Paul Fitzpatrick: London

In the 70s there was a period in your early teens when you were too young and skint to go anywhere on a Saturday night but too restless and worldly-curious to stay at home and watch the Two Ronnies.

Sure, there was the odd youth club disco, but they were few and far between, Saturday night options were limited for inbetweeners like us.

It’s no surprise then, that the sentence we loved to hear as the weekend approached was……

“so and so’s got an EMPTY on Saturday night”.

It was music to the ears, nectar for the soul, BBC viewing figures would suffer but who cared, the weekend was worth looking forward to and plans were already afoot on how to acquire a stash of Tennents lager, Newcastle Brown and Cider for the snakebites.

To call it an ‘empty’ as we all know is a classic misnomer, the house in question is about to get a lot fuller than it’s ever been, an ’empty’ in this case is simply a household devoid of supervision.

Back in the day there were three types of ‘empty’.

1. The ‘official empty’: organised in advance, invitations made on a need-to-know basis and kept within a small peer group.
2. The ‘unofficial empty’: disorganised, no control over proceedings and a risk that every nutter within distance will turn up.
3. The ‘hearsay empty‘: speculative, someone told someone, but they weren’t sure, therefore, you’d need to turn up on the day to check it out, taking the risk that it could be a complete waste of time and you may end up in enemy territory.

The ‘official empty’ normally went off without a hitch because everyone generally knew each other.
There would be a few cans of warm beer or cider, Harvey’s Bristol Cream for the ladies and cocktail hour consisted of a blend of whatever was in the living-room drinks cabinet, typically Advocaat, Martini Bianco and Creme de Menthe…. yup it tasted as bad as it sounds.

Entertainment would be provided by the family music centre which would be blasting out the hits of the day, so in 1972/3 that would have been a cocktail of Bowie/Rod/Roxy/T-Rex.

As bumbling teens there would be plenty of awkwardness until the lights went out and inhibitions were shed. This would last for the side of an album (approx 18 minutes) until the lights went back on, whereupon normal levels of social ineptitude were resumed.

Typically, the only drama of note was when someone couldn’t handle their booze, inevitably puking on the hosts new carpet/rug/settee, which would entail a clean-up operation (for both the reveller and the carpet) before getting out of Dodge ahead of the parents return.

I do recall one unfortunate incident though.

It centred on a daft 70s craze, which was to try and make yourself faint.
This mindless wheeze was performed by simultaneously blowing on your thumb and holding your nostrils, which starved oxygen to the brain until you inevitably passed out.

I’d seen people try it before but always gave up before it got to the passing out stage, however on this particular evening one brave (but deluded) soul decided to go for it, and surprisingly it was the quietest, most demure girl in our school.
She passed out for what seemed like a minute, but on regaining consciousness undertook what can only be described as a personality conversion, running around the house screeching like a banshee, tearing her clothes off and attempting to throw them out the window.

Fortunately her pals managed to placate her before things got too out of hand.

Mortified, I’m not sure I saw the poor girl attend another social event ever again.

I remember seeing Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction some decades later and the crushed expression she wore after the iconic overdose scene reminded me of the haunted look on that poor girls face.

The ‘unofficial empty’ as we all know is an accident waiting to happen and there are numerous horror stories of empties that ended up as tales of woe, typically with a common link.

The common link of course was that most of the unfortunates hosting these doomed events were naïve, and totally unprepared for the mayhem that was about to be unleashed at their expense.

Like a car-crash in slow motion you could see it all unfolding before your eyes.

First there was the jungle drums, normally a few days in advance…. “so and so’s got an empty” – the news would spread like wildfire, then on the evening in question you’d see a congregation of people milling around outside the venue, the numbers swelling by the minute.

A bit like the Alamo there would be defiance at first but after the first few gate-crashers gained entry the floodgates would soon open and resistance was futile.

Looking on in disbelief the host could see that things were going downhill fast… defeat and resignation painted all over their poor wee faces.

At this point it was all about damage control…. saucers were flying (out the window), liquids were being decanted (anywhere & everywhere), cigarettes were being stubbed out randomly and anything of value had to be nailed down.

It was mindless and gratuitous and even if you wanted to help you were powerless to do so. It was usually a mix of older lads and people you’d never seen before, behaving like Vikings on meth, before a neighbour or the police thankfully turned up to restore order.

I witnessed a couple of those nightmare scenarios as a bystander and it was the reason I never volunteered an empty even if I had one, which to be fair I didn’t very often as my younger brother was junior by 9 years so there was always a babysitter involved.

Post party, you would hear that the poor host, traumatised by events, had been grounded for several weeks and it always begged the question – ‘why would you put yourself through that – are you mental?’

As a parent I tried to pass those learnings onto my kids, and whilst there were one or two close calls (that we know about) I think we got off pretty lightly.

The ‘hearsay empty’ usually turned out to be a damp squib, you’d traipse all over the place in hope, to far flung places you’d never frequented before, to be greeted by a DeNiro lookalike parent, or a growling sibling, eyeing you up and down before slamming the door on your face.  

To make matters worse you’d inevitably end up getting chased by the natives who took umbrage to the fact that you were on their territory.

Of course, nowadays empties are prearranged and communicated via social media, which heightens the risk, and the papers regularly feature stories about ‘gatherings’ that have gone spectacularly wrong, like the article below…

Mum’s horror as 15-year-old daughter’s Facebook party sees 100 youths turn up to wreck home, smash TV and fling bottles at cops

Anyway, who’s to say that empties are for teenagers only?

I have a good friend who lives nearby who’ll message a few of us when his wife’s away for a weekend to say he’s got an ‘empty’… as you can probably tell he’s Scottish as well, and whilst the sense of anticipation may not match that of 50 years ago I still look forward to it in the knowledge it will be a good wee night.

We’ll go to the local for a few beers before traipsing back to his, whereupon wine will be drunk, the sound system will be turned up and a host of 70s classics will be belted out.
Inevitably the conversation will get philosophical and a bit soppy before we all head home several hours later than planned, to spend the next couple of days in recovery.

Alas, empties 2024 style are very different to 1972…. there’s no puking on expensive rugs or brainless pranks, in fact we all assist in tidying up and recycling before we leave.

Changed days indeed.