34. Stayin' Alive - N-Trance

I hate this song. Properly loathe it.

Every element.

The oh-so-90s ‘rapping’, the disco song they’re covering, the irritating mix, that damned chorus, the clip, how popular it was when released in 1995.

I hate it.

But.

It’s always going to remind me of some friends, some bikes and the times we spent riding around our childhood neighbourhood.

So it is, unfortunately, a song with meaning to me.

Damn.

When I was ten, we moved from a small town in the foothills of the Dandenong’s to Endeavour Hills, a suburb conceived in the 70s and built in the 80s.

You know the type – brick veneer’s all over, streets with ‘creative’ names (mainly explorers of the early, white persuasion), parks all over the place and a central shopping centre.

We moved in, ordered pizza from the local store (Johnny Boys) that first night and settled into a house with carpet, proper electrical wiring and a functioning shower. (Our former house was in a permanent state of renovation back then).  

In the days after the big move, we’d met the kids in the street – those directly next-door, the other kids farther afield.

All up, I think there must have been 10, 15 kids in that street at any given time.

The street we moved into was an odd shape – it was a through road, but with a large bowl at the corner. Almost like two different courts meeting in the same cul de sac.

Our house was four away from the bowl, with our friends being in the three houses between us and bowl.

It was a quiet street – very little through traffic – so riding around there for hours was comparatively safe.

Still, going from a still-being-renovated house in the hills – nestled amongst trees, dirt roads and burnt-out hippies – to a brick veneer home in the ‘burbs took some adjusting.

I’ll always remember heading out for lunch on my first day at my new school and realising there were no trees – anywhere. At all.

Just dirt, concrete, asphalt and bricks.  

It seems like it happened quickly, looking back, but I imagine it took us a little while to get comfortable with the other kids in the street.

Until we got to the point where we were happy to play all day in the street together.

A few were my age, a few my younger brother’s age and a few more our younger sister’s age.  

Which meant that the three of us often had someone else to play with (when the opportunities for games and pain with our siblings had worn thin).

Either inside – playing Sega or Super Nintendo at  each other’s houses – or outside, hanging around in the street.

Because that’s what we did, for hours at a time.

If it was during the school year, we’d get home from school, drop off our bags, maybe grab a snack, then head outside.

We’d grab our bikes, occasionally our helmets too, and ride down to the bowl of the street.

And this is where we’d meet anybody that was floating around.

We’d sit there and talk, though I’m stuffed if I can think of what we spoke about. What do 10-year old’s talk about when unsupervised?

Once we’d caught up on the day’s action, we’d hop on to our bikes and ride the circuit:

-          Out of the bowl, up past our place, as far as the turn-off a few houses beyond ours;

-          Turn around, back down to the bowl, wide to the left to avoid any cars coming around the bend;

-          Back up the other arm, past the house of the lovely old couple with the two small, white dogs (Kimba and Toby), up past our older friend’s house;

-          Keep going for another couple of dozen metres, past the houses of the other kids we didn’t see all that often – one of their dad’s was a gruff type of guy and we avoided that sort of downer as 10-year old’s;

-          As far up the hill as we dared, before turning around and heading back down towards the bowl;

-          Back to the bowl and repeat. Either until the dinner shouts from our parents hit that next-level of urgency, or it got dark.

When heading back down the hill, the houses on the left were elevated, built into the hill (Endeavour Hills is nothing if not accurately named).

We didn’t know anybody in those houses, though later during one of our more entrepreneurial phases we managed to get paid for helping one of them clear their yard of weeds.

But it’s the odd musical choices of one of those homes that made this awful song always remind me of those times.

Summers were the best.

Weeks and weeks of holidays, hanging out with your friends all day and all night, keeping an eye out for the streetlights coming on (the universal ‘better head home’ signal).

One summer – it must have been 1995/96 – that song was everywhere. Radio, TV, bloody everywhere.

