Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Next issue, back to the estates again, I promise!  MMT.
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Strangely, I am writing this on a Saturday morning, without a hangover. It clearly wasn’t a Bar Central night last night...

When I wanted to go out and dance to music I liked, and when I wanted to go out and try and find pretty people to dance with, and when I wanted to see good local bands play live, and when I just needed a night out, there was only one place to go in Milton Keynes, and that was Bar Central.

Now sadly closed forever after years of providing us with our only real place to hear alternative music, I thought it only fitting I should raise this glass, this final double-vodka-and-coke to the place where we dreamed a thousand dreams, slurred a thousand speeches, and stumbled around the dancefloor to a thousand indie hits.

BC wasn’t the greatest nightclub in the world, but it was ours. I will be the first to admit that I didn’t go there so much anymore, as my twenties waned I started to feel a bit too much like a dodgy old man for comfort, but knowing it was there was enough for me. Now, there is nothing. Perhaps it’s fitting that the doors should close for the final time just a week or two before the death of John Peel. Like the Great Man himself, I thought Bar Central would be around for ever, and like the Great Man also, a big part of my teens and twenties has disappeared, possibly never to be replaced.

My memories of Bar Central are so many, so blurred, so emotional, so hazy. I have been there to try and pull (only very occasionally did I succeed) ; I have been there to see bands (and a couple of times to play ourselves!) ; more often than not, I have been there just to hear songs I liked. Where else in Milton Keynes am I ever going to hear “Come Out 2Nite” by Kenickie being played, other than my own bedroom?

My memories include (and every tribute is a personal one, obviously – Bar Central was many things to many people!): Neil always standing at the door with the bouncers, or behind the bar, hectic ; me and James doing a kind of Jarvis Cocker showdown to “Common People” in the middle of the dancefloor while the nu-metal kids looked on, bemused ; Underhill’s short-lived Sunday Jazz Nights, where we attempted to sell Monkey Kettle by sitting in a corner hoping someone would ask us what it was ; always meeting someone you used to know, or know vaguely, and usually for me also my little brother being there smashed off his box ; me and Maj smashing a table by accident and being asked to leave ; the horrible toilets ; the short-lived experiment of selling chips ; trying to chat up the pretty door-girl with the appalling gambit “Excuse me, I’ve just been bitten by a man in your nightclub. Is that my fault, or the nightclub’s fault?” ; teenagers practising their Jackass wrestling moves in the corner...

So many Bar Central songs : “One Step Closer” (Linkin Park) ; “BBC” (from Austin Powers) ; “Debaser” (The Pixies) ; “I Would Fix You” (Kenix) ; “No One Knows” (QOTSA) ; “Common People” (Pulp) ; “Trouble” (Shampoo) ; even “Killing In The Name” (RATM). And I always have a soft spot for the reaction which Helen and Diane gave to the 5ive “Hits Medley”. Or maybe you had to be there. I was.

Perhaps I’m not just sad about BC, perhaps it’s a kind of general sadness about the ending of what feels like one chapter of my life. Certainly it had its flaws, I’m sure when I took my friends who live in London there they seemed relatively underwhelmed, but that’s not the point. Our lives happened there for some time, It Was Where We Went.

I don’t know where I’ll go for an Indie Night Out now, I don’t know if anywhere will replace it successfully. I already hear rumours about possible alternatives, and I’m sure we’ll give them a go. But maybe something has changed in me also. Although looking at my Daredevil digital wristwatch, my dyed black hair and my desire to buy the Help She Can’t Swim album on the way home, perhaps not so much has changed after all.

Hail and farewell to Bar Central and all who sailed in her. Frank Sinatra is playing, the lights have come on, and it’s time to stagger home.