Day 50: "Corrosion" - Various Artists (2001)
This one is a puzzler folks. Not necessarily in terms of why this is in my collection, not only why it exists at all, but in the decisions that were made in bringing this assemblage of alternative music from 2001 together, some of which are frankly baffling. It's a weird artefact from a stranger time, but also one which is a perfect excuse for me to talk about a place which probably has more personal stories attached to it than any other.
I've done my best to replicate the track list for you here, but with some omissions due to the bizarre track list.
Before I forge ahead with my trip down memory lane, let examine the album itself, shall we? Because its frankly a weirdly preposterous collection of music.
The "Now That's What I Call Music" series have a clearer thematic tie than this album does.
First, I get the inclination. Some Sony music executive somewhere goes "Hey, alternative music is popular right now, and we have all these bands signed to our label, lets just put out a compilation album and make ourselves some more money". Then they asked some poor nameless intern who mentioned once that his brother had taken him to see Skid Row to go through their catalogue of artists and put a bunch of songs together to press this record. At least, I assume that must be what happened, because the track list is borderline schizophrenic. This is an album which has The Presidents of the USA's bubblegum pop cover of "Video Killed The Radio Star" followed by Rage Against The Machine. Creed's mewling, cliched, soft-metal ballad "With Arms Wide Open" follows The Pixies with "Debaser". On top of that, there's at least 3 totally weird and random cover versions on here - The Wildhearts doing Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up", instantly forgettable US punk band The Suicide Machines covering "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden", and Christian rockers P.O.D covering U2's "Bullet The Blue Sky", all three covers of which do not appear on any albums for those groups on Spotify, leading me to believe they were weird B-sides they just had hanging around and decided to slap on here to really ratchet up the insanity of its track listing to 11.
So why do I own it? Well, apart from my insatiable need to buy records during that time period, a better title for this record would be "A collection of songs you might reasonably have heard if you wandered around the various rooms in Sheffield's Corporation nightclub on a Saturday Night in 2001". "Corrosion" is less wordy, I will grant you.
I had to find a picture of it taken at night because it looks weird and wrong in the daylight.
This place.
If you were to sum together all the hours of my life I've spent in this club (though old school Corp goers like me remember the original Corp building on Queen's Road, next to the Boardwalk, which is now a Parking Garage, a Premier Inn and an Argos), I've probably logged at least an entire continuous month of my existence in this wretched, sticky, sweaty, dark, grimy black hole of human morality. It's been the site of some of my greatest emotional highs and my worst tragedies, I've been drunk out of my mind and sober as a judge within its walls, it was my combination of surrogate therapy session and gym workout during the darkest period of my life, I've been thrown out of it once (someone on the dancefloor threw a bottle at the DJ booth, and the DJ apparently pointed out at the dancefloor and said it was "a guy with blonde hair in a black shirt", which narrowed it down to about 25% of the people in the room. The bouncers assumed it was me and my protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears), and had experiences there which are definitely not suitable to be published, even in a generally emotionally honest retelling of my past which only fifteen people are reading.
The first time I went to Corp I must have been barely 18; before we were all of legal drinking age, we kept our underage drinking and debauchery to the venues in Chesterfield where they cared significantly less about how old you were when you were buying a drink. However, once we'd all become confident (and old) enough to go to nightclubs, the siren call of this mythical venue, a proper nightclub devoted to rock and metal, summoned us to Sheffield. Corp is the kind of place that warps the neighbourhood around it with its mere presence. Our first trip to Sheffield, we looked for nearby pubs to drink in before the doors opened and found The Shakespeare (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Iron Maiden on the jukebox), The Dove & Rainbow (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Metallica on the jukebox) and Sheffield live music venue The Boardwalk (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Iron Maiden cover band on stage) all catering for the crowd we had become a part of. Even now, having moved around the city a couple of times, the club's current venue continues to warp the existence of the local drinking establishments around it to cater for its very specific crowd, while The Shakespeare is now a very pleasant real ale pub, the Dove & Rainbow has stuck to its metal aesthetic, and The Boardwalk is now sadly closed.
