FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Coming of Age in Scottish Clubs Was So Good That It's Left Me an Anxious Wreck

Moving from London to Scotland and back again taught this writer to accept that life is, sadly, utterly terrible
All photos via the author

Of all the different kinds of pain in life, anxiety has a decent claim to being the dirt worst. Alright, rubbing your exposed femur rubbed into a cheese grater might technically be worse. Watching a loved one succumb to disgusting, degrading illness isn't great. Falling out of love, or into depression have never been mistaken for pleasure.

But anxiety is as vivid as grief and as tenacious as the black dog. Anxiety is the utter reassurance of knowing yourself to be wrong. It's knowing that you've never had the right sort of body, the right sort of voice, the right sort of hair, the right sort of taste. It's knowing you've never been in the right place, or been capable of making the wrong place work. Anxiety is knowing that you never will, either. It's a of slowly dying, egged on by a generous helping of electricity sprayed direct to the veins in your temples.

Advertisement

Anxiety is being roused by mid-afternoon shards of grey-green light, sucking your bulbous top lip and having absolutely no idea where or who you are. It's looking suspiciously at the mirror, staring straight at the spam-featured corpse in the glass and thinking 'yes, I know that guy. That guy is me.' Anxiety is tapping down your sides gingerly to make sure that the corporeal world is still there, that things are still tangible, still graspable. It's clocking the Jim Morrison poster in the corner, the empty MD2020 bottles on the flatpack furniture, the crumpled mosher stuffed down the side of the settee. Anxiety is realising that you've inexplicably found yourself at an afters in Fife because those lads who gave you that pill, they said that they had a free house at their mums and that it was going to be class. Is this class? You certainly don't feel class. Your left your tinnies on the radiator. That wasn't that class. You can't find your trainers. You remember that having trainers was class.

Anxiety is an Englishman hitting up his first club in Scotland. It's not an anxiety that has anything to do with the threat of imminent violence or cross border cultural embarrassment. In the main, they're just scare stories for brassy cockney dads to bark at their son's. Old tales of animosity that just serve to underline how much worse everything was in the 70s, reinforcing the salient point, which is that you don't know you're even fucking born, sunshine, pints were better, a pound meant a pound and cross border hatred meant cross border hatred. In truth, it's nothing to do with that. Anxiety is looking in the mirror again, on a sober Tuesday afternoon, right back at the by now reanimated spam features and realising that the idea of home, the idea of 'down south' is as hazy, as alien, as foreign as a batterless pizza. It's the dawning agony of realising that the unironic use of 'swedger' is very much a thing in your life.

Advertisement

My early 20's have followed the unexceptional path of a lot of peoples early 20's. Some studying, a succession of shit jobs, some navel gazing, some waking up to the iron clad boredoms and absurdities of adult life. The concept of council tax. The concept of unshiftable paunch if I drink more than three pints in a night. The time when everything hunkers down and you harden into what you are, barely conscious of how you got there. Like most people that aren't professionally invested in clubbing, it's a priority that has drifted—not by calculation—somewhere far out of bounds. The last time I wound up at a club night, I…quite honestly remember the last time I ended up at a club night. That isn't a lament, it's just a fact of the by-now mid 20's shitfuck of life.

Like most people, it's not that it ever really meant that much. Not really. There are all the usual hazy memories, tinged gold and gunge. The double dropping freakouts at that shit afterparty at the (unironicly named) 'Flat of Dreams'. The mephedrone texts to girls that didn't care. Mr Scruff at the Reading Rooms. Optimo at Subclub. Loitering in near empty basements in Perth, giving moral support to mates with badly flyered club nights. All of the stuff that means so much at the time, but doesn't ever quite turn to sepia. Or maybe it does.

What you really miss, is the sense of being elsewhere. Of being locked into a life at once alien but familiar. Of all the ridiculous, manic freedoms of stupid, careless youth. Of thinking that your Dundee city centre flat with a slanted floor and the pigeon infestation is very bliss itself. Of sitting post-Rooms in the same flat, watching the morning sun splayed out against the stone buildings opposite, possessed with ecstasy honeymoon optimism, feeling like the Dundee horizon is an open armed invite to the whole world.

Advertisement

It was later that things got grim, that reality stuck its head through the door to clean up the ashtrays and pick the cans off the carpet. Before heading back to London. But before the permanent overdrafts, the final Megabus back to Victoria, before the outbreak of a different kind of anxiety, there's something else. There's a final blowout in Glasgow and a 5 AM meander down to the park, perching—arse cheeks frozen—at the bank of the Clyde. It's turning to my closest friend in the country, another interloper (Bradford), assenting silently to the splitting of the last tinny. It's sitting wordlessly, sipping the frothy lukewarmer, staring into the filthiness of the river, eyes slowly mellowing out with not even the hint of a thought of either of our heads.

It's looking back on that unremarkable grey morning, from the vantage point of another unremarkable grey morning in London two years later and thinking, what? It's not that you'd wish it back, not even that you'd wish to be there again. Not really.

It's the awareness that no matter where, not in Fife, not in Glasgow, certainly not in London are those times going to come again. And that's another kind of anxiousness no trick dispels.

Francisco is on Twitter