Jacob's Ladder, Red Stripe and the Popo

The cliff, of course, was metaphorical. Or at least I told myself that. A promontory not of rock, but of meaninglessness — that vast, humming abyss where youthful promise collapses into the pulsating void of adult contradiction. And yet there was a literal cliff too, just behind the dunes in a corner, not concealed by Jacob’s Ladder, but adjacent to it, distanced by the vulgar concrete platforms, installed on the site with no apology. The creaking white timber staircase did, however, act as a catalyst for distraction; with the tokenistic castle shadowed as a mere memory of itself as it hovered above. The cliff though, a shifting fixture of crumbling English sandstone imbued with Thatcherite neglect and the dumb stiff-upper lip of regional Tories, stood sentinel over the beach party like an indifferent parent: aloof, red-faced, watching. That is, until the Old Bill rocked up, lining themselves up on the crust of the cliff like dinky tin soldiers with no clue as to why they were there.

It was August. Warm in that greasy, bulbous way that makes your armpits feel like arable land. The sort of heat that breeds delusion, hallucination even, where the shimmer of sea blends indistinctly with the smear of lager and squidgy black oil on your sunglasses. We had just clattered back from Derby on a coach that smelled of Marlboro Lights, fear, and residual sweat from the jam.

The underbelly of the town — my town, for a month longer at least — had decided to throw a bacchanal in our absence. On the beach. The end of Folk Week. There existed some attempt at decoration hanging like entrails from lampposts. The night was already gravid with the smell of weed and warm dance music. People — people, those sweaty, glistening, high-decibel citizens of the coastal dusk — moved in half-time to the drone of hip house, a syrupy, synthetically euphoric beat with some overarching rhymes had somehow followed us out of Tyree Cooper’s world and onto the beach like a debt collector. It was already late-1991, but even on this beach in the east corner of Devon, the anticipation of the new decade was still half-cloaked in hope, though it would soon reveal itself to be a wire-wool disappointment soaked in boot polish.

Red Stripe cans glinted in firelight. There were faces I recognised, all appearing different out of The Mermaid and Carinas. They danced. Or rather, their bodies conducted arcane negotiations with gravity and serotonin. Stoned. Pissed. Feral. One girl sat cross-legged in the sand, offering spliffs with the languid generosity of a Bodhisattva. Others rolled joints you would offer to a mollusc.

And then he — he, the DJ, wearing wraparound shades — with luminous frames — in the moonlight like a mad insect — motioned me forward with a saggy finger. “You still rap?” he asked, in that tone of ironic deference people use when speaking to the wreckage of their own pasts. I did. Or I thought I did. My mouth said yes before my ego had a chance to finish dressing.

The mic was warm, damp. Like licking a radiator. The beat was looping — endlessly, meaninglessly — and I began to rap. Not really my lyrics. Certainly not poetry. Just a kind of verbal exorcism. Words about Derby. About buses. About Son of Noise, about South Side Alliance, about Red Stripe, about the sea. About heat. About cliffs — literal and not. The crowd didn’t cheer so much as swell, like a collective inhalation of cultural breath. I felt myself rise with them, my voice untethered, flying like cheap helium.

I was not an emcee; I was a ghost in training.

And the sea, just beyond, lapped like applause.

I drifted into a cacophony of old school party chanting and put the mic down on the folding picnic table, now wet with a mixture of dewy sea mist. It was then I glanced upwards, and spotted the Popo lined up in their numbers.

The gathering of the constabulary at the cliff’s edge possessed an air of pantomime gravitas—an absurd assembly of blue-uniformed bodies silhouetted against a fattened, jaundiced moon, as if the heavens themselves were complicit in this operatic farce. They shuffled and muttered, the sound of radio static mingling with the tremulous thumps of the PA system below. The cliff — a red raw scab on the coastline, indifferent in its Jurassic portrayal — offered a panoramic view of the debauchery beneath: a congregation of the youth, dishevelled and incandescent with chemical bravado, gyrating around driftwood pyres and the flicker of two illicit fires. From this elevation, the party-goers resembled glow-worms drunk on their own phosphorescence, or bacteria colonising the wet scum of the beach.

