A year or so after my work as a teenage cleaner had ended at the cinema, I pitched a wild idea to the new owners. Picture this: bands playing live at the Wedgewood Cinema, decked out in white, with films projected over them during the set. Lewis, the owner—a decent bloke, easy to chat with—thought it was a cracking concept but reckoned it’d cost a bomb to build a stage up to the screen’s height. Not one to give up, I threw out another idea: what about a punk disco? Lewis gave it the nod, and for at least six months, the Wedgewood became Denbigh’s own punk rock mecca.
Every weekend, the town’s teenage punk crew—spiked hair, ripped jackets, and all—formed a gloriously chaotic queue outside, buzzing for the mayhem to kick off. We’d already be half-cut, our heads swimming in Bub’s lethal homebrew, toting bags stuffed with records for the DJ. This wasn’t some half-arsed Youth Club disco with a token punk track thrown in to shut us up. This was the real deal: wall-to-wall Discharge, Blitz, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, Dead Kennedys, Crass, The Ejected (belted out Have You Got 10p?—nah, not me!), UK Subs, Cockney Rejects, The Damned, Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs (You’re Ready Now was a banger), Plasmatics, and heaps more.
Those nights were pure chaos, and I’ve got a scar on the back of my shaved head to prove it. During a particularly mental rendition of Dead Cities by The Exploited, I ended up at the bottom of a pile-on, face-down on the sticky floor, barely able to breathe under a heap of sweaty bodies. Some daft sod thought he’d leap over the lot, only to clip my head as he landed. Blood pissed out for the rest of the night, but I kept dancing, too caught up in the madness to care. Eventually, I dragged my blood-soaked self to the Infirmary for stitches. That scar’s still there, a jagged little memento of those great nights.
Denbigh wasn’t exactly a hotbed of musical talent back then, but we had one band that made some noise: Terminal, a new-wave-cum-pop outfit with a slick, radio-friendly sound. They were alright, I suppose, though a bit too polished for my raw punk tastes. Still, I couldn’t resist grabbing their single Am I Doing It Right—a cheeky tune about a lad losing his virginity that had just enough edge to make it worth a spin. They played a gig at the Wedgewood Cinema, and it was a proper spectacle. Picture this: a stage rigged up on scaffolding, level with the massive screen, with a film flickering over them as they performed. It was electric, a proper show that felt bigger than our little town.
Where did they get the idea to put it on there and have a film projected over them as they played?
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