the chorus—as much as trance music has a chorus—the woman was joined by a man—long beard, long hair, yawning—and he too shook his head at me, then started making a fire out the front of their bus.

  That was the first time I wondered to myself if maybe we’d overdone it somewhat. The thing about nonstop fun, the thing about using the logic of one being good, so four being fucking amazing was it ended in a field, somewhere off the M25, with the sun rising and a few washed-up, drugs-addled new-age travellers disapproving of you. Yes, you.

  I told Paul as much, pointing subtly—as subtly as you can after three doves and twelve hours of dancing—to the old hippies.

  Paul shook his head, saying, “Don’t worry about it. That’s in-the-week speak. That’s not for now. This is the weekend. We’re weekenders. Let’s enjoy it while it’s still here.” He looked at the sun, then reached out to grab it. “While we can still touch and feel it.”

  And at the time, it made perfect sense, as do most things when you’re absolutely nutted off your face.

  ***

  Another time we ended up—Slinky Simon nodding along to the beat of the music, very much out of his head—driving in the dark and rain, none of us knowing where we were going, except that we needed to follow the white Vauxhall Astra GTE in front. After a bare-knuckle journey in Slinky Simon’s tiny red Peugeot 205 GTI, which cornered like it was on rails, we ended up in a field near Wisley Woods, with much the same boom-boom hypnotic music that ran through my body, flashing coloured lights, random inflatable things, a bus and an ice cream van in one corner of the field, groups of people dancing, chatting, lying on the ground all over the place. The only way I knew we were dancing outside, in my head-bobbing, hand-waving, forgetting the real world completely state, was the steam coming off the people around me. If we’d have been dancing inside, in a warehouse or some random building, there wouldn’t have been any steam.

  After dancing for a while nonstop, I ended up staring at a topless white man with long, dreadlocked hair, wearing a pair of light-blue combat trousers that seemed to be inching lower and lower, exposing more and more of his navel. I alternated my eyes between his navel, his white, slightly hairy chest and the green glow stick and whistle round his neck that swung as he moved his arms over his head in time with the music. Staring, always staring, transfixed by his body, the sweat glistening on his arms, his chest, a light dusting of glitter over his arms.

  Someone stood behind me, kissed my neck, put his hands over my eyes, and said, “Rude to stare. Didn’t your mum tell you that?” It was Paul, eyes wide, grin wide, arms wide for me to lean into and be enveloped.

  “I wasn’t staring. It’s the music. It’s hypnotised me.”

  “Yeah, and his nips too.” Paul laughed.

  My head still bobbing, my hands still above my head waving in time with the music, I said, “His what?”

  Paul pinched my nipples and I understood.

  Another night, not long afterwards, five of us crammed into Slinky Simon’s Peugeot, and he flashed a car in front, suspension low with the weight of f
ive people in a tiny hatchback, windows open and music and smoke pouring out.

  “What you done that for? Paul asked.

  “I know where we’re going. Tell them we’re off to have it, and he can follow us. No hassle.”

  “Right.”

  After a short while, the car he’d flashed pulled over to the hard shoulder. Slinky Simon followed, getting out to ask them what was wrong. I leant forward from the passenger’s seat.

  The driver of the other car said, “What you gone and done that for?”

  Simon explained his slightly odd logic.

  “We thought you was the fucking filth and we’ve all necked our pills.”

  “Oh. That’s not what I meant. Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Hackney Marshes, follow me.”

  “Sorry,” Simon said.

  “Safe.”

  A face appeared, squashed against the back window of the other man’s car, banging on the glass.

  Simon walked back to his car. As he started the engine, he said, “Twenty-four-carat-gold twat, I am.”

  I said, “What’s up with the bloke in the back?”

  “Said his mate had better get a fucking shift on cos he’d double-dropped and was coming up fast. Didn’t wanna be stuck in the back of that fucking Nova when he could be dancing his nut off in Hackney.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Simon pulled away, following the other car, and asked me to give him some chewing gum before he chewed his fucking face off. “You ready, we’re on the flyer for this one, remember?”

  I had remembered, but during the car journey and the intervening drama, I’d managed to forget this was our first set DJing at one of these parties. It was, understandably, much less formal and organised than playing in a nightclub, but our names were on the flyer so that meant it was real. I took the flyer from my pocket and read it again.

  Up For It Promotions presents a private party.

  From dusk till dawn

  12 hours of music

  two dance areas

  food and ice cream

  no alcohol

  lasers

  projectors

  Legal venue

  for ticket holders only

  location guide—call 0831 124874

  Fabio Fun Town

  Mad Max

  Slinky Simon

  Tommy T & Paulie Paul

  At the bottom of the flyer, but all the same, that was us: me and Paul.

  After getting over the whole ‘we’re playing music in a field’ concept, we followed Slinky Simon to the stage where he introduced us to the guy from Up For It Promotions who’d organised the whole thing, apparently legally. Slinky Simon did say the other guy’s name, but the music, the noise and generally being a bit floaty about everything meant I missed it.

  Very emboldened by this point as I was as munted as everyone else, I asked, “Is it legal?” I chewed the gum quickly.

  The Up For It guy said, tapping his nose, “It’s a private party. My birthday, as it goes.”

  “Happy birthday!” I gave him a hug, because it felt just the perfect thing to do.

  He said to Slinky Simon, “Where’d you get him from? Is he gonna be all right to play? Looks a bit fucked to me.”

  Simon replied, “Isn’t he sweet. You met Paul, other half of Tommy T and Paulie Paul?”

  Paul shook his hand and said, “So is it your birthday?”

  The man replied, with a wink, “Yeah, I have a big fuck-off birthday like this every fucking weekend in summer.”