Those early trips were somewhat fraught. The last train back from Sheffield to Chesterfield was a ludicrously early midnight, and the first train on a Saturday at 5.47am. A taxi back to Chesterfield would run you a good £25 after midnight on a Saturday, an outrageous sum to people who often arrived at Corp with the £5 cover charge and £10 for drinks to last the rest of the evening. Several of those early trips featured some creative/stupid solutions to being stranded in another city at 3am; we slept in the Sheffield Train Station waiting room for 3 hours; we drunkenly walked the 14 miles back to Chesterfield down a bypass with no real place for pedestrians to walk; one time, because I worked at a business on the same street, I took in my work keys, let myself in, deactivated the alarm, and slept for 4 hours in our server cupboard before re-alarming the place and walking back to the station.
Once I met Kate, and through her Alex and his social group, my trips to Corporation went from "whenever we could afford it and could be bothered to go" to monthly, and sometimes twice-monthly extravaganzas. Alex's mum, an old-school rocker herself, would organise mass bus trips from the venue at 2.30am, and often there would be 20-30 people on the Chesterfield Party Bus. Corporation nights became ritualistic, highly anticipated events in the social calendar, as well as opportunities for the highest levels of our Dawson's Creek-esque adolescent drama. The Sunday fallout from the Saturday Night betrayals was as much a part of the experience as the drinking and dancing.
I could draw you a map from memory right now of the layout of the old Corp venue; the stanky toilet corridor leading to the Hair Metal room with the long bar; the tiny skate-punk room that seemed to have its own sub-culture who never ventured into the black-clad clientele of the main room, where the booths surrounding the circular dancefloor were the premium seating location in the entire venue. When we discovered that Corporation had to close its doors when its lease expired, to say we were devastated was an understatement. It was the end of an era.
While the search for a new venue went on, we kept the dream alive; Corp ran rock nights at the Sheffield Students Union building, and in a space at the Wicker Arches for 6 months, and we went to those as well (though they were never quite the same). When it was announced that Corp was going to take over an old club called The Unit, we braced ourselves for the return of a venue which had become indelibly woven into our existence.
By the time the new Corporation was operating, the dynamic had changed in our social group; Alex had moved out of his mother's, and the social group which made up our regular Corporation crew scattered to the winds by university, jobs, and other relationships. However, a small hardcore group still remained; myself and Alex, D and Alex's sister Becky, and Gareth, Martin & Dave forming the core. In addition, I'd often end up going with other parts of our splintered social group; A night at Corporation could often end up with you bumping into old friends from Chesterfield even if you just turned up on your own.
It didn't take long for the new Corp to attain the the dark, grimy layer of sweat and human tragedy to be baked onto its walls, cementing it's position as a worthy successor to the original. Corp is a terrible, terrible place and I love it dearly.
There are a hundred Corporation stories I could tell, but I thought I'd settle on this one because it's certainly the one that most significantly shifted the social environment around me at the time. It was some time in the early 2000's; I was getting ready to start working my full time job at Sheffield University, still living in Chesterfield with Dave. There was a Saturday night trip to Corporation, but this time with my old school friend Col, my oldest friend Jamie and a couple of others. Col at the time was in a relationship with a girl named Stef, who was no fan of rock and metal, but her housemate Becky was, and so she would come with us from time to time. None of us knew her that well, but we were a welcoming group and she had enjoyed herself on some of the previous trips we'd been on.
As the night went on, Jamie and Hado and the others we were out with went off to catch the last train, but me, Col and Becky decided to stay, agreeing to split a cab ride back at the 2.30am kicking out time. The evening continued with the usual pattern of dancing until a song we didn't like came on, going to the bar, buying a beer, sitting and then waiting for another good song. Because of differences in musical taste, it often meant the three of us would be cycling on and off the dancefloor at different times.
So, a some point during this dancefloor rotation, I found myself at the bar with Becky. She was single at the time, and so was I, and she was cute, so I thought I would ask her out. I tend to have a fairly straightforward approach to these things, and had long since abandoned stupid chat up lines for straight talking "hey, do you want to go out some time with me?" questions, which are both less sleazy and seemed to have better results. When I asked Becky this, stood at the Bar in the small side room of the Corporation, she gave me such a withering and soul-crushing rejection that you would think I had asked her if she minded if I kicked her puppy to death. I'd dealt with rejections before, but this was brutal, savage even, and I was left speechless and humiliated. I wandered off to the toilets to collect myself, mortified with embarrassment, and reacted the way I still do to this day when faced with abject public humiliation - I put my body weight of Jack Daniels inside me and got very annoyed. I took my annoyance to the dancefloor and refusing to return to any place Becky and Col might be, avoided them for the rest of the night, stumbled out of the club and flagged down a taxi on my own to take me home.
