Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  I now had my new job as a go-go dancer every up-coming Friday night while I spent the year figuring out the new uni course for which I might apply for the following year. However the go-go job wouldn’t provide enough income to keep my father even 1% satisfied now that I was an official DROP-OUT. And so it was that I began call centre work generating sales leads for travelling life insurance salesmen, the call centre being located at the lower Balmain premises of Craven, Player and Hyde (International) though with nobody on-site named as such, the company’s ‘board’ apparently of the ‘international’ type. In any case, the local newspaper ‘positions vacant’ ad had promised a ‘fun and slightly zany office environment — no experience necessary’, rendering me eminently qualified.

  In a heritage sandstone building surrounded by wasteland in harbourside Balmain’s now defunct dockside area, the call centre had about 15 phone staff at any one time: a few English backpackers, a few youngish men ‘between full-time situations’, a middle-aged man recently made ‘redundant’ from somewhere, a woman of retirement age boldly ‘re-entering the workforce’ and miscellaneous types.

  Though the Brit backpackers were friendly enough, the Australian members of staff didn’t seem overly keen to socialise on their breaks. I soon gathered this might be due to at least some of their names being fake ones so as to avoid paying income tax: One goofy, thick-spectacled bloke was not only a keen motor racing buff but, by an amazing chance of birth, had the same name as a semi-famous Australian racing driver. He was also the first person I had ever met who chuckled slightly any time you called him by name. There was a quiet young man who let slip he had just been accepted by ‘The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ (an order of Gay men who famously dressed as nuns for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras as well as other alternative events). Though his name for tax purposes was Graham, his ‘new’ name was Sister Mary Mary Quite Contrary.

  At the end of my first week I was even presented with a cash bonus for my work. ‘Hmm, yeahrz, you’re doing rather well,’ hummed the centre’s lone ‘supervisor’, a thinning-haired, gothic-faced young man who smiled enigmatically when I swore to him that, if I were producing a murder mystery play, I’d cast him as the ‘enigmatic butler’. The only other member of staff was the centre’s ‘general manager’, a late-middle aged man in striped business shirts and gold bracelets who strode the floor every now and then with a sucked-in gut.

  One friend I did make, though, was a bookish man in his early 30s who told me he was an ‘Arts graduate’. He bemoaned the fact that this interim job to pay his bills looked like becoming his career, the curse and fate, as he put it, of ‘Generation X’. The first time I had ever heard the term, I asked him what it meant.

  ‘It means us,’ he said. ‘The generation we’re part of, you and I.’

  ‘Why “X”?’ I put to him.

  ‘Because socialogists the world over are buggered if they can identify or even invent a name for us. As a generation we’re a cultural and historical blank.’

  Sorry

  * * *

  Since band days, of all the magnificent songs we had covered, by far and away my passionate favourite had been one called Sorry from 1966 by Australia’s ‘Easybeats’. It was written by the band’s singer, Stevie Wright, and rhythm guitarist, George Young (older brother of Angus and Malcolm Young who began their stardom with ‘AC/DC’ ten years later). Though the Easybeats weren’t the blues-influenced heavy rock of AC/DC; they were gutsy blues-influenced pop. In a ‘fame’ nutshell considered ‘the Australian Beatles’, they were an utterly original-sounding band as per their international Number 1, Friday On My Mind. But Sorry was the song for me. And more than that: There was a go-go dance that went to it…

  In 1987 ABC TV were running a Saturday afternoon show called Beatbox featuring contemporary youth interviews on topical subjects plus both contemporary and archival music video clips. It was here that I first saw (and video-taped) the black-and-white 1966 video clip to Sorry by the Easybeats. Filmed in the TV studios of ATN Channel 7 Epping, over the song’s punchy ‘whacka-whacka-whacka’ guitar-sound intro, the TV camera vision moved through and around a studio packed with young fans on all sides of the band until the camera centred in front of the Easybeats in close-cropped ‘Beatle’ type suits and mop-top hairstyles and doing their thang. As to the ‘lyrics’ of Sorry, they’re forgettable; something about having missed a date with a girl. Yet their SOUND is unforgettable. As is the whole song: Two and a half dead-set minutes of 24-Carat Pop Glory, Sorry is the sound (and look) of Serious FUN and features one of the first ever ‘heavy’ guitar solos in popular music. And below them, around them, also elevated above and behind the Easybeats are their fans who clearly adore them because the band are shit-hot-talented, young and ballsy — the lead-singer, Stevie Wright, was just 16. But that’s not all about this iconic video clip. OH no…

