1978, industrial Northumberland, Thursday evening, YMCA disco for 14 –18 year olds. Tracey Moor has a fabulous new gold polyester jumpsuit, her hair has Farah Fawcett flicks and her face is slathered in make up. She looks great. In just one week she will arrive at the disco completely transformed into a watered down version of Siouxsie circa Hong Kong Garden. Her fat friend, Karen Donaldson doesn’t look so good but smiles a lot. In just 12 months Karen will be pregnant after getting fucked by a greasy gypsy behind the waltzer at the coal-miners picnic and annual funfair. I grab a fanta from the pop shop near the gym and wander into the disco. The room is dark but the mobile disco at the far end is doing it’s best to recreate a little slice of Studio 54 just for us. Despite the charts being full of generic disco shit our discotheque plays stuff that actually fills the floor at 54. 'American Generation' by The Ritchie Family starts up and gangs of girls gather in circles to dance and stare at seated boys. 'Got A Feeling' by Patrick Juvet is next. These two records are always played together and I love them. The strings and key changes in both songs made me feel ‘weird’ and it was years before I would learn, and therefore understand the ‘weird’ feeling, that they were created by and for gay men. Boys never danced to disco at the YMCA but at 9.30 the music policy changed for 30 minutes. The punk-half-hour usually cleared the room and left a small core of us to jump up and down to 7” singles that we had to take to the disco ourselves (write your name on the record sleeve or lose it). By the end of 1978 our small core had grown considerably due to girls like Tracy Moor and boys from the football team (i.e. role models) getting ‘punked-up’. The punk-half-hour was joined by the heavy-metal-half-hour and the new outsiders became the long haired pot smokers who stood still in the middle of the dance floor and agitated their heads to 'Smoke On The Water'. The disco tunes continued to fill most of the evening for the next few years and this cross-pollination of provincial pop culture reached it’s lowest point when Tracey Moor was seen twirling round the dancefloor in bondage pants and a 999 t-shirt while Patrick Juvet trilled ‘I Love America’.