My favourite film aged 12: The Delinquents

January 1990: the first month of a thrilling new decade. I am embracing the mood by jumping on the 111 bus from my small South Walian village, jetting off to the buzzing metropolis of Swansea. I am joined on this illicit adventure by three school-friends. We have spent hours debating what coloured jeans we should wear and spraying our backcombed fringes into frosty tsunamis. We have to pass a huge test at the newly opened UCI cinema, after all. We have to look 12, and I’m a few months off that yet.

My favourite film when I was 12 – and yes, honestly, Mr UCI, I’m really, genuinely 12, ignore my quivering knees and my huge bag of strawberry shoelaces – was the first film I was brave enough to fake my age for (and yes, I got in). That film was The Delinquents, starring my ultimate heroine, Kylie Minogue. I’d convinced myself I had known Minogue well since I was nine. She regularly accompanied my tea in front of the TV, on Neighbours. She was cute, she was funny, but her car mechanic character, Charlene, also stood her ground; her first appearance on the show involved her punching Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan), who later became her husband. She was quick-tempered, as I was, but also rebellious in a safe, gentle way. She was everything I wanted to be.

But in The Delinquents, Minogue turned up the trangressiveness. This was clear from the moment I saw the poster for it in the pages of Smash Hits: she was dressed in a leather jacket and bodice, passionately stretching her neck back, which was being kissed by Charlie Schlatter. The display felt impossibly provocative. Going through the confusion of puberty, I didn’t quite know what to do with it. Looking back, I’m sure it felt like she was growing up for all of us, getting interested in things we were getting interested in, despite the fact that those things – to most of us, anyway – still felt totally alien.

The Delinquents was set in the 1950s, a period well-known to any kids who had grown up in the 1980s. That whole decade had been obsessed with commercialising the neon-lit nostalgia of early rock’n’roll, and the growing chasm between the generations, and what that all meant for the ignition of the new spirit of accessible culture. Watching the film again all these years later, its rebelliousness begins gently. Minogue plays Lola Lovell, a vision in a pastel-blue, A-lined dress, noticing an American boy that she likes on the roof of the cinema. She laughs – he’s taking down the letters advertising the latest film – then she politely approaches the cinema’s owner outside. “Excuse me, will you be getting Rock Around the Clock back again any time? It was really popular!! She beams, like a giddy head girl. “Not with normal people,” he grouches.

Then Brownie Hansen – the boy taking down the letters – jumps down. They get talking. They like books. They like music. Names of their favourites rush out, instant connections suddenly fizzing together – this, precisely this, is what love will be like, I bet I thought. Brownie teaches Lola rock-and-roll dancing. They end a practice with their legs wrapped around each other on floor: they approach each other breathing slowly, and they kiss. This was courting as I knew it would be: heady and feverish, but also blissfully simple.

Then things got hotter (predictably, The Delinquents was known in our school by the boys as the film where Kylie got her boobs out). Then they get darker: Lola gets pregnant, and the couple run away, but get caught, then Lola’s mother forces her to have an abortion. Things go downhill quickly from here – Lola gets sent away to live with her aunt, then gets put in a young offenders’ institute for underage drinking, then her friend dies in labour, all of which seems a bit of a harsh learning curve – but the scenes I remember best are still oddly delightful. In one, she’s bleach-haired, telling her mother what she does with the the boy she’s not allowed to love. “I love the way he kisses me,” she says, lustily. Then she puts her face right up to her mother’s. “I love the way he looks when he’s … just … about ... to …” Kylie, come, come.

I kept up my obsession with The Delinquents for a while, but then I moved on (New Kids on the Block had arrived by that point). I never really abandoned Kylie, though, buying her records and watching her films as I moved from adolescence to adulthood. I finally met her properly years later, interviewing her for a magazine in 2014 – we even talked about her Welsh family on the side of her mother, Carol, which made me feel that we had our own fizzing connection.

I mentioned faking my age to see her in the Swansea UCI nearly 25 years earlier, and she laughed. “What a rebel!” she said, bouncily, politely, and I nearly caved in. The backcombed-fringed wannabe delinquent had achieved her dream, after all.