  Directly above and behind the band are three go-go dancers: left to right, girl-boy-girl, girls in close-fitting slacks, sleeveless tops and ‘mod’ hairdos, boy in close-cropped mod jacket, trousers and mop-top. They would have looked awesome just standing still yet as ONE they are going all OUT in go-go dance-move unison to the music: stereo hands push up-up-out-out, arm-up-flail-right, arm-up-flail-left and arms-out left-right ‘scissors’ two-three-four-five!

  As a choreographed dance routine, though fluid it’s complex, it’s fast, it’s multi-phased in sync with the mad phases of the song and I learnt it. I got it Down.

  In order to be able to, I watched and replayed that video so many times I began to notice all its tiny details… Most promising of which was the line of well-groomed young ladies sitting in a row just above and behind the go-go trio: The row of ‘nice’ girls with their focus unmistakably on go-go boy’s cute butt.

  The Cage

  * * *

  Look up ‘In One’s Element’ in the dictionary: It’s got a picture of me in my go-go cage at The Plastic Inevitable. Indeed, somewhere in a dusty vault exists a picture of me as taken on about my second night in the job by a Sydney Morning Herald photographer, in the moment his blue flashes only adding to the psychedelic lighting all round the room.

  Going for dear LIFE in that cage, through my body and through my soul flowed the purest physical happiness. And though being the central focus of attention in a large room packed with people was an undeniable thrill, I can only assure you that my happiness flowed from being able to give pleasure to others through my performance. From being able to inspire them to even greater enjoyment of the moment.

  Dance is something primal. A mode of expression from deep within us. Something wordless and powerful, the breath of our ancient and almost forgotten selves. When dancing we live in and for the moment and appreciate the hell out of just being alive. And in that cage alive I was.

  But then Sorry came on…

  I don’t know how many in that packed-out club had previously seen the old black-and-white film clip of the Sorry dance as regularly screened on Beatbox, but those who had were now seeing it right before their eyes in living colour. And I can only assume those present who hadn’t previously seen the grainy old clip had a Force-10 ‘What the FU — ?’ moment. I think some people even stopped dancing. All my performance needed was two go-go girls in sync on either side of me — and I had firm plans to broach this subject with Georgie, for that was the name of The Plastic Inevitable’s girl go-go dancer.

  At the end of the night, the DJ grinned and handed me not only my wages but a cash bonus. And right then a highly fit-looking middle-aged man approached and leaned in to us, by their greeting a man clearly known to the DJ…

  ‘My name’s Ross Coleman,’ he said to me. ‘I’m a choregrapher these days… The Sorry routine. Back in ’66. That was me in the middle.’

  ‘Sir,’ I beamed, ‘please allow me to shake — your — hand.’

  The Valhalla

  * * *

  Steve had recently moved in to a student share house in Sydney’s inner city Newtown. O
n the fridge door of his new digs was a poster — the same poster as on the fridge door of seemingly every inner city terrace house we entered when visiting Steve’s growing circle of uni friends. The poster was the pink, green and black-and-white listing for the next few months’ film screenings at the Valhalla Cinema, a proudly independent movie theatre in inner city Glebe.

