My name is Andrew Lowe and I have breakdanced in public. It has been twenty years since my last breakdance. There was me, and four mates, and we were all into import electro and hip-hop. One of my mates was black, one was Pakistani, the other was half-Hungarian. I’d like to complete this Dee-Liteful, multi-ethnic little picture by claiming to be Chinese, but it isn’t true.

We pestered our parents into buying us matching, red, hooded tops. For some reason, we begged them to stitch the phrase ‘Zodiac Crew’ onto the backs. We threatened to hold our breaths until my dad cleared a bit of space in the garage - just enough to accommodate a big strip of unevenly cut lino and a gigantic ‘ghetto blaster’.

We tried to decorate the ghetto blaster with spray-painted ‘tags’, but we weren’t very good at art and it looked like a gang of PCP-addled chimps had had a gunfight with paint-filled water pistols.

Anyway, we span. We span on our backs, hands, backsides, backs and sides. My Pakistani mate once tried to spin on his head, but he did his neck in – as did I, on my one and only attempt. My half-Hungarian mate could do a ‘Windmill’ – a wonderfully flowing, continuous back-spin propelled by circular-swinging, outstretched legs. I could never manage it, but I did have the Crab-Walk down pretty sweetly.

It was performance. A bit of a show-off thing – fun to do, even more fun with someone watching. It tied in perfectly with our love of the music, our misty-eyed glamourisation of inner-city New York (as seen from inner-city England), and, best of all, it packed a bit of outsider spice.

While most of our peers were enjoying parentally approved activities like sport, sponsored walks and after-school music tuition, we were holed up in a garage, listening to threatening music and racking up a collection of minor injuries. One fine bank holiday, we persuaded my dad to come out to the garage and watch. He stood around politely for a few minutes, and then walked away, shaking his head.

At school, we sat through ‘Computer Studies’ – rambled at by a gentle old Welsh bloke who made us sit in the computer room, by the keyboards, by the switched-on monitors… and copy out flowcharts with a stencil.

There was also a horrible thing called ‘Music & Movement’ – an extension of Drama, where the teacher played syrupy music while the pupils swanned around the assembly hall, listing and leaping and, whenever possible, pushing mates into girls.

But outside Silver Coin on weekends and holidays, we reworked our own version of Music & Movement – drawing little crowds of grudging hecklers with our breakdancing. We even met some girls. Not many, just some.

Inside, we ditched the stencils and indulged in the best (the only) way to study computers – by playing games. It was all a glorious, esteem-building, reflex-tuning, athletic, social, peer-approved mix. But, never in a million open evenings could I have convinced my parents that I was doing anything other than training for a life of crime.

The gaming added a healthy competitive edge and it often felt like more of a performance than the breakdancing. When Silver Coin installed a chunky old thing called Dragon’s Lair, I spent a long time watching the technician ‘test’ his way through random scenes. I spotted the mirror-image trickery, got advice from some kid who had the Lizard King section sussed. I watched and learned and caned and caned the up-down-left-right-sword business until my brain patterns were little more than one long Dragon’s Lair walkthrough.

Each time I played, a crowd formed. A couple of people would optimistically slap a 10p piece on the joystick panel. Some even tried to psych me out by inserting a coin while I was still playing – a pre-prepared credit just willing me to mess up.

One day, I didn’t mess up. I kept going and going and the crowd got bigger and bigger, and then, up popped a scene I hadn’t seen before - the Dragon’s Lair itself. I’d reached it with two lives and on the second attempt, I did it. I slayed the dragon. In the gameworld, Dirk had conquered evil and got the girl. Back in the arcade, the crowd/audience let out a cautious little cheer. A bit of back-slapping, a “Nice one!” or two, and then… game over. The little shit with the stored credit stepped up and the moment was gone.

So, the breakdancing was fun, and I scored a goal or two for the fourth-year football team, and I was a demon table-tennis player, and I was in a gigging band at university, and I once handed in a wallet to the police station and picked up a small reward. But I’ve only ever felt the spine-tingle of heroism in front of a video-game screen.

18th May, 2003

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