The Jook house or Jook Joint was an African American small restaurant or blues club where people would gather to eat, drink and dance. They were usually found in semi-urban areas in the Southern USA, most notably Mississippi. They were seen as an important cultural phenomenon emerging after the proclamation of emancipation in 1862. Saturday night was for jukin’. The Gullah (Creole English) word juke translates to mean bawdy and they were certainly places for people to let off steam after a hard day’s work.1
I believe in alchemy. Listen hard to the sounds it makes. Copper, silver, mercury, tin, and gold could all be heard emanating from the jukebox. Don’t Fear the Reaper; She’s Got Bette Davis Eyes; Tusk; She Sells Sanctuary; Because the Night.
True Colours
It all started one Friday night. My friend came over to my house to get ready. We spent ages putting on our make-up. I got immense pleasure from trowelling it on, experimenting with different eyeshadows and lipsticks. My mum had a palette that she’d kept for years, a cream-based eyeshadow with several vivid colours in and a brush. You’d mix a few drops of water and paint it on like poster paint. Heaven. We watched The Tube on television and then sauntered into town in our pub outfits.
I don’t remember exactly what I wore on the first occasion, I expect it was black - with a leather jacket, but I remember entering the pub and quickly surveying the room to work out where to sit and where to order. Being a tall girl with big hair, who always looked old for her age, I was of course, nominated to go to the bar.
I went up and ordered three, half pints of cider with blackcurrant. I played it cool despite fearing the barman, Bez. Bez had a 70s shag, wore low slung flares with his hip bones poking out and perfectly faded t shirts. He was a rock god with dead eyes. There was no verbal challenge back to me. The drinks were put on the towelling beer mat, cash was exchanged, and we picked them up and went to sit in the pool room right next to the gents’ toilets. Why that felt like the right place I don’t know, but it did.
We were lucky. The doorway was normally filled by Big Al who was imposing at 7ft tall and built like a thug. He looked hard as nails; he had a shaved head and tattoos and one of those faces that sort of creases like a bulldog.
The Boys Are Back in Town
At this point in time, street brawls would regularly break out up the high street spilling out of the neighbouring White Lion or the chip shop. I don’t know why this was the case. If I looked back at this period from a historian’s perspective, maybe I would say something about the Thatcher years and people losing their jobs. But from a teenager’s point of view, it appeared that the men were backwards, loved eating meat pies and had no idea how progressive the rest of the world would become.
The pub had lots of booths carved into the main room from wooden panelling. The seats were covered in green leatherette and there were short curtains hanging from the windows. It was a long and narrow room leading into a much sparser room with a pool table, where a lot of the bikers would be found.
Welcome to the Jungle
Over the coming months this would become my playground. On a Friday and Saturday night when the pub was full it was like being on a ship. The bodies were packed in tight and would sway in harmony as people, becoming more intoxicated, tried to get to the bar or the toilet or would simply move around to chat, flirt or cause trouble. The proximity of bodies added to the heat.
I had a crush on one of the rockers. I spent so long staring at his face that I even managed to work out who his brother was. They had the same defined jaw line.
It was known as ‘the biker pub’. These greasy leather-clad men seemed very old to my 15 years, I’m not sure why they congregated there. I guess they enjoyed the winding roads of the nearby Peak District, or it was a hangover from the 1970s, which was not that far behind them. Or it was the jukebox? John Mayall, (who recently died) was from Macclesfield and I sometimes wondered if it was his influence that led to the bikers and rockers being so plentiful.
Needles and Pins
The rockers were younger men with lots of big hair. Some were from the Led Zeppelin gene pool (like Bez the barman) others were more on the Bon Jovi line. The pub also attracted a motley crew of druggies, who I recognised, even in my young years, were not going to be able handle this stuff recreationally and would perhaps not have the best future. I know at least one of them died young and another who is currently homeless but has created a place to live in the forest out of trees.
One evening, I sat in one of the booths near the front, with a friend. I was speaking to Mark. He was an eccentric guy, but likeable. He was tall and quite gaunt with big staring eyes, which he used to full effect like an Egon Schiele painting. He had, I heard, played bass with the band The Blue Orchids. He’d met Nico. He was full of stories, but they were not of rock ‘n’ roll but the humdrum life he was leading.
