Inside the fight to resurrect Soho’s Crobar: ‘You can almost still hear people inside’

“CROBAR - SOHO. KILLED BY LANDLORDS. JUNE 2020. RIP.”

So read the inscription on the gravestone, a picture of which appeared on the Crobar’s Facebook page back in September. It was to announce the demise of the beloved heavy metal drinking den, a fixture of the area since 2001, but the accompanying post was fiercely defiant. “I aim to open a new Crobar with both a bar and live music venue,” wrote owner Richard Thomas. “It will require crowdfunding, and I suspect it will be a year or so before opening will be viable, but f*** the greedy insurance companies, f*** the greedy short-sighted landlords and f*** our brainless government… we will be back!”

The post went viral, drawing 10,000 reactions with more than 2,000 comments of dismayed commiseration and ardent support. The news also caught the attention of filmmakers Lucy Brown and Andrew Wildey, who decided to make a film about the venue’s plight. The resulting 18-minute documentary, Crobar: Music When the Lights Go Out, airs this Wednesday and tells the story of the venue — both about how the crowdfunding campaign hopes to revive it, but also how, for the last two decades, it has been emblematic of the stubborn resistance against the sanitisation of Soho’s cultural scene.

At the turn of the millennium, Soho was “the heart of rock in London”, Thomas says in the documentary. On Charing Cross Road, there was the Astoria, through which the likes of Metallica, Nirvana and Foo Fighters all passed. A couple of hundred yards away, tucked away on the narrow cut-through of Manette Street, there was The Borderline, another legendary live venue. Just across the road, on Denmark Street, sat the 12 Bar Club, a rite of passage for rock artists on the up.

When the Crobar opened on Manette Street, it slotted into that headbanging enclave as the place you’d visit after you’d been to gig round the corner and wanted to keep the party going late into the night. It was a “rock bar for rock people”, as Thomas describes it; the kind of place you could turn up with long hair, or a leather jacket, or wearing goth-black eyeliner, and not get eyed as some social miscreant by the door staff. It was something of a celebrity hotspot, too, with everyone from Alice Cooper to Justin Bieber among the patrons, but as Thomas says in the film, they were allowed to blend in by the staff — no-one ever asked for a picture to hang up on the wall, even if a slightly inebriated customer might have asked for a selfie.

One by one, though, those other venues all fell away, pushed over the edge by rising rents, vulturous property developers or, in the Astoria’s case, because it had to make way for Crossrail. As 2020 arrived, the Crobar was the last one standing, but even after all those years, Thomas couldn’t help but buckle under the weight of the pandemic. Intransigent landlords and reluctant insurance companies meant that, by the summer, the money had disappeared.

“He was so pissed off, but so organically pissed off,” says filmmaker Brown of the first time she spoke to Thomas about the Crobar’s demise. “I was like, ‘this is a no bullshit person’. I like that, and just felt inclined to help him somehow.”

When Brown travelled to Soho to film inside the now-vacant venue, which she describes as feeling like a “tomb”, she could “almost hear the people still in the bar”. “There were all the empty beer bottles and remnants of a life before lockdown,” she says. “It was just very surreal.”

As ghostly as it might have been, the real, human affection that exists for the Crobar was left in no doubt after Brown and Wildey issued a callout to fans of the bar — from hardened regulars to one-time visitors — to share their memories of the place. Brown’s inbox was immediately inundated with responses; one person wrote how they often travelled to the Crobar from Italy, while another shared a photo they had taken there with their late father. “I got weepy several times,” Brown says.

“I think the reason people like the bar so much is because, ultimately, it’s Richard,” she adds. “He is the bar. It’s why the staff are happy. It’s why people get drunk but they don’t get kicked out — they might get a bit of a slap on the wrist [instead], because it’s a chilled out place. And that’s all down to Richard.”

But it’s also because of this — a bar owned by one man, rather than some multinational hospitality conglomerate — that makes the Crobar’s disappearance such a grim symbol of Soho’s changing landscape. The film explores how, in the Nineties, it was an area that artists and bar workers could afford to live in, but how now, it’s a crane-ridden playground for overseas investors hoping to cash in on property and high rise offices, awash with vapid corporate slogans (one shot in the film captures on a sign plastered onto the fences a new development on Manette Street, which reads: “Promoting urban diversity.”)

Whether a reincarnated Crobar would be able to return to such an astronomically expensive area remains to be seen. But the prospect of it being resurrected in some place and form is on its way to becoming a reality, with more than £43,000 generated by the crowdfunder so far — aided by famous fan Dave Grohl, who donated a mystery raffle prize back in September. Thomas is hoping for at least £95,000 in total, with a view to getting the rest of the cash from the bank.

The plan is to reopen it as a bar with an adjoining live music venue — and “more than three toilets”, Thomas writes on the crowdfunder (the loos at the original venue were notorious to say the least, as exemplified by a post on the Crobar’s Facebook page back in 2016, announcing that a broken pipe had led to a “literal shitstorm”).

But less than optimal bogs was all part of the charm. And for the broad community of rockers that assembled around the Crobar, its return is something of a must. Its success would also be a symbolic victory for grassroots music venues around London, all of which have been put through the ringer during the pandemic. It will be tough, but optimism and resilience have never been in short supply on Manette Street.

“I very much look forward to seeing you all again for drunken chats and high jinks,” Thomas writes on the crowdfunder. “Long live Rock n’ Roll!”

Crobar: Music When The Lights Go Out premieres at 8pm on January 27 on Youtube. Donate to the Crobar’s crowdfunder here.

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