showaddywaddywaddywaddywaddy

The Wads on stage, limping and knicker-dodging ...



A final glimpse through the smoke as we walk away in silence ...

It’s a Friday night on the scary Somerset coastline and two international Djs are looking for action. The bingo’s closed, shutters rattling in the wind, the restaurants have ‘No Irish, Gipsy's [sic] or Vegetarian's’ signs up and the sand is rattling off the dunes and turning our faces into 1:1000 representations of meerkats’ colonies.

Then the magic lights of Pontins beckon, offering warmth, cheap beer and chavs! Who could resist. By some strange psychic power we are drawn to the murky depths of the camp cabaret arena, three acres of pulsating 70s lights, Brummie accents and acrid stale cigarette smoke, mingling with microwave hot dogs and clothes you last saw on the cover of Jackie, circa 1974.

The house lights sparkle and onto the stage come ... Showaddywaddy! It’s pants down time as the ladies whip themselves up into a rock ‘n’ roll frenzy as five be-draped apparent stepdads arthritically stagger around the stage carrying outsize musical instruments. ‘That’s not Showaddywaddy’ complains the lady next to me, ‘where’s Les??’ And indeed I couldn’t spot Les either, the one member of the ‘Wads’ as we call ‘em that even Terry Waite would recognise.
A murmur goes around the arena as fags are stubbed out in anger on those with received pronounciation. ‘We want Les, we want Les’ shout the crowd in one huge Brummie voice.
Suddenly the spotlight hits stage right and he’s there!! Les! Les, of the curved lip and waggly hips, and he starts singing, the crowd (including to her eternal shame, DJ Trin) join in!

It is awful!!!

I’m spiralling back to the 70s, tank top heaven, as the familiar chords of ‘Angel Eyes’ cut through the smoke to reach my complaining ears. ‘We thought this era was forgotten’. ‘Arrgghhh - I feel violated’ and ‘I’m shagging that tonight’ battle for supremacy amongst us, the forgotten Chav-Gestalt of the Council Estates of England. DJ Trin is staring into space, on another plane.

Awful it is!!

And, when I recover later in the street, I try to work out why. You see the Wads were never cool, even in the 70s when tank tops and Susan Stranks and the Tomorrow People were. Yet here they were, in the 21st centuy, in the same suits and playing the same songs, entertaining the chavs at Pontins. Had I entered a parallel reality, or had I imbibed an off Grolsch? Why?

Why? My Nan’s boyfriend took her to see them in Portsmouth in the 80s and I’d wet myself with mirth then! And here they were, two decades on, still doing it. Why?

Rock ‘n’ Roll was always crap - except in the raw and exciting early months when it was almost revolutionary. It was an evil visited on us, it led to nightmares like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and Tom Robinson. Yes, the Wads latest album includes a cover of 2-4-6-8 Motorway, lovely Tom’s seminal 80s anthem to ... roadbuilding. It’s getting worse, uncool piled on uncool, and the oversize knickers are still flying over our heads to land on Les. Does uncoolness guarantee immortality? Perhaps. Perhaps it fills a need for the uncool majority that will vanish from the earth with nary a trace. Perhaps the Chavs are right all along, not troubling their empty heads with thoughts but with pure experience - wake up, fag, change nappy, eat grease, argue, watch telly, hit kid, fag, yorkshire pud, pub. John Smiths’, raid leccy, fag, punch mum, fall asleep on sofa ... and put on the Wads for entertainment. Perhaps it’s me who’s wrong ...

I’ll sleep on it.