The Roller Disco

Originating in the 1970s at the peak of the Disco era, the Roller Disco didn’t find its feet in the UK until the mid -1980s. Prior to this, the roller skate and its far more comfortable sibling, the roller boot, were alternative forms of childhood transport along with the very narrow (yet stylish) True Glide skateboard, the Raleigh Grifter and Chopper, and the Bicycle Motocross, otherwise known as the BMX. But it would be nearer to the end of the 80s before I would eventually experience a roller disco. For starters, I needed to learn how to skate, and simply watching Starlight Express and Cliff Richard’s Wired for Sound video wasn’t going to cut it.

Now Cliff used his roller boots in a manner similar to the cassette in his pocket…in stereo, but my first encounter with a roller skate was a far less-impressive mono affair. I was familiar with what they were and what they could do, but my first use of one was for building a skateboard to do my paper round on. Basically, I found a skate discarded in the back entry, cleaned it up and cut it in half using a Junior Hacksaw in my dad’s shed. It took about an hour to get through the damn thing and the cut was more like a wave than a slice. By the time I’d finished, there were no teeth left on the saw blade and it was bent at a 45° angle. I took a good rollocking off my dad for blunting the blade, but that’s how I learned that the teeth on the Hacksaw blade should have been facing towards me and not away. The cut was on the pull; not the push. A simple mistake for a simple 12-year-old.

I bolted each half of the skate onto a short, roughly-sawn plank which I then painted with gloopy, blackboard paint. Some of the paint dripped onto one of the wheels, which is why I named my trusty steed, ‘Blackwheel’. Now blackwheel was lethal, and only I knew how to use it. Unlike the expertly-engineered trucks of real skateboards that were designed to enable precise movements proportionate to the surface area of the board, Blackwheel could basically do a complete U-turn well within the width of a standard pavement. To the uninitiated, it was an ankle-breaker, and any attempt to steel it would result in guaranteed injury to the thief, often in a spectacular airborne fashion.

Because of Blackwheel’s Great Egg Race design and build quality, it was somewhat louder than standard skateboards when traversing cracks in the pavement, and whereas I thought this might be an issue at six-o-clock in the morning whilst delivering my papers, imagine my surprise when come Christmas, I made almost £4 in tips from my customers. Basically, the noise that the clattering beast made had ensured that no one on my round ever overslept and they were never late for work. I was essentially a 1980s Knocker-Upper, and that Christmas it earned me almost as much in one day as my paper round did in a week.

My first official encounter with actual roller boots was when one of my friends appeared in the street wearing a pair a couple of days after Christmas. They had yellow wheels, a blue suede body, pristine stoppers, and yellow laces and ankle supports. Not long afterwards, I managed to source a pair myself, although I can’t remember where I got them from. Unlike my friend’s brand-new blue suede Rider Rollers, mine were more of a plastic and rusted steel affair with a loose stopper hanging on to the left boot for dear life. Many items back then weren't streamlined like they are these days, and were often built with the possibility of having to withstand a nuclear blast in mind.

kids of the 1970s and 80s were often very confident and didn’t ask for help as much as they could have, but after walking (walk-rolling) gingerly out of the front gate towards my friend who was zooming around like Jane Torvill, I asked her to teach me how to skate. And she did. And very well as it happens.

1980s roller boots had a 2 X 2-wheel arrangement which was somewhat different than its much faster cousin, the roller blade, which had an inline arrangement. But the key to learning how to use them was a combination of posture, confidence, using the stopper to push off as well as stop, and something called, ‘falling forward’. It took me a couple of hours or so, and after taking a few tumbles due to gravel jamming my wheels, I was coasting along happily. By the end of the first day, I didn’t even need to use the stopper to push off to get going, which was handy because it had completely fallen off by then.

After a couple more weeks of practise, we were good enough to use some of the makeshift ramps that the bike riders were using to leap over their friends who would lie down in the road with their eyes closed and fingers crossed. Looking back, it does amaze me how quickly we learned how to do things when we were kids in the 70s and 80s. We would practise over and over and were ready to take countless tumbles and falls throughout the process.

By the time the roller disco arrived in our town, we were confident skaters. We could execute a range of jumps, skate on one foot and even skate backwards, all at considerable speed. The disco itself was housed in a section of a derelict war munitions factory which had been converted into a roller rink (a perimeter made of 8 X 4 feet sheets of plywood painted black). In one of the side rooms was the skate hire hub containing a hundred or so pairs of skates of various, ‘close-enough’ sizes. The skate hire cost 50 pence, and I also recall that there was a drink stand which sold plastic cups of black current, orange or lemonade for 10 pence each. Because the skate scene was so extreme, we asked for half black current / half orange combos, and felt suitably radical for doing so.

The Roller Disco was memorable for all the right reasons. For the few months it was there, you were guaranteed to see every kid in the community at some point. The latest chart songs were played at loud volumes through huge speakers whilst red, green and blue spinning lights turned a section of what was clearly a building earmarked for demolition, into a potential scene from Norman Jewison’s film, Rollerball. There was even the occasional smoke machine which took things to a whole new level, and I don’t recall there being any health and safety documentation or disclaimer we had to read beforehand. If there was one, I suspect it would have been a very long document.

Now there were four categories of skater at our Roller Disco. There were the beginners who would never let go of the perimeter boards, but had a fixed look of delight on their faces throughout the whole hour. They wore their roller boots awkwardly, and it sometimes looked like their legs were fractured and bending inwards half way down the shins where there clearly weren’t any knee joints.

Next, there were the small groups of 'cool kids' who wore the boots and looked the part, but never actually skated. They just frowned and laughed at those who did, and were only there because it was the in place to be. The fear of ridicule were they to fall over was far too much for them to handle. They basically just kicked one skate forward and backwards from heal to toe to create the illusion of motion and that they could skate if they really wanted to.

Next up was me and my group of friends. We had far-surpassed Cliff Richard and were well on our way to Starlight Express-level capabilities…until the fourth classification of skater rocked up, with his pristine leather roller boots that were clearly not from the 50p skate hire hub. This dude was the son of the people who ran the business, and he wasn’t messing around with bunny hops and balancing on one foot. This cat could leap over three people lying on the ground without needing a ramp, do the Box splits at high speed, and also one of those jumps that you would normally only see at the winter Olympics. It was either a Toe-loop or a Salchow, and trust me, he was far too fast for you to trip him over when the smoke machine fired up.

Like so many working-class communities in the 1970s and 80s, we knew that we weren’t the wealthiest or the smartest kids in the world, but our sense of camaraderie and our creative imaginations could turn what might have looked to the untrained eye like a demolition site, into the dance floor from Saturday Night Fever. That was our Roller Disco, and I have the clicking knee joints to prove it.

Which category of skater were you?