My 45-date tour of the UK rolls on and the schedule is pretty brutal. So, when we get the opportunity of a day and, more importantly, a night off, we tend to cut loose.
When I say we, I’m on the road with my technical support crew who are both in their early thirties and seem reasonably content to go out on the town with this fifty-something ex-goth.
Our last night out was in Leeds, a city that I don’t know very well.
Fortunately, I have a goddaughter, Amara, who was at university there and stayed on afterwards.
‘Where should I go for a good night out?’ I asked her.
She replied that she was working behind the bar in Wax Bar and that we were welcome to start there.
We didn’t need a second invite and, 30 minutes later, we were at the Wax Bar and it was perfect. It was a dive bar, the sort you find in almost every American city but are all too rare anywhere outside the major UK conurbations. In the States, if you find the dive bar in any town then you also find your tribe (well, I do anyway).
The Wax Bar was festooned with musical posters of my teens: The The, The Cure, Bauhaus, Tom Waits, Talking Heads. The soundtrack matched the curtains. A steady stream of my musical youth blared out of a faux ghetto blaster. The Sugarcubes, The Sound, Pixies, Pavement, Wire… I loved this place. It was a home from home, and my crew seemed totally at ease getting drunk in what to them must have been some sort of retro bar.
A couple of hours passed, and we decided to move on for a bit. James, my lead tech, had a place that he really wanted to go to, and I felt that it was probably their turn to choose.
I wondered where we would be going? Maybe an alcoholic bubble tea emporium? A vape bar? God forbid, some sort of nightclub packed with influencers dancing with their phone screens?
Instead, we walked for five minutes before entering, what looked from the outside, to be some sort of gaming arcade. I was stupefied. Surely there weren’t arcades anymore? Everybody played on home consoles and phones. Arcades were yet another throwback to my misspent youth.
But it was an arcade… albeit with a cocktail bar. And the games that were on offer were another trip down memory lane for me. There was Tekken, Time Crisis, Pac Man, Mario Karts, Drifter… this was crazy. I felt like time had stood still.
We spent a couple of hours drinking and playing games and, honestly, it was one of the best nights out in ages. Eventually we returned to Wax Bar before ending the night at a late-night dive called Mojos.
But what was weird was how the whole evening had basically centred around the sounds and pastimes of my youth. Didn’t the younger generation have their own stuff to do? I can’t remember me, in the mid Eighties spending a night out in a bar dedicated to the Sixties, with people doing the Twist before heading off to a folk bar where you could only get in if you were dressed in a duffle coat and sporting a pipe?
I just blagged some tickets for my 20-year-old to go see David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd fame, at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘Best night of my whole life,’ was his verdict. Proud as I was of his sophisticated musical taste, it did make me appreciate that maybe, just maybe, I grew up in the coolest era ever and just hadn’t realised it before? Not taking questions at this time.
