It’s 3am and you’ve just tumbled out of a city centre nightclub, unsurprisingly a tad worse for wear given the copious amounts of beer, shorts and fruit flavoured crapola (“for a laff”) you’ve been drinking. You’ve lost your mates either to members of the opposite sex or to a curry and it dawns upon you that you’re all alone. You’ve also come ill prepared for the horizontal winter rain that is now driving with insistent and incessant force directly into your face. You’re cold, wet and very, very drunk.
You need a taxi but don’t know where to find one; after all Anytown isn’t your home town. You decide to follow a crowd as it shouts, screams and swears its way along the street, trying not to look conspicuously like a Billy-no-mates. You’re drawn to a mixed group who appear to know where they’re going. They’re in good spirits and one bloke in particular is actually quite funny. In fact he’s telling the same joke you heard earlier that evening in some pub. Bizarre coincidence or what? Indeed you’re so caught up in the happenstance of it all that you find yourself laughing out loud, almost hysterically, just before the bloke gets to the punch line.
At which point he goes quiet, stops dead in his tracks and turns to you threateningly as do the rest of the group, particularly his girlfriend and her mate. You hadn’t really noticed the tattoos before, or the fact that the guy obviously works out: a lot. As he menaces towards you, you also can’t help but notice that his girlfriend and her mate have now turned to face each other, nonchalant and feigning disinterest, as if the impending ‘fight’ is standard Friday night extras after the club and before the cab home.
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When you eventually fall to the pavement moments later and instinctively assume the comparative safety of the foetal position you also register that the two girls have started singing together a song that was played earlier in the club. It’s a song that seemed to briefly capture the idea of The Weekend and the thrill of the escape from 9 to 5 even if the reality is a bit more shabby and predictable: “Aaaaah, wanna feel the music take me away / Aaaaah feel the beat and the music take me away.”
Despite the ongoing GBH your brain for now has decided to act independently of your body and its predicament and is instead trying desperately to remember the name of the song on your behalf. As the umpteenth blow hits the crumpled heap that is your body it connects all the relevant electrical impulses and - ting! – informs you that it’s STONEBRIDGE and ‘Take Me Away’.
You almost laugh as your brain gives itself a split-second pat on the back before finally devoting its full attention to the more pressing job of self-anaesthesia and corporeal damage limitation.
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