This is for all the dead dance halls

It starts in an other age, in a dead northern town on a long lost Saturday night – Le Salon Bleu – exotic French twist for a decaying dance hall that was once Saturday Shangri La.

Get made up, tarted up, dressed up, the lads and lasses are all up for a stomping, boozing, brawling, bit of the other – time to flash some cash and rock and jive and smooch and slooch away those weekday workday woes of coal face factory drudgery.

Now, dead town, dead mines, dead factories and a few ghosts down le salon bleu in the decaying décadence of peeling walls, shabby blue plush drapes, fading gilt and glitz and cigarette stubbed stucco. The tired « orchestra » play the Last Tango in Nowhere for electronic organ and limp bass.

A few « regulars » wallow in the glory days and cling to the bar, knocking back a last few for the road.

On the floor with drunken demeanour, a frugal Fred and generus Ginger, sway and fumble their last waltz way into a night of rum and Coke concocted passion.

This is

Tripping the Blue Room Light Fantasic.

Drunken, slow, Bontempi tango.

Tired bass pulsates dead mambo,

Down in the Blue Room

Down the street

Propping up a slag

Before she crumples in a heap.

 

Deep phlegm breathing, heaving tits

Two fleshy slag heaps lift and shift,

A slop sludge body, imprisoned in plastic

As they trip the Blue Room Light Fantastic.

 

She strips off the diamanté cardie

She’s dripping wet and sweats Barcardi,

She sucks in his face with hoover lips

And he fights for breath in the fleshy eclipse.

 

And she pulls him closer

Shoves his hand up her shaft

She winds his gear

And starts to laugh.

It’s Saturday night

And she’s ecstatic

As she trips the Blue Room Light Fantastic.

 

And soon,

Out the PVC she’s oozing

Body black and blue with passion bruising,

She rolls off her undies to the hairy essential

And tugs hard on his smeggy credential.

The great unwashed

It’s all fish smelling

He’s covered in crab bites

And sores are swelling,

In the dark,

getting shafted,

She’s ecstatic,

As she trips the Blue Room Light Fantastic.

(Auchel – Pas de Calais)