Dr Mike and I visited just about the weirdest bar I’ve ever been in on Friday night.
The Beach House on Kilburn High Street didn’t look terribly enticing, but we’d just come out of a disappointing gig at the Luminaire club, had had a few drinks and didn’t fancy the ‘cosmopolitan’ atmosphere of the nearby Black Lion again. As luck would have it, a couple of doors down from the Black Lion we saw a colorfully lit frontage for something called the Beach House Chillout Bar.
It didn’t look like a bar, frankly – the glass in the front door had been punched, but hadn’t broken, and you couldn’t see inside as there was a small sort of porch blocking your view. Personally, I thought it looked like a brothel or a massage parlour.
Then a guy saw us looking in and unlocked the door.
PROPRIETOR: ‘You want something?’
ME: ‘Um, are you open? Do you serve beer?’
PROPRIETOR: ‘Yes. You want a drink? A smoke?’
ME: ‘OK. We’ll just go and get our friends. Back in a sec.’
The guy locks the door again and disappears. I am now convinced it’s a crack house of some sort.
Dr Mike and I go to the Black Lion where everyone else is waiting. It’s busy, crowded and loud, which is how Dr Mike persuades me that we should at least try the Beach House Chillout Bar. No one else likes the sound of getting a drink in a crack house/brothel, so we go back on our own, promising to ‘phone and tell them what it’s like.
The propietor sees us outside again, unlocks the door, lets us in and locks it behind us. Apparently, there was a private party on before but it’s finished now and the place is open to the public again (although, how it’s open to the public when they keep the doors locked is beyond me).
Inside the Beach House Chillout Bar is…is basically like inside of someone’s house, with every single piece of furniture taken out. There’s no carpet, some desultory pieces of fabric are stuck to the ceiling and a small pulpit at the back houses some DJ equipment (playing some quite decent tunes, as it happens). A blonde woman is dancing on her own near it. We are the only other people there. It’s dim, but not threatening. Best of all, someone seems to have salvaged some old kitchen units and put them near the entrance as a bar.
It’s dodgy as f***, basically.
But we order a beer from the nice young lady behind the bar and start chatting to her. Turns out she’s from Birmingham, so we chat about that (Dr Mike and I both went to uni at Wolverhampton). It also turns out that she’s one of Goldie’s daughters.
Dr Mike and I end up staying for over an hour, having a couple more drinks (we’re running low on cash for the last round so Yvonne, the barmaid, gives us two more beers for whatever we have left – we’re about £1.50 short). One of our friends pokes his head round the door, takes one look at the place and runs away.
Since none of us live anywhere near Kilburn we’ll almost certainly never go back to the Beach House Chillout Bar and will perhaps never know what the deal was with the place, but I’m glad we tried it. And that it wasn’t a crack house. Or a brothel.
