Payday and Full Moon = Clacton Chaos

The latest C4 series of #bouncers at the tail-end of last year was good for shining a light on the English Youth At Play. I only caught the bits focusing on Colchester and Clacton, but they held my attention as my father in law is from the latter faded seaside resort (as faded as the wooden signs hanging round his house that his Dad used to make) and my wife spent much of her youth living in Colchester. The problems for the bouncers were as you expect – Liquid Lounge’s cameras caught a particularly vicious fight between two groups that moved outside still at full pelt. Silk Road in Colchester generated problems that were mostly played out beyond its doors in what they liken to ‘suicide alley’ down the road, where scores of people loiter past closing time leading to the inevitable argy-bargy with police trying to move them on.

What has stayed me ever since is the Clacton bouncers talking – with complete sincerity – about the occasional confluence of payday and Full Moon being their worst night for trouble. Payday, obviously enough because people have more money in their pocket (therefore invariably wraps of chalky crap too), but Full Moon?! Are they seriously trying to suggest planetary movements stir deranged havoc in the minds of Essex’s animalistic youth, leaving them howling? Liquid Lounge the conductor of the ensuing magick? Well I suppose it’s Orientalist to say such fanciful chaos reigns only in the likes of Ko Pha Ngan.

This has nothing to do with the influx of charged up out-of-towners with money to burn (as in Thailand), nothing at all. Threaten them with walking off the end of the pier.