Bunker people

Saturday 15th, September, 2007:

I read an article this morning that described the 1980’s as ‘the decade of excess’. The ‘80’s, it said, was the decade of Porsche driving red-braced yuppies holding fistfuls of £20 notes in one hand and a bottle of champers in the other. It was a decade of de-regulation, profits and rampant capitalism. It was the decade of Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney, Chris Waddle’s mullet and Thatcherism. It was a decade to be celebrated.

It made me think that there must have been two sets of 1980’s. Because, up here in the North East, all we had was unemployment and LCL Super Strength, and we were broke for most of the time. Of the people who hung about the Bunker, none of us had a Porsche, and only Andy Gibson had a car, a Citroen van (and Hud burned out the starter motor on that). We didn’t have wads of cash, we had YOP schemes for twenty three pounds a week, and we had the fortnightly ritual of standing in a queue of steaming unemployed waiting to sign on before nipping up to the Museum Tea Rooms a pot of tea or, if you were flush, a cup of Louis coffee that would last for hours.
These financial dire straits didn’t stop us from wearing red braces, if we really wanted to, but it did put the mockers on us drinking magnums of Moet et Chandon.

What we did have was a set of values and a sense of doing something new, something real, something that belonged to us; we fought Nazi skinheads in the market square, picked magic mushrooms from Backhouse Park and played music, of admittedly varying quality, on second-hand guitars in a century old dilapidated school. Years later, when we discovered that some of these tatty guitars were worth a fortune, we’d already sold ‘em so it didn’t matter. I know that up until recently John ‘Cullen’ Collinson had a Sunburst ’59 Les Paul Junior that he played to death in Patrick, and that would go for the best part of ten grand now. And I remember standing with Frankie Warsaw, gazing in Shite’s window at a metallic blue 1961 Gibson SG Junior, it was battered to fuck and the paint had crackled so badly that it looked like a mosaic. It looked great. It was going for £175. A total rip-off, we thought. Today it’d be worth about five or six grand.

And the Green Terrace site was sold for millions.
We charged ten bob an hour.

But, easy come, easy go. It was never about the money. It was about dealing with the death of industry and the death of prospects, it was about playing in bands, making a coffee last a half day, wearing second-hand clothes not because it was cool but because that’s all we could afford, and it was about having a lot of fun in the meantime.

So, for us, were the 1980’s a decade of excess? I suppose, in some cases, yes. But excess wasn’t the point, it was never the point; it was just a by-product of the things we did.



Side-note: Interestingly, post-Bunker, quite a few of us ended up with careers in what might be called the Caring Professions – Education, Social Work, the NHS. Quite a few of us got degrees too, and more. But wherever we ended up, I like to think that we still recognise bullshit when it lands on our doorstep and that, crucially, we don’t subscribe to the political bollocks that we still encounter on a daily basis.

We still don’t wear ‘red braces’.

Dave Wares.