Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 8
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 8: The World is Your Lobster
(Want to read previous chapters first? Links at the bottom)
The Landlord has serious debt problems.
Sometime in the middle of all this crate stealing, vinyl making and wedding receptioning, we had become bored of being quite so nefarious. What we really needed was a permanent home that we could call our own, somewhere that belonged to us and we could start to offer a consistent programme of music. Somehow this wishful thinking had turned into an initial agreement with a local Landlord to host every Friday and Saturday in his cellar bar. The arrangement was simple - we take the door he takes the bar.
We therefore found ourselves in the unlikely position of being in possession of the keys to a fully fledged and bonafide Nightclub. This was a monumental step for us, moving everything we were doing from being borderline mildly criminal activity into something that had the veneer of respectability. We even managed a visit from a fire officer who reported that we were ‘sort of doing okay’.
The basement part of this building had a long history as a particular type of nightclub for a very particular type of clientele. To reflect the nature of the business conducted there, all the walls were painted black. As was the ceiling. And the floor. The bar was lit by two single bulbs, one at each end, meaning that anyone standing in the middle to serve was as shrouded in darkness as the customers. Various alcoves and nooks were located behind pillars and posts, also offering up the chance to disappear completely into the shadows. The venue was, in fact, one large and highly suspect dark hole. Into this pit someone had carved out a ten foot wide by fifteen foot deep area halfway down one side which had floorboards instead of black carpet, thereby designating it as the performance area. To emphasise it’s role as the focus for attention, the walls of this particular part of the space had been decorated from floor to ceiling with mirrors facing in every possible angle. As per our usual clueless and innocent approach to everything, we naturally assumed that this was to enable you to check out any dance moves you might perform in what we had decided was obviously intended to be a dance floor.
It was in this area that we had parked a 3,000 watt PA plus monitors, figuring that the mirrored surfaces would allow people to get some interesting views of the performing musicians. We then phoned up everyone who’d ever asked us about playing and told them that finally we had somewhere. Again, as per our fly by night approach to The Victoria Hall and The Hand and Sceptre, you would probably imagine that the resulting line up of twice weekly events would feature a cast list of unknowns, unremembered, and flat out chancers. In reality, the acts that filled up this tiny, and wildly inappropriate, space included the following: The Boo Radleys. Swervedriver. Adorable. Spitfire. Moist. Suede. Green Day - twice. 180 people paid £3.50 each to see Green Day there on Christmas Eve 1991, an interesting number of paying customers because in the 32 years since that happened at least 2000 people have claimed to have been there that night.
The club was soon getting packed out every Friday and Saturday, and once again we had momentum. The Landlord approached us and offered us a new agreement to run the upstairs bar. This we quickly turned into some sort of beatnik cultural hub, where we would dream up ever increasingly ridiculous reasons for people to go out on a Tuesday night, including the Windy Miller Challenge: Starting at the left of the optics, drink one shot of each spirit until the far right hand side of the bar. Then drink your way back again only this time doing doubles. If you can walk down the stairs at the end, your drinks were free. No one ever won as we had taken the precaution of making the run twenty bottles long, requiring the consumption of 60 shots in total. During daytime the location of the bar would mean the occasional American tourist would mistakenly wander in searching for coffee, a demand we were very happy to service by making a lot of burbling and spurting noises in the kitchen while adding boiling water to a spoon of instant granules.
Running the upstairs bar was an important learning lesson for us. We suddenly became aware of exactly how much money the person who owned the bar was making out of our events. The economics of this part of the live music industry haven’t changed much in the last thirty years, and you can do them in your head using this simple formula: One third of the money you can possibly take will come from ticket sales, two thirds will come from bar sales. On the expenditure side, the live music bit, the bands, the PA, the lights, the promo, will eat up about half of the total money and the stock for the bar plus electricity, rent, rates etc. will eat up most of the rest. The result is that in the UK, the model of live music at this level is massively weighted in favour of anyone who owns the bar. To be honest, even though there are some small scale promoters out there who just about scrimp by to a profit, and very good luck to them, there isn’t anyone who has survived simply as a promoter on this scale of gigs for longer than 5 years. In the end, either because you own it or because the person who does is covering some of your costs, the bar is where the money is. Serious drinkers enable you to put on live music. Including Suede and Green Day.