But one of the weirdest places was the stereo of one of the houses up the other arm of the street.

This house would – for hours at a time – put this song on repeat and blare it out of their stereo. To the point where we could hear it as we rode past.

In hindsight, this is a shocking level of volume for a song so clearly rubbish, but, hey, it was the 90s.

We had, by now, gotten to the point where we could easily ride without holding on. Arms crossed, we’d head down the hill, pedaling lazily while steering with our body weight alone.

So it was that, for a few weeks there, we’d ride to the top of the hill, turn around and cruise past this house blaring ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by N-Trance, practicing our very best disco dance moves.

Arm rolls, point-to-the-sky, too much clapping and plenty of on-bike dancing.

Up and back. For hours.

Until the cry of ‘Car!’ came along, then it was all-hands-on-deck, off the road and over the nature strip to the footpath.

I wonder now if they knew we were doing it – I’m not sure if the road was visible from where their poor stereo was situated.

Or if anybody else saw us doing it.

I suppose someone must have seen these half-dozen kids dancing on their bikes.

I also marvel at the freedom we must have felt at the time, to do something so bizarre and silly.

At a time where there wasn’t really anything to worry about.

We didn’t have bills.

We didn’t have to worry about groceries, cars, education, health, schedules or anything really.

All we had to do was go to school, come home and head outside to play with our friends.

It makes for a pretty great set of childhood memories.  

We’d do other things – play forty-forty, cops and robbers on the bikes, cricket in the bowl, kick-to-kick, trade footy cards, argue about the usual dumb stuff kids argue about.

The TV show Gladiators was big at the time, so we’d hike up to a nearby park which had a steep embankment and play ‘Gauntlet’. Until a few-too-many close calls between a skull and a rock convinced us it wasn’t that good an idea.

We lost a lot of tennis balls playing cricket in the street – to this day, I still have a low-level hoarding reflex when I see tennis balls – with too many of them going down the drains.

Well, until we worked out how to lift those concrete lids off to get the balls out.

Another time, one of the older kids also showed us how to strip the powder off those sparklers you can buy and collect it in a plastic cup.

If you then light that pile of powder – explosive, I suppose – it shoots a rocket of sparks into the air for a few exhilarating minutes.

Combining this with our newfound mastery of the drains led to another realisation:

If you wait until dusk and put your cup of fire on the bottom of one of the drains before you light it, the glow is so bright that it will light up the entire network of connected pipes and drains.

Not only is this cool to see, it leaves any passing motorists with a very quizzical look on their face.

This isn’t something I recommend, of course, but I can report that as a 10-year old it was a very exciting discovery!

We lived in that street for a little over six years before moving to the other side of town.

We attempted to stay in touch with the kids from the street, but we were getting into our teens and unfortunately overt ‘fun’ isn’t a big part of your adolescence. And it was also just far enough away to make it hard to catch up.

Plus, riding your bike and dancing to bad disco, isn’t all that attractive when you’re 15 and convinced of the sheer importance of your life.

Especially when compared with making money on your weekend.

So we fell of out touch with them after a short while.

Live moves on, after all.

I’m wary of falling into the rose-coloured trap of nostalgic childhood reminiscences. The times weren’t perfect; hell, we weren’t perfect.

But there is something idyllic in the idea of just riding around with your friends every afternoon.

Unweighted by things like responsibility or real life; when your biggest problem was scrounging up a tennis ball.

Just riding up and down the same street.

We were tremendously lucky to land in that street, at that time, with those kids.

We were lucky that our parents trusted us enough to leave us unsupervised long enough to discover our own boundaries.

We were lucky that where we lived was so safe that we could do so without any worries.

We were not, however, lucky that those people decided – for some damned reason – to play that awful song loud enough for the street kids to dance to as they rode past.

Because now that song is indelibly linked to some great memories I have of my childhood.

Every time I hear it, I’m reminded of that street, those kids, that bike and those times.

But I still hate that song.

All of it.