I spent a week after that keeping my head down through sheer embarrassment. I was sure that the tale of my clumsy advances and cutting rejection had spread like wildfire through my social circle, and I wasn't very proud of the way I'd reacted afterwards. It wasn't until the following Friday that Jamie called me up to ask me where I had been.
I told him the story of what had happened at Corp that night, and how embarrassed at my actions I was. He laughed, and said "Oh, you don't know?".
The denouement to my story, it seems, had happened without me that night. What I (and everyone) was unaware of at they time was that Col and Becky, his girlfriends house-mate, were carrying on a secret affair behind Stef's back. That night, they had gone back to Becky and Stef's shared house, and Stef had come downstairs in the night and walked in on Col and Becky in flagrante, causing a drama storm of epic proportions that would envelope our whole social group. My actions that night were washed away in a tsumani of hormonal drama which tore friends apart over the following six months. It was a mess.
So that's the Corporation experience. You'll go there, you'll drink, you'll dance, you'll sweat, and it will change your life. Just not always for the better.
The first time I went to Corp I must have been barely 18; before we were all of legal drinking age, we kept our underage drinking and debauchery to the venues in Chesterfield where they cared significantly less about how old you were when you were buying a drink. However, once we'd all become confident (and old) enough to go to nightclubs, the siren call of this mythical venue, a proper nightclub devoted to rock and metal, summoned us to Sheffield. Corp is the kind of place that warps the neighbourhood around it with its mere presence. Our first trip to Sheffield, we looked for nearby pubs to drink in before the doors opened and found The Shakespeare (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Iron Maiden on the jukebox), The Dove & Rainbow (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Metallica on the jukebox) and Sheffield live music venue The Boardwalk (dark, sticky floor, cheap beer, Iron Maiden cover band on stage) all catering for the crowd we had become a part of. Even now, having moved around the city a couple of times, the club's current venue continues to warp the existence of the local drinking establishments around it to cater for its very specific crowd, while The Shakespeare is now a very pleasant real ale pub, the Dove & Rainbow has stuck to its metal aesthetic, and The Boardwalk is now sadly closed.
Those early trips were somewhat fraught. The last train back from Sheffield to Chesterfield was a ludicrously early midnight, and the first train on a Saturday at 5.47am. A taxi back to Chesterfield would run you a good £25 after midnight on a Saturday, an outrageous sum to people who often arrived at Corp with the £5 cover charge and £10 for drinks to last the rest of the evening. Several of those early trips featured some creative/stupid solutions to being stranded in another city at 3am; we slept in the Sheffield Train Station waiting room for 3 hours; we drunkenly walked the 14 miles back to Chesterfield down a bypass with no real place for pedestrians to walk; one time, because I worked at a business on the same street, I took in my work keys, let myself in, deactivated the alarm, and slept for 4 hours in our server cupboard before re-alarming the place and walking back to the station.
Once I met Kate, and through her Alex and his social group, my trips to Corporation went from "whenever we could afford it and could be bothered to go" to monthly, and sometimes twice-monthly extravaganzas. Alex's mum, an old-school rocker herself, would organise mass bus trips from the venue at 2.30am, and often there would be 20-30 people on the Chesterfield Party Bus. Corporation nights became ritualistic, highly anticipated events in the social calendar, as well as opportunities for the highest levels of our Dawson's Creek-esque adolescent drama. The Sunday fallout from the Saturday Night betrayals was as much a part of the experience as the drinking and dancing.
I could draw you a map from memory right now of the layout of the old Corp venue; the stanky toilet corridor leading to the Hair Metal room with the long bar; the tiny skate-punk room that seemed to have its own sub-culture who never ventured into the black-clad clientele of the main room, where the booths surrounding the circular dancefloor were the premium seating location in the entire venue. When we discovered that Corporation had to close its doors when its lease expired, to say we were devastated was an understatement. It was the end of an era.