  Paul and I stuck together as we always did at these parties, agreeing on an if all else fails meeting point by the ice cream van, listening to how the other DJs responded to the crowd, building their sets to a crescendo that seemed to mirror the waves everyone felt in their bodies. I borrowed a man’s juggling balls on sticks, and after he’d taught me how to dance while spinning them in opposite directions without them colliding, I tried my best to give it a go, to Paul’s and the man’s amusement. In the end, I handed them back to the man, who offered them to Paul, who shook his head, and then the man hugged us like we were long lost friends, telling us to have a good night before disappearing, his swinging balls cutting a slice through the crowd.

  Paul said, “Fancy getting some ice cream?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t feel hungry in the slightest, as usual at this point in a night out.

  “Fancy going for a walk, see if he’s selling any?”

  That sounded like fun. Pretty much anything he’d have suggested at that point would have sounded like fun, so I nodded, and we strode off, hand in hand, towards the ice cream van, a little piece of the real, everyday world amid the magic, manic chaos of the big partying bubble we were in.

  As we approached the ice cream van, which surprisingly had a queue of people dancing outside it, Paul said something so beautiful, so touching, so wonderful I couldn’t help but kiss him and hug him tight.

  A girl wearing white furry trousers and a black bra asked if we were all right.

  “Yeah. Cheers,” I replied.

  “Wicked,” Paul said.

  Can I remember what he said now? No, as soon as he’d said it, it was as if its beauty was too much to be alive on this world, so it disappeared before either of us could grasp it.

  I said, “Where did that come from?”

  “What?”

  “What you just said.”

  “What was that?”

  “Gone.” We joined the back of the queue for an ice cream, dancing with the others.

  That morning, as we drove back to London and civilisation in Slinky Simon’s car, the sun rose and the radio quietly wafted the early breakfast show into the back, along with the air from the open windows. The air of a new day. The first day after we’d played a crowd of ten thousand clubbers in a field in Hertfordshire. Paul’s suggestion of a new track he’d managed to acquire through means he wasn’t at liberty to disclose, a track by Paul Van Dyke, had gone down so well we ended up playing it three times in a row to the shouts of the crowd.

  That night was always referred to as our ‘For An Angel’ night—the night that Paul Van Dyke launched Tommy T and Paulie Paul’s career outside the M25.

  As Slinky Simon stopped outside our house, he turned to face us and said, “Same again next weekend?”

  Without pausing, I said, “If we must, we must.”

  Paul nodded, took my hand and we walked, slowly, slightly wobbling, up the path to our front door.

  Later, in bed, as we were pressed skin to skin, our sweat mixing, our hands grabbing each other’s hardness while we stared into each other’s eyes, Paul repeated something he often told me: “Sometimes I don’t know if you’re a bad influence on me, or I’m a bad influence on you.”

  “If this is bad, I don’t want good.” I kissed him, closing my eyes, and we continued to make slow love until we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  CHAPTER 9

  OF COURSE, IT wasn’t all drugs, dancing and amazing sex. Oh no. We still had that inconvenient thing called the real world to deal with. No matter how many hours we stayed up over the weekend, in the name of fun or work, we still both had that immovable reality to face each Monday morning.

  I became very good at spending the whole Monday morning rewinding videos slowly; videos I’d saved during the week, for just such an eventuality. My cheeks were sometimes sore from accidentally biting them. My jaw ached from all the gum-chewing, the talking deep meaningful wonderfulness that actually turned out to be nothing but at the time felt like the answer to life, the universe and everything.

  You may be expecting me to say I saw some terrible things in those parties—ambulances rushing people off to hospital collapsed and foaming at the mouth, people getting into fights. Sorry to disappoint you, but none of that happened.

  Just like me and Paul, all the other weekenders resumed their real lives on Monday morning—working, studying, whatevering—with no problems. Except for having a head full of cotton wool
and a big case of the midweek blahs on Wednesday.

  For those who don’t know, that’s the delayed lack of serotonin in your body catching up on you. The energy, the euphoria, the connection you feel with all human beings, the wish to be open, to talk about things you couldn’t contemplate talking about if you were straight, all comes from your own body’s hormones, not the drug itself. The drug makes your body flood with serotonin, the happy hormone. Which is why, midweek, you always feel a bit sad, a bit low, cos your body’s usual levels of the hormone are all gone, since you used a week’s worth in one night.

  Paul was less good at dragging his sorry carcass to the record shop each Monday morning when the alarm went off. He called in sick a few times, and I told him he’d lose the job if he wasn’t careful.

  “Who cares? I’ve got the allowance,” was his reply.

  To which I reminded him of his desire to be free from the parental strings attached and if it was good enough for me, it was good enough for him to get his arse to work on a Monday morning too. “Also, if we ever want any chance of affording a flight to Ibiza for this tryout Slinky Simon’s offering, your job is needed.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, so he didn’t; he got out of bed, jumped into the shower and I walked him to the Tube station.

  “Fancy dinner tonight?” he asked as we reached the barrier.

  “What for?” I didn’t want to splurge money unnecessarily.

  “Date night. Us two. Pizza. My treat.”

  I nodded and spent the day looking forward to it. This was something he’d introduced which we kept up while we lived in Catford. Every Wednesday, we would go out, just us two: cinema, dinner, bowling… Once we went ice-skating but never again cos Paul kept falling over. We’d go to the theatre if we could get cheap, standing-up tickets at the last minute.

  This was our time, when we forgot the everyday talk about taking the bins out, making dinner, work and vegging out in front of the TV. This was us time. We talked about plans for Ibiza, whether we could stick our jobs much longer, and argued over which music tracks were the best. I listened to him explaining why he’d moved from Chelmsford, where he was born, to West London—