Inspector Bulb — an assemblage of gristle, nicotine stains and unspoken disappointment — adjusted his cap as though it might shield him from the grotesque spectacle below. He gave the signal, a perfunctory chop of the hand, and the phalanx of lawmen began their descent. It was not, to put it mildly, a graceful manoeuvre. The cliff path, winding and slow, conspired to humble their authoritarian swagger; boots slipped, and curses were muttered through clenched teeth, their descent resembling not so much an exercise in discipline as a lemming-like swerve towards ignominy.

Upon the pebbles though, the raid began in earnest. Torches snapped on — brutal cones of light cutting through the haze of smoke and adolescent sweat. The revellers scattered in a choreography of panic, limbs flailing, eyes wide with the sudden, unwelcome imposition of consequence. The music, by this point some godawful happy house dirge, juddered to a halt as the sound system was unceremoniously toppled into the shingle. A girl in a sequined top sobbed as her bottle of Spar Medium Sweet was kicked over by a constable with a face like a boiled ham. There were chases — comic in their futility — cops puffing after spry teenagers who vaulted groynes and disappeared into the night like sandpipers evading a lumbering predator.

Arrests were attempted, obviously, Popo had to try to make their books balance; futile gestures of control, tokenistic trophies to justify the operation. But as dawn began to peep, casting its anemic light over the littered beach, the sense prevailed that the true anarchy remained untouched; lodged in the marrow of the generation they sought to subdue, indifferent to the petty theatre of the raid. The sea, implacable, went on gnawing at the shore, erasing the evidence of the night’s excess with a bored sigh.

We slipped the net, of course — like so many eels through the coarse mesh of officialdom’s grasp. While the bulk of the uniforms fanned out across the beach, their boots slipping on the wet sand and shingle with every earnest lunge, Tall, Sharp, Bait Boy and I had already melted into the night’s periphery, scarpering around the bulge of rock where the walkway was thin and soaked and the ground littered with dead Clipper lighters and discarded cans. The panic had given way to a giddy euphoria, the sort that comes not from victory but from evasion — a temporary reprieve from the dull inevitability of consequence. We laughed — not loud, lest we draw attention — but the stifled, breathless kind, our chests tight with adrenaline, our legs aching from the sprint and many hours on a fucking coach.

By the time we reached All Saints Road, the dawn was bleeding into the horizon, that pale August light that makes the world seem hungover and bleary, as if the sky itself regrets the night before. We walked in silence mostly, the thump of trainer on Tarmac the only sound, save for the occasional rattle of a passing lorry on its way to some scheduled obligation. It was a long walk home — miles of indifferent suburban streets, the curtains drawn tight against the world. Occasionally we passed an early riser: a dog walker, a milkman, the kind of person who’d nod without meeting your eye. And we — ragged fugitives from the night’s farce and a jam up north (at least, up north from where we were brought up) — nodded back, complicit in their tacit agreement not to ask, not to judge.

Home. I peeled off my clothes — salt-stiffened, reeking of smoke and booze drinks — and let them fall in a sodden heap on the carpet. The sheets were cool, almost clammy, the stale fug of my room familiar and vaguely nauseating. As I folded myself into the bed’s embrace, the residue of basslines echoed in the hollow chambers of my skull: Caveman’s ‘Victory’ and Hardnoise’s ‘Mice in the Presence of Lions’ took turns in wrecking my mind — how fucking apt earworms these truly were, with their defiant drums and sonic swagger reverberating in that liminal space between wakefulness and oblivion. The tracks throbbed on, ghostly relics of the night’s chaos, as sleep took me, unbidden and graceless.

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Taken from the forthcoming book The Dark Nineties: Falling out of Love with Hip Hop, (2025, Squagle House)