Discard Interview: Richard Thomas

This year should have marked The Crobar’s twentieth birthday. A Soho staple since 2001 and brainchild of Richard Thomas, the rock and roll institution announced in September of last year that it would not be re-opening its doors. Since then, the ever-creative team have raised £100,000.00 in fundraising, offering prizes including Crobar coffee, Crobar whiskey and signed merch from Judas Priest, Dave Grohl, and HIM. 

Refusing to go quietly - or indeed to go at all – The Crobar documentary Music When the Lights go Out’ released on YouTube in January helped garner further attention to Richard’s cause, alongside a virtual jukebox and a virtual party room (open every Friday and Saturday, see The Crobar’s Instagram for details). In their own words “we’re not fucking leaving”, and at the very least they’re not leaving without a fight. 

The Crobar hasn’t had a ‘heyday’ specifically, because for nineteen years it reigned over Soho’s rock and roll scene unobstructed, dishing out 180 bottles of Jager a week and the same in cases of Red Bull. Back in the noughties it was part of what Richard calls ‘Soho’s Golden Triangle.’ With The Astoria, 12 Bar, Metro, Borderline, LA2, The Arts Club and Roxy all within walking distance from each other, there was nothing like it anywhere else in Europe – a mecca for anyone interested in metal, punk, rock and everything in between. 

That all changed with the expansion of the Tottenham Court Road Underground Station, and the seemingly insatiable need for towering, glistening, anonymous office buildings in Central London, not forgetting the ever-growing number of Starbucks and Costa Coffees in the area. The Crobar was the last original rock and roll bar standing and although its time on Manette Street might be over, The Crobar is not.  

A Welsh Londoner, Richard was born in London and raised in Aberystwyth – a University town in Ceredigion, where he worked at his parents sweet shop from the age of ten. At sixteen, he offered to help out at his local pub on a busy night and was hired as a weekend bartender. He explains “I had no desire to spend my life working in a shop or an office. I enjoy people, I enjoy hospitality and having a good time. It made more sense to me, rather than working nine to five in a shitty office job and drinking in the pub after work, having five hours sleep and doing it all over again, why not just be a bartender?”

Eventually, Richard opened his own bar in Aberystwyth but decided the town was too small for him and relocated to Manchester for a couple of years. “I tried to get a job at the Hacienda but didn’t manage to, I went there a few times. It was a mad, mad place. Sometimes I hear about it now and I think – are you sure it’s the same club it used to be? It was dirty, seedy, it was like The Astoria – you didn’t want to touch the walls because they were grimy, but it was just great.”

“I had no good reason to stay in Manchester so I moved down to London and worked at the Kensington Roof Gardens for a few months. It was very corporate and no fun at all. Then I worked in The Red Lion for a week – a nice little shit hole, and then someone told me about The Borderline.” Richard worked there for nine months before being made GM “thrown in at the deep end, a baptism of fire” where he stayed for eight years. 

As anyone who remembers it can attest, The Borderline was a magical place. Loud, sweaty, sticky, and always packed. Richard calls it the most fun job he ever had ”I loved it, I saw so many great bands – I probably saw around four thousand gigs. I remember a lunchtime Garth Brooks show for the press, and Rage Against The Machine’s first UK gig, just sixty people, what a show that was. Rocket [the Thursday club-night] was absolutely brilliant. At the back you had the Hells Angels, the older crowd, the 80s rockers in their 30s and 40s and then the dance floor was packed with kids. There was so much energy. So much laughing. I remember trying to explain to a doorman one night, we had a full-on mosh pit and he didn’t understand how it could be so violent on the dance floor but all hugging and no animosity after. It was a very angry generation, and that’s how they got rid of all their negative energy. It’s a healthy way to express yourself. There was the odd broken nose, but it was a healthy thing – to vent your anger on the dance floor.” 

I was there on those Thursdays, almost every Thursday, and I can confirm that it was the best alternative club-night in London at the time. But it didn’t stop there. “The live music scene in Soho back then was amazing, that whole Tottenham Court Road corner was the hub of it – you had The Astoria and it radiated from there. So many little bars, cafes, restaurants and nightclubs. Clubbing was a thing in those days. Social media now has replaced so much of it. You didn’t have a mobile until the late 90s, the internet didn’t arrive until the mid to late 90s so if you wanted to see anybody or talk to your friends you had to go out. I think social media has robbed us of one of the most basic human needs – real connection.”

In 2000 The Borderline was bought by the same company that owns Slug and Lettuce – and it all changed. Under Richards’ stewardship, it had been named “Time Out’s Venue of The Year” which as Richard explains “was quite an achievement for us at the time, and this new company wanted me to destroy everything I’d worked so hard to achieve. It was one of London’s main rock and roll venues, but they made it so hideous that I quit, I went to The Garage [a live music venue in Highbury] for two or three months. I just couldn’t stay.” Borderline closed permanently in 2019.

What happened next, Richard calls serendipity: “I got a phone call from a guy called Denim Dennis who had the Acoustic Café on Manette Street and he said he’d had enough and wanted to give up the lease. I asked him not to talk to anybody else, to give me two days, and with two mates I scrapped together every penny I had. We begged, borrowed and stole to get that bar. I loved rock and roll, and it made sense to do something I loved with people I loved in an area where rock was king. The rest is history, a lot of hard work, stress and grief but an awful lot of fun. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

The Crobar opened in 2001 and was quickly cemented as a rock and roll destination bar. Richard knew exactly what he wanted it to be. “When I arrived in London it had this too-cool-for-school attitude. Doormen sneered at you, bartenders were too cool to serve you and I thought ‘this is not hospitality, this is not the purpose of our industry, you can’t make people pay to drink in your bar, and look down on them and give them a shit time, what’s wrong with you?’ I’m here to be nice to people. That’s my purpose, to give people an escape for a few hours from the brutality of life, have them relax and have a good time.”

