It’s Valentine’s Day 2006 at Night & Day Café, we have Isobel Campbell playing, and no it’s not a themed evening.

When Isobel takes the stage the venue is full to brimming and as she begins to play a heavy hush falls across the venue. It’s quiet. Really, really, quiet.

Towards the middle of her set I’m sat in my basement office doing something or other when the phone rings. There’s trouble upstairs at the box office.

I charge upstairs and as the venue is full I elect to run around the outside of the building to the front door. Ever ready to help, my friend Brian Hartley has made his own, less customer-finger-friendly path to the ruckus by running the length of the long Night & Day bar.

The quiet has been well and truly broken.

I arrive out front with Brian. The venue door is locked and missing it’s brass door handle which is now sticking through the our front window. A tacky heart-shaped cushion lies discarded in the street while a heart-shaped balloon is just visible in the sky.

After a spell my colleague Sandy emerges and fills me in.

An overly loved-up, drunken couple has tried to burst in, and after being forcibly locked out the bloke has completely flipped (literally actually, falling backwards into the road after yanking the venue door handle clean off).

We are not happy. The police have been called.

Just then we spot the offending couple escaping somewhere down Oldham Street so Brian and I head off in pursuit while Sandy waits for the cops to arrive. 

We reach Piccadilly and are gaining on them when we spot a speeding police car heading our way. It’s OUR police car racing to Night and Day, so we frantically try to wave it down but the driver has other ideas and swerves past.

It’s at this point I should probably point out that this story has no punch line. No explosive ending. No pratfall. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men it ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”

The romantic and angry couple hop a cab and speed off. We walk back to the venue.

Isobel Campbell poster art by Nick Rhodes - www.switchopen.com