If there was someone working in the Night & Day Café office then the door remained open; visitors simply wandered downstairs, made their way across the tatty dressing room and there they’d find me, sat in the small converted World War 2 bomb shelter that served as my workspace. As you may expect, this open-armed arrangement produced varying results.

On the whole it worked just fine; musicians might swing by, hand across a demo and talk over getting a show; show posters and flyers were dropped and collected and friends came and went. You could count on certain local characters making more-or-less daily visits too; down-and-outs, oddballs, kindly pests and various folk from the venue’s checkered past. Extraordinary people’s poet Carol Batton arrived day after day armed with remarkable poems and stories. Carol’s ode to Glam Rock was simply “Drum hum, not humdrum” (magnificently channeling Glam Rock’s core ethos alongside Tony Visconti’s unique production techniques). I loved that.

But I digress. On occasion, our perpetually swinging door brought less welcome company.

Singer-songwriters would sporadically arrive without notice, sweep into the office and pronounce, “I’ve come to play for you!” I was a little taken aback the first time this happened but not so much that I let them continue.

“Look, we can’t do this.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“It’s really weird and uncomfortable.”

Too harsh you think? Well try to imagine yourself plonked in my old seat, faced by an earnest and often freshly jilted solo artist hell bent on serenading away. It’s just the two of you, the office is cramped and the mounting atmosphere is thick enough to withstand a chainsaw. There’s an elephant in the room all right but he’s covering his ears.

Actually I do remember my first unannounced arrival, which happened way back before we made the bomb shelter office, when anyone visiting had to walk in near darkness past pile after pile of venue junk to a lone desk lit with a solitary bulb in the distance. All very John Gotti. I loved that too.

I’d been working at the venue just a couple of days and was still fighting pandemic chaos, so had opted to listen to Hank Williams in the hope that it would help sooth the slow process of venue resuscitation.

A band wanders in. Now, I wish I could remember which band this was but for the life of me I can’t recall their name. Anyhow, they approach my desk and I assume they are here because they want a show, but before any solicitations take place or heaven forfend any greetings, their spokesperson looks in the general direction of the music emanating from my computer and says…

“What’s this fucking shit?”