We now understood this. Our accounts for the upstairs bar showed us where the money was, and it wasn’t in our wallets. The theme of this book is the massively stupid things that happened to me or I willingly took part in which added up to where I ended up. In the case of letting someone else make a profit at the bar from our work, the income and expenditure reality should have been obvious to us from the outset, but we just wanted to put some bands on. I would later find out that my own journey to this economic revelation has been shared by just about everyone else in the grassroots sector. Even now if you ask people running this type of venue why they do it they will stare at you puzzled and announce that it’s almost exclusively for the music. Then they will go straight back behind the bar and try and make enough money to pay for it.
None of the agreements we had to run any part of the building ever seemed to make it as far as paper, adverse as the Landlord was to pens. The mere sight of a pen would lead him to develop some form of mild gastric illness - the words "could you just sign this?" actually caused him mild palpitations.
The other negative aspect of our arrangement to run this venue, aside from the fact we were packing people in and someone else was making the profit, was that it still wasn't technically ours. Therefore anything that needed doing had to be approved by the Landlord. As befits a man of his local standing, the Landlord was surrounded by a coterie of hangers-on, well-wishers and minions. Alongside the extensive stock of out-of-date Babycham and unopened creditors letters that constituted his pub empire, the Landlord had used these contacts to acquire a farm, some flats and some warehouses. Somehow all these projects appeared to be haemorrhaging money at once, which never seemed to stop him from opening a new frontier of idiocy. One morning his chief lieutenant appeared to inform us that due to a nasty incident at the recently opened Koi Carp farm, the Landlord wouldn't be in today. After a particularly tough day visiting his various failing ventures, the Landlord had decided to cheer himself up with a visit to his beloved fish. Deciding the water "seemed a bit cold for 'em" he had cranked up the thermostat as high as it would go, poured himself a glass or two of vodka, and woken up some hours later feeling slightly steamed up and puzzled by the smell of cooked fish. The Landlord would therefore be busy today inviting his investors to the world's most expensive fish supper.
His minions would apparently be despatched at our merest whim to ensure the smooth running of the bar. "Whatevah you need, you only gotta ask once innit?" he assured us. This approach would result in a series of long running disagreements which we would grandly title as projects that needed completion such as “Behold! A Lightbulb!” and “The Battle for the Toilet Door”.
There being only one shared toilet in the cellar bar, we rather felt that it should have a door on it. The Landlord agreed. After three weeks answering customers questions regarding the absence of the door, which would seem to them to be a fairly basic part of the equipment, we cornered him for an update to the progress. "Ere's what happened, right? My Richard come down here last week with a brand new door which I got specially made din't I? Would you adam and eve it, when he fits the door, it's only the wrong size! I'm not havin that, I says, so the very next day we got a new'un, but I takes one look at it and decides it's not good enuff for my lads. RICHARD, I says, RICHARD... these lads want a proper fahking door, not this fahking rubbish. So, we gets a new door, proper door innit, but then the screws wouldn't fit it! Tomorrow, I promise yer, you will have the very best door money can buy".
We never got a door. The Landlord, however, did acquire a new nickname and his very own catchphrase, both bestowed upon him by the Music Store Owner in a moment of eloquent clarity. "He's like a superhero, only in reverse," he muttered one night. "They should call him Cunt Man. Slogan: 'Out of my way, citizens, let me fuck it up for you'."
This somewhat chaotic approach to management of the building eventually draws towards its inevitable conclusion one night when The Landlord wants a quiet word.
"Listen, I'm not saying anything, right, but anything you want that's valuable; you might want to put it upstairs tomorrow. I'm not saying anything's going to happen, am I, but downstairs looks like a fire risk to me and you never know when it's going to go off, do you."
We move the stock to the very top of the building and await the inevitable fire alarm call, which duly manifests itself some hours later. We arrive to the sight of a blazing roof, an untouched ground floor, and a very puzzled looking Landlord. "I don't really understand that" he says. "I climbed on the roof and poured petrol down the chimney. Then I threw a match down...... why's it burning like that then?"
Unbelievably, the Fire crew rescue just enough of the stock to allow us to keep trading, but it was unfortunately not to be. The following week, we are confronted by the sight of a weeping, defeated Landlord on the steps of the building. "Get yer stuff out lads.... the bailiffs are on their way". We ransack the building in a manner that most Vikings would have considered a little over-the-top, removing every last heater, light bulb, ashtray and matchstick to a safe location.
"Dunno what I'm going do now lads" says the Landlord, tearfully. "It's all gone up in smoke ain't it? You, though. You'll be alright. You'll bounce back."
We load our loot into the Mini and start to drive away. At that moment, the Landlord appears in the rear window clutching a heavily varnished and cumbersome objet d'art.
"Lads! Lads!" he shouts "Don't forget your fahking door!"
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