Although anarchistic by nature, The Crobar did have rules: “No fighting, no drugs, no spitting, no stealing, and no bothering women.” The last point is important to Richard, “My mum used to tell me she didn’t feel comfortable sitting in a pub waiting for my dad. She’d wait outside for half an hour rather than going in and having a drink on her own. A pub should be a safe haven for everybody, and if you’re a woman alone, you should be able to go in, have a gin and tonic or whatever – and you should feel safe. Men can be predatory, but not in The Crobar. If anyone came to me and said ‘that man’s bothering me’ then he was out. In the past five years we had a lot more young gay people visiting because the nature of gay socialising in Soho has changed a lot – young gay people no longer feel that they have to be in exclusively gay bars in order to be safe or to have fun. People have said to me that they felt safe in The Crobar because if anyone gave them a hard time, they spoke to me and I said – you know – leave them alone. No arseholes.”

Asked about the celebrities who visited The Crobar (Justin Beiber, Metallica, Alice Cooper, Motörhead, Kid Rock) Richard is uncharacteristically coy. “The thing about it is that a lot of those guys - rocker pissheads - half the time they sat in my office and drank beer and we talked shit. There aren’t that many totally mad stories.” We keep prodding. “Well Lady Gaga used to visit, and Dave Grohl, and the Iron Maiden boys, but most of the stories I don’t feel I should share, I never wish to compromise anybody. What happens in the pub should stay in the pub. If the wife finds out it should never be from the landlord, that’s the landlords’ rule – discretion.”

More important to Richard than the celebrities are the staff and regulars. His bar manager Olivia stayed with him for ten years as did his doorman John. “John was a big lad so they always put him in trouble spots and he hated it. He came to me as cover for a few weeks, he rocked up and he didn’t know what to make of it until he realised that our people were really friendly and he fit in. He was married, he had kids, he just wanted to come to work and go home and not worry about ending up in hospital. He didn’t have to prove how macho he was; he just did his job. Most of my bartenders worked four or five years for me, everybody knew everybody, the customers weren’t strangers, there was a family vibe on the rock scene at the time.”

Despite being pegged as a victim of the pandemic, The Crobar’s closure is more complex than that. Feeling let down by his landlord, insurance company, and the government, Richard is angry at the way he and the hospitality industry has been treated over the past twelve months. “I am furious. I am absolutely bastarding furious. I would string the whole lot of them up with piano wire from the Westminster Bridge if I could.” He cites the lack of an EU pandemic plan, insufficient business support, greedy landowners, idle MPs, and panicked insurance companies as the reasons for The Crobar’s closure.

Richard describes The Crobar as a zombie company, existing only to ensure furlough is paid to his staff, himself and his wife. The individual who owns 17 Manette St is worth over £400 million and has evicted the majority of his tenants. “Who will take over those buildings?” Asks Richard “I’m hoping they will be forced to turn them into affordable accommodation. In the 90s a lot of bartenders lived in Soho. The accommodation wasn’t great and you’d share with four other people but they were out every night. Soho was full of young people who were happy because they were living the dream. They buggered that up, the landlords got greedy. It’s all well and good selling a penthouse apartment to a man who’s there three days a year, but he’s not out every night supporting the local economy. But maybe, in four or five years’ time we can change that. Maybe some positives can come out of this.”

Asked what he misses most about Soho, Richard is melancholic at points and excitable at others. “So many things. The building itself I probably won’t miss, my knees no longer hurt from going up and down the stairs five thousand times a day. It’s the people I miss. I could nip out for a sandwich down old Compton St and see some mad shenanigans and come back to the bar like ‘My God, you will not believe what I’ve just seen.’ Whether it’s a couple of girls beating each other to death with stilettos or Harmonica Matt on the corner – there was always something going on in Soho, always something that was worth making a comment about and that’s what I miss. That lovely pool of human interaction - because I’ve never found any place else like Soho. Nobody cares what your sexual preference is, what you do when you’re not around, nobody gives a shit. That was the joy of it. Anyone you want to be – it’s acceptable in Soho. I miss standing outside the door chatting to the people who would go by, who never came into the bar but were an integral part of Soho because they were always about. I miss all those people. There was one old boy I used to see quite often. He was born and bred in the area, he’s about seventy now and he said ‘Rich, I have seen it all. It comes, it goes. Soho ultimately survives, the people make it what it is. It’s the center of London, you’d have to move it geographically to stop it being what it is.’ I’m very optimistic. Soho will bounce back and bounce back better. Better than it’s been in the past few years. I hope the youths get off their arses and say ‘I’m bored of bloody social media. I’m going to learn guitar’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to form a band with my mates’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to open a bar so I’m going to beg borrow and steal and somehow I’m going to do it’. Similar to the swinging 60’s, I hope we see the revolution of a generation. Whether we will or not - I have no idea. But I hope so, I am hopeful.”

And those empty glistening office buildings? “Soho is the people, it’s not the buildings. You know it’ll be nice and shiny for a year or two until the bill posters have gone up and the crackheads and the homeless have pissed and shat all over it. That’s just Soho, it’ll be OK.”