Venue Stories - Narratives, Memories, and Histories from Britain’s Independent Music Spaces - Fraser Mann
Peripheral Dancing: The Jazz Rooms, Brighton, 1984
Venue Stories - Narratives, Memories, and Histories from Britain’s Independent Music Spaces - Fraser Mann
Helen Pleasance [+]
York St. John University
Description
It is 1985, definitely 1985. Or could it be 1984? A new club that has opened up in Brighton. The Jazz Rooms – down one of those narrow side streets off the front by the pier (the one with the chip shop on the corner, I think), then down some steps to a basement room (of course it’s a basement; it’s a jazz club). How often did the night run? Once a month on a Saturday night? How often did we go – four, five times? More? I can’t really remember now. The things I do remember are that it became a Big Thing – reviewed in The Face, impossibly cool people piling down from London to be seen on the dancefloor. One night I rubbed shoulders with Sadé. Another time, Jerry Dammers was there. But what – or rather who – I remember most vividly is the woman on the edge of the dancefloor every time we went. Small, slightly scruffy in low-key 1950s cotton blouses and skirts cinched in at the waist, and a chiffon scarf tied round her head in a huge bow, she always seemed to be alone. She usually had a bottle of lager in her hand and was not quite part of the crowd on the dancefloor. The way she moved, though, obsessed me. Her movements were spare, mostly her head and her hips; you couldn’t say she was a great dancer in the way that you might of someone spinning and making shapes to Northern Soul. But she absolutely possessed the music, or, maybe, it possessed her. This chapter explores how my encounter with her has stayed with me and shaped how I became a peripheral dancer – the venue as the space where a tune and a body take hold of each other and create someone who doesn’t exist anywhere else.