Swillington Miners Welfare Club

You know when you have just the most unusual time that is so alien to you you start to wonder if you have, in fact, slipped through the very fabric of time and space and entered a different yet strangely familiar dimension? Well that happened to me in the village of Swillington near Garforth this past weekend.
I’m a big fan of social clubs. I really am. The drink is god-​forsakingly cheap, there’s always fascinating social interactions between bonkers local people to watch unfold, you can’t leave the bogs without making a new best friend EVERY SINGLE TIME and I’m usually the best dressed dancer in the house bar NONE. Yeah, I said it.
What was I doing? I mean, really, what was I doing? Where the hell was I and what on earth was happening? Allow me to explain…
We caught the number 9 bus from Crossgates to the former mining village of Swillington, in the middle of God’s damp nowhere between Garforth and a variety of motorway junctions. I always wondered what people in the outback DO for fun at the weekends, and now I know, they go to the local Miners Welfare Club dressed in various shades of animal print and get bungalowed to Pink Tribute acts.
This is the West Yorkshire Wild West, a concrete clad 70’s monolith to doomed big industry and the inability to adapt to changing times. Red velvet chairs, striped wallpaper with flowery curtains. Port and lemon, lager top and Elizabeth Duke. Hundreds of permed and deeply wrinkled locals who smell of Poundshop perfume and Superkings watch the lycra clad and poorly postured ‘youth’ strut around in their plastic high heels and tut to each other about ‘them illegal immigrants’ and ‘what is the nation coming to’. You have two choices of wine, red or white, and no choice of size. And no, you can’t buy a bottle because that’s alcoholism… but being 65, wearing 14 gold chains, missing a foot and drinking 27 glasses of medium white through the course of one evening is apparently NOT alcoholism.
Love it.
The boyfriend (bearded, long hair, wearing a Swans T-Shirt…I was rather more suspecting us to be burned at the stake than politely admitted entry and given a Pink wristband) and I were here for my mate’s 30^th birthday. I’d given Lou the full Essex makeover and apparently the place to be was the M.W.C.
The warm up band were actually pretty spot on… a collection of rockettes aged 16 – 19 who very competently belted out their own songs as well as some good and punchy contemporary tunes. I can’t actually remember a single track because I’d already had two bottles of wine before we came out and I’m super sensitive to the smell of Charlie Red… it’s rather like being punched repeatedly in the head for me. Overall though the memory is solidly good with some foot tapping and gran-​style ‘seat dancing’. Pink, unfortunately, was still squeezing herself into the 4 inches of fabric that made up her costume and so, to compensate for the delay, we were treated to bingo. FOR THE WIN! I might suggest this for the next T in the Park.
‘Pink’ actually turned out to be pretty epic. I’m not specifically a Pink fan but it’s amazing how many songs you recognise and then slightly horrify yourself by knowing ALL the words to, and this lass looked, sounded and acted just like the real thing. It was a quality set, delivered in two halves over the course of about 2 hours. Within minutes I was on the dance floor, spinning, jumping and thrusting around with people called Michaela and JoJo, people with more rings on each finger than I have in my entire collection, people wearing turquoise tiger print, people who still drink Snowballs, people who… frankly…know how to get pissed and get down. Fan-​tas-​tic.
The night had plenty of highlights– not least me drying my sweaty head under the hand-​dryer in the ladies and inadvertently starting a new craze that swept through the female cohort like the revelations on Mount Sinai. Apparently this act had never been done before in Swillington, and it was deemed an idea of such genius that I may well find a little plaque to myself if I ever step into the W.M.C again.
But then the lowlight. It’s Swillington, it’s a mere midnight and you can’t get home. I’m not joking. No bus. No taxi will come there. You are well and truly stranded my son. So a valuable lesson. If you don’t want to end up flagging down cars for an hour on the roadside like me and the boyfriend you really really really need to pre-​book your escapemobile before you ever set foot into The Badlands.
So why the review? Is ANYONE from Unilocal EVER going to go to the Swillington WMC? Well, having looked on their coma inducing website I’ve noticed some pretty interesting stuff happening there on a regular basis and it strikes me that an annual visit to Swillington to drink Babycham, play bingo and watch a George Michael tribute might actually be a fairly awesome experience.
Spread your wings my darlings, there’s life in them there hills… just not as we know it.