Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 11
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 11: 12 Months in Mauritius
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
The honeymoon phase is an early part of a relationship where everything seems carefree and happy. According to Wikipedia It usually lasts from six months to two years and can be marked with lots of laughs, intimacy, and fun dates. Ours lasted almost exactly 12 months to the day. It was high on laughs and we had a lot of fun dates, and I guess we did develop a fairly intimate knowledge of how to make things out of gaffa tape so that counts.
We had run numerous events in all sorts of weird locations, then ended up with a club we had to fill every week on Friday and Saturday night. Now we had our own venue and we suddenly needed to fill it seven days a week. Luckily we had a backlog of goodwill among artist and agents that stretched back over seven years, plus we had no sense at all of our own limitations, so pretty quickly we had hit on what we thought would be a winning formula. That formula can be summarised as ‘phone us up, we are booking it’. Anything touring on the circuit which looked vaguely like it might be in the Melody Maker or the NME we would take for a Friday or Saturday night. Most times we didn’t bother to listen to it, we just assumed people would want to see it because they had read about it, an assumption that proved to be surprisingly accurate. These were the days before You Tube or Spotify gave you instant access to all the music ever made. The way most people heard about bands was either one of the weekly music magazines or the John Peel show, and that meant that the only way you could actually find out if they had more than one song, or even one, was to go and see them.
These featured events quickly became our ‘banker’ nights, and in the first six months a crowd of people began to attend every single one of these and create what might best be described as a core of ‘regulars’. And by ‘regulars’ I mean oddballs. Absolute freaks and weirdos. The very best people there are.
The thing about a place like Tunbridge Wells, with its public reputation for a stiff upper lip, a crisp white shirt and a reserved seat on the 7.37 to Cannon Street to do something or other in the city, is that it’s all a facade. It’s true there’s a lot of affluence, whole streets of mansions made out of a particular type of stone by a very particular architect at a very particular time. But like all towns and villages of this type, the wealthy inhabitants are massively out numbered by a slightly less aristocratic middle class, and they in turn are sitting on top of a seething mass of people who want absolutely no part of it. Places like Shades, with its permanent risk of biker gang violence, or the legendary Doughnuts, housed in the basement of a hotel that seemed to be full of hardcore drug users and with a slogan that mysteriously promised a night that would be ‘Deep Joy and Darkly’, had been part of the slightly more shady history of the town for decades. What we had unconsciously done by opening a music venue was to create an absolute magnet for everyone who existed in that subspace in a radius of about twenty miles.
The thing about a grassroots music venue that gets talked about a lot is that it’s where artists start their careers. Claiming the brownie points that go with having ‘been there’ when this or that act played a set in front of almost no-one before moving on sometime later to headline Wembley Stadium is a standard part of the narrative on why they matter. Much less recognised, and culturally at least as important, is that places like The Forum are a permission slip. When you walked through the door of the Forum for the first time in 1993, you would see every possible aspect of the rich carnival of alternative culture within the first five metres.
Look over there in that dark corner. There’s the young kid who doesn’t seem old enough to be here and he’s clutching the fanzine he started last week in one hand and a cassette recorder in the other. He’s hoping to interview tonight’s act Bark Psychosis to find out what they think about people stage diving while they were trying to tune up. Leaning in the archway to the main hall is the leather jacketed, enormously quiffed, architect who designed the bar. He’s still smarting from not having been allowed to stick sharp metal fragments on to the walls - they looked great but slashed your hands to ribbons if you leant on them. If you ask him nicely he will show you the eight foot high artwork he’s painted on one of the walls of a naked hermaphrodite that caused us to get a rather strong letter from the council. He’s chatting to a handlebar-moustached fellow with a monocle and the shiniest shoes outside of Wall Street. He’s dressed in his usual pristine three piece suit and is just waiting for his chance to run all the way from the back to the front so he can hurl himself off the stage and flatten the front six rows. Over there is someone with a tripod and one of those new fangled video camera things who has just started making a documentary.
