“Will you meet my mate?”
They say you always remember your first. This applies to nearly everything – whatever it may be. One thing it definitely applies to is your first disco.
Whether you think back and you cringe, or you somehow have the ability to think back and laugh, there is no way that you can think back and in good conscience be proud of your actions that night.
My first disco experience was in a place called The Wezz in Donnybrook. It was named after Wesley Rugby Club, and it was held in the middle of the hall.
It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever been a part of.
2nd year back to school party what a night
Any body looking for tickets get in touch for any year pic.twitter.com/boXBpQOO— wezz (@Thewezz) September 8, 2012
I didn’t go when I was in first year. I guess my parents wanted me to hang on to my innocence for as long as possible, but the majority of my friends went as early as they could.
My first appearance was at the second year Halloween Wezz. This was a big one. I was warned by the more regular attendees that I would definitely need a ticket to get in. Even the tickets were weird. They called them ‘guarantees’, because referring to them as tickets was far too normal for the folks in charge of Wezz.
Oh my God, I haven’t mentioned the folks in charge of Wezz. Well, to be honest, the less said about them the better…
They would send out regular messages to every single person who had ever attended the disco, as it was a requirement that you gave your phone number as you filled out a tiny little card with all your personal details when you picked up your membership.
Here’s hoping you’re like me and have a different phone number from when you were 14, because if you don’t, well, who knows when the next ‘Wezz text’ will come…
They were eccentric to say the least, but they ran a stellar establishment.
And by stellar establishment, I mean an absolute madhouse.
I was lucky enough to have ‘membership status’. This meant that I would queue with the members rather than the non-members when I arrived.
I wouldn’t have been caught dead in the non-members queue, and if I did it would have been the worst moment of my childhood. Now that I think of it, the queues were basically the same length, I think I just had to pay extra.
Still. It was definitely worth it.
Straight off the bat, there was a drunk room. Yep, a drunk room in an underage disco. I was 14 when I first went. My mam dropped me and my friends off at 8pm, and my friend’s Dad picked us up at 11.30pm (the actual event ended at 11pm, but we said 11.30pm so we could have an extra 30 minutes of mischief).
I personally didn’t drink when I was 14 – which is not something that I should be particularly proud of – but the ‘drunk room’ would be FULL of kids who may have taken a different approach. It was a terrifying sight. It was like a horror movie infested with zombies.
At least they didn’t let people in if they were caught sneaking drink in. They were strict on that. Smoking was not as much of an issue… so much so that there was an actual designated smoking area. For 14-year-olds. That is genuinely ridiculous. The reason they couldn’t kick people out for smoking was because there were too many kids smoking.
Too many kids smoking! How crazy is that?
And the outfits. Oh dear God, the outfits… I would normally just wear whatever my cleanest t-shirt was, together with my cleanest runners and my only pair of wine-coloured chinos.
Girls, however, girls were a different story altogether.
The place could have been mistaken for Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory with the amount of girls going around resembling oompa-loompas.
Now the lads looked ridiculous too, don’t get me wrong (my style was to straighten my fringe down and spike the back of my hair up… like an absolute lunatic), but the girls took it to a new extreme.
They dressed like female WWE characters from the ’90s, but way more orange. I always pitied them wearing next to nothing and then having to queue up for ages in the freezing cold. But it must have been all worth it when you got in the doors.
The venue itself was tiny. The walls would literally be dripping with condensation, and if you were unlucky enough to touch off it, you would want to have about six showers before you were clean again. Realistically you probably should have had six showers the second you got home from Wezz; that should have been a requirement…
They sold soft drinks for like €3 per can, and, to be honest, if you managed to go a full night without one, you must have had the tolerance of a marathon runner. They probably made a mint off that alone. That, and the cloakroom for all the lads to put their brand new adidas jackets in for a fiver per item.
I won’t talk about what actually happened inside those confusingly sweaty walls, but it definitely wasn’t pretty. It was the opposite of pretty. It was carnage. It was chaos. It was fun, for a 14-year-old. It was probably hell from the perspective of a parent.
As much as the place had its flaws – and by Jesus did it have its flaws – we still looked forward to it every time.
I remember making a little countdown in my homework journal in school, where I ticked off the days until the mid-term when another disco in The Wezz took place.
It’s one of those things that didn’t seem that weird at the time, but looking back, it really was.
All in all, I’m probably a stronger person for having gone to The Wezz.
A stronger, dirtier, somewhat traumatised person.
But stronger nonetheless.
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