Do you have a favourite bar…

Do you have a favourite bar…
…where you can play pool with strangers
Maybe wear some lipstick and not be in danger
Of getting beat up in the men’s room

Feeling safe is important in a pub. (Being safe is, too, but in the nature of things you only generally find out if that’s not the case a lot later.) I generally do feel safe in pubs these days, but then (a) I’m White, male and middle-aged and (b) I very rarely go anywhere even slightly rough (Holt’s pubs in the suburbs, on CAMRA crawls, are probably as close as I get). I can remember being in a few places where I felt it would be inadvisable to stay for another, but this is going back a bit – I think at the time my youth was as much a factor as being a posh Southerner. I also think one effect of the general decline in pub-going – and the broader decline in all-male socialising – is that it’s harder to find pubs that are likely to get seriously lairy, or at least easier to avoid them.

But of course, safety in general isn’t what those lines are about. I’ve never felt any desire to wear lipstick, or been in any real danger of being queer-bashed (although as a kid obviously I was called ‘queer’ a few times, what with the long hair and the book-reading and so on). All the same, my favourite bar for a few years in the early 1990s was Manto. This was partly because of the decor, which was ‘café bar’ at a time when café bars were places you went to in France – a decorative tiled floor, small tables, plate glass for natural light – and partly because of the atmosphere, which was chilled (as we didn’t say at the time). This in turn was largely down to the door policy, which was ‘mixed’.

Yes, Manchester’s first overtly gay bar… wasn’t overtly gay. However that policy came about, in that time and place it was a stroke of genius: this was a bar you could go to if you were gay or if you weren’t. As indeed I weren’twasn’t – but I’d spent some time in Brighton and got used to the feeling of being in a venue where it wouldn’t have mattered if I had been, and I’d found I rather liked it. Ironically, as time went on and Canal Street turned into what we know now, Manto got less inclusive – viz. more gay – and I guess it was always heading that way. (I first got this message, ironically, from a flyer advertising a lesbian night and featuring a full-length nude – which I guess was the kind of thing you’d find in a pub that welcomed straight blokes at one time, but looked a bit different in that context.) On the other hand, pubs in general are a lot more inclusive now – society is much more inclusive now – and I’d find it hard to specify exactly how your average 1990s Manchester boozer exuded compulsory heterosexuality, or indeed exactly how it bugged me. An inclusive venue just felt better.

I do not play pool with strangers, though, or indeed with anyone else. The last time I was prevailed on to pick up a cue (“I’m terrible at it!” “Ah, go on – I’m terrible, we’re all terrible, it’ll be fun!”) my prowess at pool reduced first my opponents and then my partner to helpless laughter. Well, I did warn them.

Do you have a favourite bar…
…the bartender’s German
He only understands the names of liquors and the German language
Doesn’t watch the TV, ’cause it’s over his head
But he was in the Olympics
You can ask him

I’ll have to pass on this one. “The landlord’s a real character” is a phrase that for me inspires dread rather than enthusiasm, tending as it does to be followed by “doesn’t suffer fools” or words to that effect. As I wrote back here about “Pub Landlord Humour”, it’s “a combination of hearty welcome, assertive jokiness and veiled menace”,  often with the emphasis on the third rather than the first of these; it’s interesting that by 2023 the pub I was writing about  – the Maltings in York – was “proudly referred to as the ‘strictest’ pub in the UK”. At the risk of overthinking this, I wonder if what’s going on here is that we know at the back of our minds that running a pub is a tough and unrewarding job, so that we have a sneaking sympathy with anyone who takes it out on the punters – especially if they do it in a witty and showmanlike way, and if the particular punters they take it out on aren’t us. Not really my thing, anyway (although to be fair I did have some excellent beer at the Maltings).

As for bartenders like the one in the song – someone who actually is a ‘character’, in the sense of needing a paragraph to describe him – I’m coming up blank. I could name any number who do or did a great job, from Dom at the Beech to Alex at the Beer House, but nobody with European origins and an international athletic record, or anything so exotic. At least, as far as I know – it may be my ignorance talking.

Do you have a favourite bar…
where you can drink yourself under the table
And they know you’re there, so they won’t lock you in
They won’t take all your money
When you’re completely insensible
They leave you your dignity
You can play The 5th Dimension on the jukebox

One mark of a ‘favourite bar’ is – as the song says – that you can get absolutely mortal without any fear for your safety, possessions or dignity; another is that you like the place (and its beers) enough to want to, from time to time. So I suppose I’d better own up. Have I ever drunk myself under the table? No. But have I ever reached the state of the guy I saw in rather a nice bar in Edinburgh once, who drank up and then quietly folded his arms on the table, laid his head down and went to sleep? No, although I can’t say I’ve never been tempted. (The bartender came over and woke him up. He tried to persuade her that he was fine – and, to be fair, he wasn’t disturbing anyone – but she wasn’t having it.) OK then, have I ever left a pub in a state where walking in a straight line requires concentration, while Radiohead on headphones sounds like the meaning of life? More particularly – since the song clearly isn’t talking about visiting multiple bars – have I ever left a pub in the aforesaid state, having gone in sober?

Well, all right, yes, once or twice. OK, five or six times. Seven or eight, maybe. Ten at the very outside. And on all, or very nearly all, of those occasions, the bar has been the Petersgate Tap, noted hereabouts for its tap takeovers and tastings – both of which frequently involve beers that are very strong, very dark or very both. Which works for me.

The Petersgate Tap does not have a jukebox, however (not that I’d put on The 5th Dimension if it did). The thought of jukeboxes takes me to other bars: the New Oxford and the Friendship, whose otherwise unremarkable machines introduced me (respectively) to the later work of Steely Dan and the Pet Shop Boys’ Introspective; Keg and Cask, whose jukebox’s default selection was so good that nobody ever put any money in, which unfortunately led to it being taken out; and, head and shoulders above the rest, the Crescent. What a pub that was, back when I was doing my doctorate at the University of Salford in the 00s: four rooms, two bars, 8-10 cask beers, one real fire, one cat, and one excellent jukebox. I used to visit in the afternoon and try and get as much music out of a quid as I could manage; the jukebox had both Astral Weeks and Let it Bleed, so the five tracks I selected generally included “Madame George” (or “Astral Weeks” itself) and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. Happy days.

Do I have a favourite bar? The Crescent and Manto are out of consideration (and they’d both changed for the worse some time before they closed). I had a definite fondness for the Hillary Step for a while, but under the new management – specifically, with the new, darker, decor – not so much. (Something similar goes for the Beech, only not so much ‘darker’ as ‘open-plan with TVs everywhere’.) I’ve been going to the Beer House since it opened – which must be getting on for 25 years – and I still find it a comfortable and welcoming place to drink, most times of the day or night; I still wish they’d put on a few more dark beers, mind you. (Bring back McKenna’s Revenge!)

But my current favourite has to be the Petersgate Tap. It’s just a shame it’s hidden away in Stockport – it’s not on the tram, you know…