While the search for a new venue went on, we kept the dream alive; Corp ran rock nights at the Sheffield Students Union building, and in a space at the Wicker Arches for 6 months, and we went to those as well (though they were never quite the same). When it was announced that Corp was going to take over an old club called The Unit, we braced ourselves for the return of a venue which had become indelibly woven into our existence.
By the time the new Corporation was operating, the dynamic had changed in our social group; Alex had moved out of his mother's, and the social group which made up our regular Corporation crew scattered to the winds by university, jobs, and other relationships. However, a small hardcore group still remained; myself and Alex, D and Alex's sister Becky, and Gareth, Martin & Dave forming the core. In addition, I'd often end up going with other parts of our splintered social group; A night at Corporation could often end up with you bumping into old friends from Chesterfield even if you just turned up on your own.
It didn't take long for the new Corp to attain the the dark, grimy layer of sweat and human tragedy to be baked onto its walls, cementing it's position as a worthy successor to the original. Corp is a terrible, terrible place and I love it dearly.
There are a hundred Corporation stories I could tell, but I thought I'd settle on this one because it's certainly the one that most significantly shifted the social environment around me at the time. It was some time in the early 2000's; I was getting ready to start working my full time job at Sheffield University, still living in Chesterfield with Dave. There was a Saturday night trip to Corporation, but this time with my old school friend Col, my oldest friend Jamie and a couple of others. Col at the time was in a relationship with a girl named Stef, who was no fan of rock and metal, but her housemate Becky was, and so she would come with us from time to time. None of us knew her that well, but we were a welcoming group and she had enjoyed herself on some of the previous trips we'd been on.
As the night went on, Jamie and Hado and the others we were out with went off to catch the last train, but me, Col and Becky decided to stay, agreeing to split a cab ride back at the 2.30am kicking out time. The evening continued with the usual pattern of dancing until a song we didn't like came on, going to the bar, buying a beer, sitting and then waiting for another good song. Because of differences in musical taste, it often meant the three of us would be cycling on and off the dancefloor at different times.
So, a some point during this dancefloor rotation, I found myself at the bar with Becky. She was single at the time, and so was I, and she was cute, so I thought I would ask her out. I tend to have a fairly straightforward approach to these things, and had long since abandoned stupid chat up lines for straight talking "hey, do you want to go out some time with me?" questions, which are both less sleazy and seemed to have better results. When I asked Becky this, stood at the Bar in the small side room of the Corporation, she gave me such a withering and soul-crushing rejection that you would think I had asked her if she minded if I kicked her puppy to death. I'd dealt with rejections before, but this was brutal, savage even, and I was left speechless and humiliated. I wandered off to the toilets to collect myself, mortified with embarrassment, and reacted the way I still do to this day when faced with abject public humiliation - I put my body weight of Jack Daniels inside me and got very annoyed. I took my annoyance to the dancefloor and refusing to return to any place Becky and Col might be, avoided them for the rest of the night, stumbled out of the club and flagged down a taxi on my own to take me home.
I spent a week after that keeping my head down through sheer embarrassment. I was sure that the tale of my clumsy advances and cutting rejection had spread like wildfire through my social circle, and I wasn't very proud of the way I'd reacted afterwards. It wasn't until the following Friday that Jamie called me up to ask me where I had been.
I told him the story of what had happened at Corp that night, and how embarrassed at my actions I was. He laughed, and said "Oh, you don't know?".
The denouement to my story, it seems, had happened without me that night. What I (and everyone) was unaware of at they time was that Col and Becky, his girlfriends house-mate, were carrying on a secret affair behind Stef's back. That night, they had gone back to Becky and Stef's shared house, and Stef had come downstairs in the night and walked in on Col and Becky in flagrante, causing a drama storm of epic proportions that would envelope our whole social group. My actions that night were washed away in a tsumani of hormonal drama which tore friends apart over the following six months. It was a mess.
So that's the Corporation experience. You'll go there, you'll drink, you'll dance, you'll sweat, and it will change your life. Just not always for the better.
