Possibly the seediest club in the world...

Its 1981, the young Jerrychicken is now the proud owner of his own apartment, a one bedroomed first floor shoebox that cost the almighty sum of £9500, £500 of which was mine, £9000 of which belonged to the Northern Rock Building Society but they hardly called and I had the place to myself most of the time, apart from the time when I forgot to pay the mortgage of course, it was actually the first payment that I forgot, not a good start eh ?

Owning your own property brings with it certain responsibilities of course, decorating the place is one such chore and with hindsight the hessian wallpaper isn't a fashion that I look forward to having a renaissance, nor the craze for mirror tiles, three boxes of which were used in the bathroom (they'll make it look bigger I was told), they didn't tell me that the sticky pads that you stuck them to the wall with would lose their grip in a steamy atmosphere and a friends wife who took a bath whilst staying at my place found herself sharing said bath with several broken mirror tiles one evening, I still don't know how she got out unscathed.

Again with hindsight it wasn't such a good idea to remove all of the original ceramic tiles in the bathroom and then not replace them with anything for six or more months during which time the steam and damp bathroom atmosphere got into the plaster and caused a lovely bloom of mildew on all four walls, I had a black bathroom in no time at all and a lovely crop of penicillin just above the toilet cistern.

But its not my apartment that was seedy, oh no, that accolade is reserved for a certain nightclub in Newcastle where the Electrical Club held its regular "stripper and comedian" stag nights.

The Electrical Club was run by Graham, a sales rep of an electrical wholesaler who garnered support for his organisation from the myriad of electrical contractors and retailers in the North East basically because he didn't like going to the pub and drinking on his own. Meetings were held every week, or more than once a week at The Printers Pie, a pub in the centre of Newcastle and the club existed to, erm, meet, and, erm, drink beer, thats it.

Once a month or so someone would declare that it had been almost a full month since we had had a "stripper and comedian" stag night and so Graham would be instructed to go and organise one, a job that he coveted greatly, coveted so much that no-one else ever got a chance to organise a stripper and comedian stag night, especially to organise the strippers bit of the stripper and comedian stag night.

The lucrative part of running your own club of drunken electrical contractors was that when commanded to do so you got to have a whip round of members and then take the money to a run-down district of Gateshead where a woman of indescribable ugliness ran a stripper agency from one room above a fruit and veg shop.

According to Graham you never actually got to go into the room that the ugly woman rented, you got to walk up the stairs to the room and tap on the door, if you banged on the door too hard she wouldn't open it in fear that you were the local police porn squad, but tap on it in just the right way and she'd open the door a crack and ask who you were and why you were there.

Of course Graham was well known, almost family you might say and so she'd open the door fully to him revealing a shelf across and halfway up the door barring your entry into the room. Upon, and chained to the shelf was a lever arch file in which, encapsulated in plastic were the A4 pages from her stock inventory, and her stock inventory consisted of younger, less ugly women who, for cash money, would remove their clothing in the company of men whilst being accompanied by music.

Graham would spend all afternoon at the top of the stairs at the "agency", thumbing backwards and forwards through the already well thumbed pages, reading the notes on each page as to what each of the less-ugly women would be prepared to do for cash money, phrases such as "partial strip" or "no touching" were quickly dismissed in favour of the ones that read "will allow light oiling by clients" or "objects may be inserted and retrieved later", Graham had a particular fetish for the object inserters, especially as he wore spectacles, a favourite target of the object inserters.

Having booked a gaggle of willing oilers and object inserters Graham then turned to the venue, and his venue of choice was the whole reason for the post today for the venue of choice was always "La Dolce Vita".

In the 1960's La Dolce Vita had been one of the premier venues in the North East, a place where the country's top musicians and artists flocked to appear, a place where if you were anyone then you simply had to be seen.

But by 1981 it had passed beyond shabby to a state of existence known only by one word - shit.

It was a shit nightclub and no-one ever went there willingly.

Except the Electrical Club.

The first thing that struck you about La Dolce Vita is that it was dark inside, the second thing that struck you about La Dolce Vita was that as you walked across the carpeted floor you suddenly realised why it was so dark - it was dark to prevent you from realising that you were actually walking across a sticky mess rather than carpet, stand still long enough and you were stuck like glue to the carpet which was obviously the original 1960's carpet with 20 years worth of beer spilled on it.

The third thing that struck you about La Dolce Vita struck you when you went to the Gents toilet and you realised that two decades of vandalism had never been repaired to the point where the urinals were missing, having been smashed off the wall long ago, you therefore urinated into the pipe on the wall where the urinal had been, easy to do when sober (well, easy for Gents anyway) but nigh on impossible when blathered hence the constantly damp floor and constant aroma which stung your eyes at times.

So we'd stick ourselves to the floor and we'd piss into pipes on the wall and we'd wade through other peoples piss in order to do so and we'd suffer all of these degradations just so that we could watch Grahams choice of willing oilers and object inserters whilst getting drunk on beer that smelled as though it had lain in the pumps since the 1960's, they were great nights, lads nights, nights that women cannot hope to understand, we wallowed in filth and foul odours to watch Percy Filth on stage - its at the root of mens souls and is the primary reason why women will never understand us.


One day, in order to underline this message I will tell the story of how one old friend of mine took his wife on holiday to celebrate her 40th birthday, he took her to Benidorm to celebrate her 40th birthday, and on the actual night of her 40th birthday he took her to a nightclub and bought front row seats to watch the infamous Sticky Vicky, Queen of the Object Inserters. For sheer nerve, bravado, and plain dumb-fucked-ness we males all salute him today.