Guy Lloyd: lads, laughs and larking about, ’80s style

The weekender: part 2

If you cast your mind back to last week’s blog, I was about to embark on an eighties weekender at Butlins in Bognor. The first thing that struck me when we drove in to Butlins was its pure Britishness. Butlin’s to me is a reminder of the dark and depressing times of the eighties; when people were either too poor or too scared to go abroad. So it was fitting that the likes of Five Star, Heaven 17 and Dr. and the Medics would all be passing through over the next couple of days.

The first thing we had to do, of course, was check in. On the way to the apartment I was struck by the ratio of men to women. There seemed to be a hell of a lot of men. Worse still, these were ‘Men’s Men’. Lads. You know the type. You see them on West Street in Brighton, and I don’t really gel with these types.

The apartment itself was fine; an ideal space to party in all weekend and nothing more. The copious amounts of alcohol would make the springy bed more appealing.

Copious alcohol would make the springy bed more appealing

As mentioned previously, our fancy dress plan was simple; double denim on the Friday night, followed by a ‘freestyle’ night on the Saturday, where we each brought a surprise costume.

It turned out that we were one of the few groups to dress up on Friday night. We watched The Beat, a great band, but they looked as uncomfortable on stage as we did lurking in the shadows just off the dance floor. We went back to the apartment and had our own party. I can’t say anything more about this, but we were hurting Saturday morning.

Fear not – there was an eighties pool party at 11am. We went along, again wary of what we would find. We needn’t have worried. We had a ball and some of the water slides were incredible. Refreshed, we hit the pub ‘for a drink or two’.

Saturday night came and it was clear that this was THE night. Just about everybody dressed up and there were some amazing costumes. I was quite camp, as you can see in the picture, and had to face a couple of comments which could have been categorised as ‘gay hate’. But I minced around as if I was at Pride and got away with it. Five Star came on (only four of them) and were the musical highlight of the weekend. They still do all the dance moves and I still fancy Denise or Lorraine. I can’t remember which one.

Overall it was a huge amount of fun but I did feel relieved to come back to liberal Brighton. Would I go again? Probably not.

Unless Kajagoogoo made a comeback.

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