  Having somehow survived Sydney’s post-war march of urban redevelopment, The Valhalla was a grand old Art Deco palace and living monument to an age when the ‘silver screen’ reigned supreme in popular culture of the pre-TV 1930s and 40s. And its current owners, bless their cotton socks, were keeping it alive as a vibrant mecca for lovers of independent, experimental and ‘Art House’ cinema, also ‘classic’ cinema of left-wing legend. In the pre-digital, pre-Internet late 1980s, rare and eccentric cinema films were largely unavailable to the general public. There was no finding and downloading them for view as they existed only on celluloid in dusty old movie reel cans. They were buried treasure. Buried treasure on nightly display at the Valhalla Cinema.

  With the threat of Cold War nuclear annihilation still hanging on over our heads in 1987, Stanley Kubric’s black-and-white masterpiece Dr Strangelove from 1964 had The Valhalla packed out every night for a week. From 1964 and being seen for the first time by us Generation Xers, Kubric’s dark comedy-drama satire of our modern world on the precipice of nuclear self-destruction was a thing of vital contemporary relevance to us up on that silver screen. As a result, the atmosphere in the packed old cinema was electric — indeed a turn-up for the books for Generation X!

  All in Kubric’s so vivid ‘actual footage’ style, the film was the wickedly hilarious drama of a rogue U.S. Airforce general intent on tipping the fragile balance of West versus East superpower stalemate and plunging the world into nuclear war and in 1987 it said the following to us: You, youth of the modern world, are sane and right to be angry and cynical about your world leaders; the flimsy balance of mutually-assured destruction they have set up over you all looks like madness because it IS madness. It is the architecture of second-rate genocidal CLOWNS. With every single one of the U.S. Airforce B52 strategic bombers back in 1964 carrying 16 times the total explosive force of all the weapons used in World War Two, imagine the scale of the potential nightmare right NOW!

  Though it wasn’t just the best films of all time that unified Valhalla audiences; sometimes it was the worst: One night Steve and I rocked up to see the opening night of Amazon Women on the Moon but we’d got our nights wrong. The house was packed, as usual, on the bill the last night of something: a ‘Science-Fiction Double-Feature’…

  Robot Monster and the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space!

  Robot Monster, from somewhere in the 1960s, was a film born of when youth cinema audiences required their sci-fi flicks to plumb unimaginable depths of ‘so bad it’s good’. B-Grade wasn’t enough for them; 1960s sci-fi double-feature audiences demanded Z-Grade and they GOT it. As a film, Robot Monster was HEROICALLY shoddy and just as hilarious, the ambiguity of whether intentionally or unintentionally hilarious only rendering it more so.

  But then commenced Plan 9 From Outer Space, to this day celebrated as ‘The Worst Film of All Time’. It was the art of Hollywood enigma, Ed Wood, whose directorial output is regarded as so brilliantly awful as to have warranted a film on his career, Ed Wood from 1994, starring devotees of his awfulness including no less than Johnny Depp, Bill Murray and Martin Landau.

  And Plan 9 did not disappoint, revealing itself as an insanely-scripted outer space sci-fi graveyard gothic zombie extravaganza of such hotch-potch confusion as to make you disbelieve you could actually be witnessing what you were up on the screen. Perhaps the greatest moment in the film is that of the firework-sprouting ‘flying saucers’ where the man in the black leotard and mask holding up them up on sticks becomes clearly visible to the viewing audience. In that moment, we were thundering our feet on the wooden floorboards of the old Valhalla cinema.

  Generation X.

  For one moment in glorious unison.

  The King of Go-Go

  * * *

  The Sydney Morning Herald headline read: King of go-go finds it hard to be gone.

  Clearly that’s what Ross Coleman had been back in 1966, due to his TV go-go performances the very teen heart-throb with his clothes regularly ripped off by his legions of adoring girl fans — and just possibly by one or two adoring boys. In 1987 a well-respected choreographer for the Sydney Dance Company, according to the Herald article, Coleman was even now rehearsing a troupe of professional dancers for a special go-go performance at The Plastic Inevitable.

  ‘It is a wild but serious mode of dance,’ Coleman said of go-go. ‘It’s the feel that’s hard to capture. You have to be uninhibited and it certainly requires sexuality. I wouldn’t suggest it to the fragile.’