A Song from under the Floorboards
He presented me with a pair of earrings that he’d made from roofing nails. He’d been working with roofers and the nails were long and he thought they looked good, ‘tribal’– he said, and he’d bent them into earrings. I am not sure if they were meant for me, or if I was just the lucky lady who sat next to him that night.
When it came to closing time, we went back to his friend’s terraced house and sat in the small, wonky, front room. Nothing is straight in this town on account of all the hills and cobbles. Mark performed a crazy dance to Captain Beefheart. That was tribal too. He was on his knees writhing about the floor like a bird displaying his plumage in a courting ritual. I think it was all done slightly tongue in cheek and probably under the influence of mushrooms.
It was time to go. I borrowed an army jacket from his friend and walked home. The next day I returned to the house, but I didn’t want to knock on the door, so I spent around 20 minutes stuffing this huge great army jacket through the letterbox. Inch by painful inch.
I never wore the earrings, but I did keep them.
What do I Get?
Big Al was on the door and working behind the bar. He came over to the table with several drinks. A half cider and blackcurrant, a Pernod and black, a half pint of Guinness and black and made me drink them in a power trip, designed to intimidate me, knowing full well I was underage. I was watched over by my sister’s boyfriend, the lead singer of The Macc Lads.
The pub was making quite a name for itself and becoming the place to hang out. It was a petri dish incubating culture. Kids would come from all over the place. The fashions were diverse, and people made a lot of effort to get ready.
I befriended a group who were all around six or seven years older than me. Three of the blokes all had black hair, which they would style into perfect spikes at the weekend. Part-time punks who all had proper day jobs. They dressed in a similar way. Leather jackets, black bondage trousers or skinny jeans, band t-shirts. One of them was much skinnier and wore a lot more make-up and on occasion was far more flamboyant wearing a man’s silk dressing gown instead of the leather jacket.
The elaborate fashions were partly because a lot of people were going on into Manchester after the pub and would spend hours clubbing. I got to know the part time punks better, we hung out. They were really kind to me, taking me under the wing of their black leather jacket. We went to see The Cure, Gene Loves Jezebel, The Damned. The car journeys were always soundtracked by mix tapes and I remember The Buzzcocks blaring out as we headed into Manchester.
Picture this
I wasn’t enjoying college, so I left and got a job working in one of the many old Mill buildings in the town. I was employed as a painter, painting plaster cast pictures of English countryside scenes that were moulded in relief and designed to hang on the wall. The company was called Legend Products, and they had a big market in Germany.
I worked in a huge open plan space in the mill, alongside lots of other mainly older women. We each had a very large table with jars of paint lined up at the edge. Then there would be a fan of the plaster cast pictures, which you would wash with colours until you built up the desired effect. Finally, you would use a fine brush to add in details.
It was piece work, which meant you got paid by the item so you were encouraged to go as fast as you could. Minimal care was taken. It was literally sloshed on. The highlight was having a fag on the fire escape and getting to chat to the women. They called me Mick Jagger because I wore these funny purple tie dye trousers to work under my blue tabard.
After a couple of months of painting pastoral duck ponds and thatched cottages, I was given a promotion, of sorts, and asked to paint the Coronation Street characters. This was a real challenge. They had a set of two-dimensional carved characters – Bet Lynch, Hilda Ogden, and Stan Ogden.
The boss arranged for us to go to Granada Studios to meet the cast and we had a little day out. We met Sally and Kevin Webster, which seemed a bit odd to me as we didn’t paint them.
Painting gave me spending money to carry on with my social life. The problem was my social life was not very conducive to getting up early in the morning and having a steady hand to paint Hilda Ogden’s curlers.
I spent twenty years away from this town but in a strange turn of fate I am back here living down the road from one of the many regulars. I saw Mark, once or twice, in the park playing with his grandchildren. I heard he died a few years ago on his 60th birthday. So this is for him and his earrings.
Information sourced from the simple things
I loved reading this Mags… you bring the memories, and the characters you met along the way, to life so vividly. Thank you 🥰
Poignant and beautiful - plus any chance to meet a Corrie cast member (or two) is a total highlight.