THE TEENAGE DISCO DAYS.
Originally published in August 2022
Two editions ago, I took a wander down memory lane and discussed with you what it was like growing up in the Gortlee area of the town back in the days of the heady 1990s.
It rekindled memories of neighbourhood games, playing on rope-swings and underground dens and being out until your Mum called you in for your dinner from the back porch.
This time though, we’re moving onward with a look at a Letterkenny upbringing during the more teen angst-filled years.
Almost everybody goes through something of a teenage-rebel phase in their lives and I was no exception to the rule.
Compared to when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I found myself answering back a lot more to my parents. Making demands to stay out later than I needed to and probably always giving them something to be rightfully annoyed about.
That’s not to say I was a ‘bad kid’ as such. I grew out of rebelling almost as quickly as I had gotten into it and maybe the reason why I occasionally found myself glugging cheap cider down an alleyway on a Friday night was because, in hindsight, perhaps I was hiding myself from something. Like any other adolescent, I had insecurities and maybe acting up was my mask.
During my first three years in secondary school, I often found myself zoning out during lessons. It wasn’t necessarily always that I was causing disruption or winding the teachers up. It was more a case that I was disinterested in the way most classroom tasks followed the same routine of ‘read-the textbook-and-answer-the-questions’ over and over again.
It became mundane.
Maybe things like these nights out provided some sort of much-needed entertainment.
Girls become a bigger part of your life at this stage and while I – without sounding like a brag – did okay in the old ‘shifting department,’ it always seemed to be the case that the girl I fancied was busy fancying someone else; usually a friend or a classmate of mine.
These things wouldn’t bother me now, but you gotta remember, I was just a kid back then and absolutely everything was a big deal.
Of course, it wasn’t all drama and thankfully there was plenty of time for fun too. It also goes without saying that no kid from Letterkenny grows up without some sort of story to tell from the dancefloors of the Golden Grill nightclub. It was the late 1990s / early 2000s. Dance tracks, of which included genrés like House, Garage and Trance (and teeny-bop), filled up the charts.
Planning a night out at the end of term teenage disco took more effort than a CIA covert operation: “What time should we meet up? Who is sorting the pre-disco booze? Do we know anyone with a fake ID who can get served? Should we get some curry chips to take the smell of our breath? Whose house did we tell the Aul Pair we were staying in?”
And of course, the irrepressible matchmaking line: “Here! Will you shift my mate?”
At this point, you’re probably all thinking that this was all very boyish and laddish behaviour. Rest assured though, and in the name of balance, plenty of girls have come forward on an online post I put up about the teenage disco days and through some giddy nostalgia, they too recalled the divilment they got up to.
One female friend of mine recalled how she would get her mum to drop her off at a friend’s house under the pretense that they were having a slumber party.
She’d be on the way to the house wearing a hoodie and pajama bottoms carrying sweets and a DVD, but once she’d been dropped off, she’d discard her attire and unveil that she had the miniskirt and top on underneath the whole time. She also let slip that competitions over who got the most ‘shifts’ was not purely a boys’ thing.
Other ladies were good enough to share with me the makeup routine beforehand. As one recounted: “The planning of the outfit and getting ready with your mates, the pang of Davidoff Cool Water or Exclamation off the girls with the Lynx Africa from the boys and the digital camera hanging off your wrist for the photos and I still remember my first slow set.”
At which point, her friend interjected with “the makeup, the panstick and basically, the more orange and tanned you looked, the better! In fact, looking back, I’m pretty sure I used to be using silver lipstick,” she laughed with just a touch of a cringe.
Once inside the venue, the traditional laps of the dance-floor ‘just to see who’s about’ had to be done and while most of the tunes were poppy and dancey, this was an era when the three song slowsets were still a thing. Essentially the banging tracks by the Vengaboys and tunes like Sandstorm by Darude were momentarily replaced by the likes of Mariah Carey, Boys II Men, and an up-and-coming group called Westlife.
If you didn’t get your shift by that stage of the night, you may as well forget about it. Mind you, getting the shift didn’t make you untouchable because it wasn’t uncommon for some members of the staff stewarding at the event to give you an embarrassing tap on the shoulder for you to quit what you were at, otherwise a phone call to home would be made.
On the flip side, if this was by no means your first shift with the same person, maybe something was in the air and this was a time to pop the question: “how’s about you and me start going steady?” And they say romance is dead!
Those were just some of the guarantees on nights like these and the only other one was probably the certainty of a good old-fashioned scrap in the car park afterwards.
Usually between lads from different schools or different townlands; doing their bit to represent their parish with just a sprinkling of peer-pressure to join the fight thrown in, I suppose.
You’d think after all that craic, it’d be plain sailing and you’d just go home. Usually it did, but not often without the interrogation from your folks.
“Who was out with you? Who is he? What do his parents do? It’d be more in your line to do a bit of study than going at that galavanting! Such and-such a one was telling me there was fighting at it? What a bunch of galloots ye really are!”
Those days though, good as they were are – just like the venue itself – alas, no more. Mind you! They certainly wasn’t the end of our disco days. Far from it. Now it was time to move on the to next step … Yup, you’ve guessed it!
“Does anyone know where we could get some fake IDs to get into the over-18s, lads?”
Jonathan Foley 