  My eyes widened as the newspaper article continued…

  When Ross first entered the Plastic Inevitable Club he was shocked to find the 60s revival in full force. There in the go-go cage was teenage Justin Sheedy. Instantly it was clear he had studied Coleman’s own go-go technique. ‘Every one of his movements was one of mine from the Easybeats’ film clip for Sorry — it was astounding.’

  The very next Friday night at the club, I saw two lovely girls stepping onto the dance floor close by my cage. ‘That must be Justin!’ said one.

  Taking a vitally needed sweat-break outside on Cleveland Street halfway through the night, I found myself surrounded by girls. To this day I curse, I CURSE the fact I did not say, ‘Fine. Which one of you wants to have sex then?’

  In any case I suspect go-go dancer Georgie may have noticed the female attention I’d been getting as at the end of the night she made a beeline for me and invited me to her apartment on the weekend so as to learn the Sorry dance.

  Rock And Roll.

  P.S., dear reader, I can only assure you that Georgie and I never EVER got round to performing the Sorry dance.

  Manning

  * * *

  ‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ released Steve over a chomp of toast. ‘Have a geeze at this,’ he said, handing me the Herald’s weekly ‘what’s on’ entertainment supplement. On its green back-cover page was a photo. Of me dancing in my cage, below it, further publicity for The Plastic Inevitable as Sydney’s hot new club. Clearly was its managing DJ well-connected in print media circles.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Steve. ‘Any thoughts on next year?’ he smiled.

  ‘Still thinking, mate,’ I said as I scoured the page.

  ‘Well, keep thinking. Anyway I’ve got a lecture. What time y’start at the call centre?’

  ‘Afternoon shift.’

  ‘Come to uni with me,’ he said. ‘Get a feel for the place…’

  We rode down the backstreets and alleyways of Newtown towards the sprawling campus of Sydney Uni on two rickety old bikes left at Steve’s terrace by flatmates apparently long since moved on. Considered ‘common property’, anyone who wanted to ride them could feel free, flatmate or guest, Steve taking the ‘girl’s bike’; its handle bar basket perfect for his uni books and folders.

  Passing through the gates of the uni, as we pedalled along its often tree-shaded avenues past ovals and lawns, the first thing that struck me about The University of Sydney was that, even though its buildings were a mix of 1950s modern-drab, 40s fibro-transient and 1850s ‘Let this be Oxford’ Gothic, everything in this well laid out mish-mash looked like it was meant to be where it was. Steve, architectural connoisseur that he was, pointed out ‘The Transient Building’, as per its sign…

  ‘Transient since 1946,’ he chuckled as we passed it.

  As we rode up tree-lined Manning Road it struck me how blessed I was to be riding a bike once again with my childhood friend, just as we used to so long ago. Dismounting, we perched the bikes outside a venerable-looking old sandstone and brown brick building.

  ‘This is Manning,’ said Steve. ‘Home of Manning Bar.’ He checked his watch. ‘Just go
t time for a coffee, I think.’

  Entering the building, we passed through a large ground floor cafeteria called the ‘Blackburn Bistro’, the place bustling with students, Steve indicating a stern-eyebrowed older gentleman standing off to one side as if presiding over his domain.

  ‘That’s Fritz,’ said Steve. ‘Runs the place. Fritz Von Manning.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I grinned.

  ‘Nah, they say he’s been laying low here since the War.’

  ‘Fritz…’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I still say you’re kidding.’

  ‘Hey FRITZ,’ Steve called across the crowded room.

  The man acknowledged Steve with a mild softening of his stern countenance.

  ‘Come on,’ said Steve, and led me upstairs past a wooden booth ‘kiosk’ in which sat a portly, spectacled young man in a Chinese ‘Mao’ cap complete with red star badge. A few students leaning in to his booth, above it was a sign saying ‘CONTACT’.

  ‘Who was that?’ I put to Steve on our way up round an antique wooden stairwell, a soily-sweet waft of patchouli oil scent drawn up behind us.