A DANCING Excerpt from my Next Book, "Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer"

1985.

Though early December – the beginning of summer in Australia with nights balmy to hot in Sydney – the nights in Melbourne were still mercifully cool. Cool enough to dress up and hit the town. Which Germaine and I did on that very first night. And when we hit it, I realised Melbourne had something Sydney did not.

Nightclubs.

Sure, Sydney had nightclubs but not the kind that welcomed two kids under the legal drinking age with open arms – perhaps because, as was clear from the first establishment we entered, the emphasis here in Melbourne wasn’t on drinking but on dancing.

Stepping down into the ‘Groove Tube Café’, a whole dancefloor full of people going coolly berserk to "Stepping Stone" by The Monkees, on the walls and on the dancing people were revolving cartwheels of colour, each wheel of numberless coloured spokes all intermeshing with others in perpetual harlequin-shaped motion.

‘This is AWESOME,’ I sided to Germaine above the music.

‘As it should be,’ she returned close to my ear. ‘Sydney’s got natural beauty. Melbourne...’ She shook her head. ‘So we make beauty.’

‘I can’t believe this!’

‘Believe it,’ she flowed. ‘Sydney, you’re fine if you like the one thing that every club in Sydney is doing. Here there’s so many clubs there’s always one doing what you like. I like Go-Go. And here it is...’

Go-Go Dancing! And here indeed it was... Just like in the black-and-white photo in the school library except exactly 20 years later and in colour and I’d just stepped into the photo. The people weren’t just dancing like fools (not that there’s anything wrong with that); here there was a definite style, just like in the still photo from 1965 except here it was moving and, man, was it moving. Some of the dancers were better than others but their style was a mix of mania and grace, a fusion of passion and poise only ever seen elsewhere in Flamenco dancers.

But then Stepping Stone finished and a song began that I had once heard for the very first time through Steve, one he by now famously hadn’t thought I’d like...

HHEOWWWWH!!!

"I Got You" by James Brown meant one thing only. I spun to Germaine.
‘Dance?!’

For the second time that day she put out her hand to me. Though this time I didn’t ‘take’ it, as such...

I grabbed.

"MEMOIRS OF A GO-GO DANCER" WILL BE THE SEQUEL TO JUSTIN SHEEDY'S WARMLY-RECEIVED FIRST BOOK, "GOODBYE CRACKERNIGHT". FULL BLOG POST AT SHEEDY'S CRACKERNIGHT.COM HERE...
http://crackernight.com/2014/06/22/a-...