As you pull into the venue itself, the Internationally Famous Photographer is leaning on the bar suggesting that he should not only be on the guest list but also the band should have put some drinks behind the bar for him. He’s debating the level of free stuff he deserves with the couple wearing the tightest PVC outfits this side of the local sex shop. In their hands they have the newly printed leaflets for their Fetish nights that we have innocently agreed can start next Wednesday. The local tattooist is at the end of the bar sizing up who is is inking this week. Down the front is the girl with the beehive hairdo and the amazing dress sense, her brother with the quiff and the biker jackets, and their friend with the bowl haircut who always brings his harmonica with him. Together they look like the B52s on acid.
As far as the eye can see, which isn’t very far because we couldn’t afford any lighting for the hall, all your gaze can fall upon is people busy being someone and plotting their next move. They all look like they own the place, and the reason for that is that in a very real way they do. They are The Forum more than the bricks and mortar, the ridiculously coloured carpet, or the thrown together, barely still standing stage.
It’s an electric atmosphere of creativity, identity, personal passions and playfulness. Want to start a band? That person is a drummer. Want to be a sound engineer? Climb up the ladder and start pushing the faders about. Got a better idea who should be playing than we do? Great, you’re in charge of Tuesday nights, make something happen. Fancy yourself as a DJ? Make a tape, put it in the stereo, if it’s any good you’re on after the band. Like many of its fellow venues of this type in towns just like this one, The Forum isn’t just the place where the bands play. It’s where people play. It’s where you can see someone wearing an extraordinary outfit and decide to become a fashion designer. It’s where a single drunken conversation turns into a lifelong career in theatre. It’s where you meet your life partner, it’s where you bring the kids you create together. It’s where you can be anyone you want, but most of all you can be yourself.
All the people in the above paragraphs are real and they all went on to lead lives that were more than partially shaped by the permission slip that the existence of The Forum gave them. The little kid with the fanzine went on to be a renowned author. The woman with the video camera now works for the BBC. The girl with the beehive still makes her own clothes. I like to think there’s a venue in another dimension where Moon is still wearing his stupid Davey Crockett hat and doing his daft mod shuffle and where Goth Dancer is still miming out the lyrics to Ieya; sadly not everyone who features in this book is still with us in the physical sense. But all of them are still there in the fabric of the walls of what we call The Holy Toilet, and you can feel the energy they left behind when you walk through the doors even today.
This assembled freak show of the best humanity has to offer would create an astonishing buzz in the venue that would very quickly transfer itself into a national reputation. Agents started to call. We even had to buy a fax machine. One day it spews out an offer to present Green Day again. The next it offers us S*M*A*S*H. We were on a roll, offers flooding in, most of them started with the hesitant enquiry ‘just to check…. it’s not a toilet any more right?’. Soon we couldn’t fit all the circuit tours into weekend slots so we started parking them into Tuesday or Wednesdays. On Thursday we put on the best blues or jazz artists we could afford, and on Monday we created a showcase event for new local bands.
This left us with just the Sunday night, where we would make our first tactical financial error in pursuit of the spirit of cultural freedom. Approached by a local troupe of budding comedians eager to build up a scene, we reached a deal to play host to The Bucket Cabaret. This well-intentioned, half planned, barely written, anarchic take on entertainment had within it a sea of characters too chaotic, bizarre and ridiculous even for this book, although they would certainly warrant a book of their own. I would suggest the title ‘Aaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhh!’
