I went back home on Thursday for the first time in two years.
When I say home, I mean my home town. Leeds is my home now.
Home is Grimsby, which is nothing like that terrible film. It’s a lot more mental than that.
Home is also Cleethorpes, which is attached to Grimsby, so they are essentially one big place; although they are also quite different. Grimsby is very deprived. Estates and addiction. Dead industry. When I was ten, some guy who was probably in his thirties pulled a knife out on me. He was probably a heroin addict. Because I wasn’t having a very nice day anyway, I said “Come on then, do it or fuck off.” He looked a bit shocked and fucked off.
That was Grimsby.
In Leeds now, I’m always happy when someone else from Grimsby is out with me if I end up recounting some madness, because they’ll vouch for the fact that it was really that crazy. Otherwise a lot of people think you’re exaggerating. If anything, it’s the opposite. There are things that I wouldn’t write down because they probably need to stay unsaid for a long time.
There are nice areas in Grimsby too. In the town itself, there are streets with huge Victorian houses that must have been lovely once, but are now run down and broken. There are also little pockets of newer, nicely built cul-de-sacs, where people with money live. There’s also a lot of wealth in the suburbs. A lot of the people in these places are self-made, or their parents are. Even in the nice areas the kids have street smarts, and once you get to sixth form age everyone from all the areas go to a huge college and get mixed up with each other, and the whole thing is a massive melting pot of music and madness. And drugs.
You’d be at a party in an eleven bedroom house one night while someone’s parents were on holiday and the next night you’d be doing the same thing with the same people in a two up two down council house with crazy people shouting at each other outside.
Cleethorpes is by the sea. Less faded than a lot of English seaside towns, it has some nice bars and restaurants; people throw their money around there, and if you know the right places to go, you’ll hear some cutting edge music. There is, and always has been, a thriving music scene. The people creating this scene are from both towns, although most of the venues are in Cleethorpes. This hasn’t always been the case – years ago, there were a number of decent venues in Grimsby too. Now there are just dive bars and burned out and derelict buildings.
As soon as I was old enough to decide where I lived, I moved to Cleethorpes. I played at and put on nights there, and knew a lot of great and crazy people, and it seemed reasonable to live there, where I was a short walk from everything I was doing.
I was never going to stay, but I did a lot when I was there and had a mad and excellent time which I will never forget. The party scene was smaller, but certainly as crazy and brilliant as the Leeds party scene.
The Grimsby and Cleethorpes scene is weird. The style and attitude is a weird mix of cultured and chav. I observed to my mate Matt, on Friday, sitting outside a Cleethorpes bar that the prevailing look and taste is a bizarre combination of Berlin and Essex.
Also, there’s the endless drama. When I first started putting on nights in Leeds, the thing that most surprised me was how nice everybody was. What I was used to was people threatening you and trying to get you shut down if they thought your night threatened their night. Often, this was ridiculous, and you’d find yourself wondering how a techno night could be seen as competition to a nightclub that played cheesy chart EDM and got punters in by offering 241 shots. And some of these people were guys like twenty years older than you, and you’d be amused by the weirdness of even being considered their peer in any way.
Sometimes it was darker than that, and people who were, on the surface, your mates would be the ones causing the trouble, and you’d be sat there having a drink with them, knowing that the whole time they had a knife in your back. When you’re used to that and you suddenly find yourself in a place where people are genuinely nice and want to help each other out, it’s hard to believe that they’re not going to fuck you over.
The debauchery is different there too. On the level of sessions and nonsense and music and endlessly never going to bed it’s very similar, but there’s a level of depravity and a load of gangster-type shit that just doesn’t exist on the Leeds party scene.
At a very young age, you’d get mixed up with people a lot older than you, and you’d find yourself in bizarre and extreme situations with bizarre and extreme people.
It’s only when you move away and you talk to people who aren’t from there that you realise how mad it all was.
When I first moved away, I used to go back quite regularly, and then that just sort of stopped. It wasn’t intentional, life just happens and then you realise one day that you’ve not visited your home town in two years.
When I did go back, I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the experience would be. When you grow up in a mad place, you come away with baggage that you don’t realise you have, because when you’re in the middle of it all, it just seems normal.
It was really nice to be back in amongst it at first. Drinking a pint by the sea in my old haunts, running into people I’d not spoken to for two or three years.
Seeing parts of what I used to call home in a state of partial demolition was weird. Things stay the same and they don’t stay the same. The madness and the drama was all exactly the same. There were points where I wondered why people were telling me the things they were telling me, points where I turned t Matt and said ‘I don’t think I’ll be back again for a long time’. Other times it was wonderful to stand in exactly the same place I’d stood so many times, so long ago, and hug an old friend.
Of course I’ll go back. Never to live. If I left Leeds – which certainly wouldn’t be any time soon – it would be to go somewhere in Europe. But part of my heart will always belong in the madness, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.