The members of the performing gang did, however, share one unifying characteristic that it took us at least seven months to spot and which presented a very significant threat to the future of the venue: They all absolutely loved the odd pint or two. I’m being generous. There were a minimum of 13 of them and they liked at least seven pints each. Not knowing this very salient piece of information, we had reached a deal with them whereby they would get the venue for free, we would take the entry fee, and they could have ‘a few drinks’. We had then allowed them to set the entry price, which they had decided should be £1. If you’ve quickly done the maths in your head, we had agreed to staff the venue, pay the rent, rates, electric, water, and give them circa 100 pints of lager for the return of however much money was taken at the door, to an absolute maximum income of circa £100. Within that deal we had greatly under-estimated their capacity for adding people to the guest list as well, resulting in one memorable week where the total return was a whole pound. Although the coin in the tin later turned out to be French. We were dimly aware that this wasn’t perhaps the greatest deal in the history of venue ownership, but we had a brand new thing and we wanted to play with it. Plus, the Bucket Cabaret gang were massive amounts of fun, as you would be after consuming your own body weight in free lager every week. On a really good night you would only have to see two of them naked.
We ploughed through the first nine months lurching from weekends of sold out nights to over sold out nights on to perilously dangerously over sold out nights, paying little attention to the bank account because, let’s face it, if you’re this busy it can’t possibly be anything other than positive news. One night featuring Dodgy we forgot we’d given a complete set of tickets to two different local record stores, but their crowd liked forming human pyramids and sitting on each others shoulders so we ran it as a double-deckered event and it was all good. We mostly lived off pasties from the local garage, but a couple of weeks things were going so well we even paid ourselves so we could go to a restaurant and eat food that hadn’t been microwaved.
And then one day we sat down to take a look at the bank account and there was absolutely nothing in it. Our absolute focus on the tremendous amount of fun we could make, and determination that no idea was a bad idea, had led us to enthusiastically embrace nights like The Bucket Cabaret, where the polite way of putting it was that they were drinking the town dry at our expense. This revelation coincided with a creeping realisation that we were operating in somewhat of a bubble of enthusiasm. The bands we were booking were certainly in the NME a lot. However, and I say this as nicely as I can, a lot of them weren’t very good. Actually, that’s a generalisation. Bands like Mr Ray’s Wig World and Dr Phibes and the House of Wax Equations were actually tremendous, but they were the exceptions and we were operating mostly in the very definition of niche; archly difficult music with an incredibly limited audience. The sort of music journalists like to write about, and we really liked because we had listened to way too much music, but not many people actually cared about them. Certainly not enough people to fill a venue every Friday and Saturday night.
When we had started our adventures in promoting some years earlier there were a string of acts that people genuinely wanted to see, that made music that connected with large numbers of people, that shifted records and tickets. That wasn’t these bands. These bands weren’t selling any tickets in their own right. The venue was selling tickets because everyone wanted to be there. People came to the venue to be at the venue, not because they particularly liked, or even knew, the bands. We had a scene but no musical leaders for it.
It was 1993. The UK indie scene was in the doldrums, still reeling from the invasion of twelve thousand grunge bands from over the Atlantic. British bands were left picking up the pieces of whatever scene it was that had accidentally thrown up Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and thinking about whether they looked like chancers if they didn’t wash their hair, bought a lumberjack shirt and looked a bit depressed.
By the end of the year we had joined them in being directionless. We ran out of money just about when people ran out of patience with watching whacky Liverpudlian psychedelia mainly designed just to annoy people. It was a grim Christmas and we just about made it through to January 1994. The venue was freezing cold, shows started to be more empty than full, midweek nights started to fall away. We had to cancel the Bucket Cabaret and ask the Fetish nights to supply their own form of heating.
By February the Honeymoon period was officially behind us and we were in deep deep trouble. We talked about having to close down every day, but for some reason we didn’t. I still don’t know why we didn’t, it was probably a cocktail of belligerence, stupidity, belief and hope. We just kept turning up, kept opening the doors and hoping something would change.
And on 26 March 1994 it did.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
I’m loving this trip down memory lane. I had the (mis?)fortune to be the live music interlude for the Bucket Cabaret on a few occasions. One night they managed to fill the back of my guitar combo amp with foam, and on another basically set it on fire.