Post by bergerac on Dec 10, 2007 9:23:34 GMT -5
From The Times
December 8, 2007
Estuary English
Once known as the birthplace of the chav, Chatham is now the unlikely centre of a new music scene, with the help of an idiosyncratic pub, Pete Doherty and a singular vision of Albion
Ben Machell
The odd thing about the trip from Victoria station to Chatham is that it hardly takes any time at all. And it’s not as if you go particularly fast. Compared to the swish Eurostar trains that used to limber up on the same stretch of track, you just dawdle, but still in 40 minutes you suddenly arrive at a town that feels as if it has as much to do with London as deep-sea fishing has to Birmingham.
The central wedge of an unlovely conurbation on the banks of the Medway, Chatham can’t boast a medieval cathedral like its neighbour Rochester, or a league football team, like the other neighbour Gillingham. The naval dockyards here shut nearly 25 years ago, so now, along with the Charles Dickens theme park, they operate as a faintly optimistic tourist destination (“Rope has been made at the Dockyard for nearly 400 years – and now it’s your turn,” it offers enticingly). What the town does have over its neighbours, and for that matter, the rest of the country, is the Tap’n’Tin pub. It’s two minutes from the station. Walk past Wickes, go under the road bridge and it’s opposite the off-licence with a handwritten sign advertising cans of “Strong Beer” for a quid.
Over the course of a week, the Tap’n’Tin can attract a few thousand visitors, but just labelling it a pub seems like underselling the place. Within the premises, you’ll find a small launderette, a hairdressers, a tattoo parlour and a sweet shop filling out the nooks and crannies of its dim, three-storey interior; like some perfect student union with a touch of Gormenghast castle. Pete Doherty is a habitual patron and performer, while its 1,000 person capacity and a large live music room has seen the Tap’n’Tin become the focal point of the Medway music scene, the pub running its own record label (Tap’n’Tin Records) and online radio station. It’s the kind of extraordinary operation that could only spring up in an ordinary British town. It would swiftly be devoured in a big city centre, but thrives when set against the humdrum that accounts for much of modern British life.
“Twelve years ago, I found myself in Beijing building an Irish pub,” explains John Terry, 61, the Tap’n’Tin’s softly spoken owner. “I hated the whole experience. It was shallow, scratch-and-sniff stuff, just buying memorabilia and sticking it on the walls. I’d had this property for some time, so when I came back, I thought I might as well whittle up a pub as I’d like to see it.”
A Rochester native, Terry’s business background has a rugged glamour that would shame any City CEO. Starting as a carpenter, he ran an engineering company before relocating to Archangel to arrange timber sales from Russian growers to British companies, after which followed time in Eastern Europe and China. He even “had interests” in nightclubs in Maidstone and Gillingham. Today, he operates the Tap’n’Tin from a cosy annexe above the beer garden, and says that the idea of installing the launderette and other amenities came from seeing a shop in Russia selling used carburettors and bananas; in-demand goods sold under one roof.
“And what’s better than a pub with a launderette?” he grins. “We get a lot of soldiers who sling their wash in and have a drink, while students from Greenwich, Kent and Canterbury Christchurch university campuses will have a haircut and a game of pool.”
Opening eight years ago, Terry realised he should book some live music when drinkers kept dancing on the tables to the jukebox. The first gig was by Billy Childish, the Medway’s resident artist/poet/punk-rock musician, and an act mirroring the pub’s own meandering pursuit of a muse. The Tap’n’Tin has accommodated art installations, prayer meetings and, now and then, bouts of wrestling.
“The wrestling was a shock to me,” admits Terry. “I walked into the pub and saw a crowd shout and scream while two people fought on the canvas. A lot of what goes on here, I find out about later.”
All this, added to the regular doling out of free hamburgers and a refreshingly broad age-range (an elderly regular in a thick woolly jumper drinks real ale and chats to the heavily tattooed and pierced twentysomething barwoman) makes it feel like some otherworldly Utopia compared to the recurrent chain bars or beer-branded music venues of higher-profile towns and cities.
Chatham is no City of the Plain, but by mid-afternoon on a Thursday, one man is content to take a pee in a pedestrian shopping street. Walk on, and beneath an intimidating overpass, there’s a mural of a seaside scene with Polish graffiti scrawled across it. Joe Dollimore, the 18-year-old drummer of local band Underground Heroes, who are headlining a Hallowe’en party at the Tap’n’Tin tonight, has just been accosted in the town. “I was walking down Chatham High Street and someone said, ‘Give me your money, then,’” he says. “He was wearing tracksuit bottoms and an earring, sitting on a BMX and just expected me to give it to him.”
Back at the pub, his older brother and the band’s singer, Aaron Dollimore, shakes his head. “People who have actually heard of Chatham think it’s famous as the home of chavs,” he mutters. Even their record company decided to play up the Chatham connection, marketing the four-piece as “chav punk”, although the reality is that they’re no more chavvy than any group of lads from any small town or unglamorous hinterland. They cite the Jam and the Specials as influences, admitting more of a connection with Paul Weller’s Woking or Jerry Dammers’ Coventry than Pete Doherty’s imagined Arcadia.
“Chatham is a shithole, though,” the elder Dollimore continues. “There are about six pound shops in the High Street. The clubs play rubbish music. There’s a place called Amadeus, and it was voted Nuts magazine’s ‘horniest club of the year’, which sums it up really.”
All of which, they freely admit, adds to the importance of the Tap’n’Tin. Not just as a spot to drink, or play music, but as a place where anyone can duck out of the parochial grind. From the balcony overlooking the walled beer garden, the pub’s stout, sturdy brickwork lends it the feel of a fort, standing Alamo-like against the pound shops, sad clubs and buses to Borstal.
As the evening wears on, a young crowd starts arriving for the Hallowe’en party. Many have opted for the full zombie look, others, through generous use of fake blood, just appear to have been caught up in the Chatham chainsaw massacre. Some are students, though many, like Underground Heroes, are audibly Medway natives. There’s an enviable sense of communality too, big groups of boys and girls mingling merrily, shouting to attract the attention of new arrivals, comparing costumes and sharing cigarettes. In the upstairs gig room, the bands and their friends prepare punch, pouring bottle after bottle of vodka and fruit juice into a huge plastic bin. The DJ checks his sound effects, cueing a track of bloodcurdling screams. It’s exciting and eccentric; home-brewed fun with an intensity you’d not find after a month of trawling the bars, clubs and parties of Hoxton.
“It’s a letting-off of steam for a lot of people,” explains George Penfold, the Underground Heroes’ effete guitarist. He warns that gigs at the Tap’n’Tin can be boisterous affairs by metropolitan standards, and he’s right. A packed room of snogging, drinking, yelping zombies is marshalled by a fat, bald teddy boy who doubles as compere, introducing the bands with a snarl. Anywhere else, and he’d seem like a novelty, but here you’re inclined to take him very seriously. Following local support band the Ruskins (“The girl that I like can f*** right off”, a lyrical highlight), Underground Heroes lead the Hallowe’en crowd into a frantic danse macabre.
“If you went to a Kooks gig in London, people would just be looking to see who had the skinniest jeans,” reflects Dollimore. “It would be all, ‘Look at my shoes, but don’t get them dirty.’”
But, as he’s demonstrated, the nation’s music scene doesn’t start and end with big-name bands playing the capital. Beyond the Liverpools, Manchesters and Glasgows, we’re a nation of overlooked towns. “When we’re on tour, a lot of the places we play aren’t much different from Chatham,” Penfold says, listing visits to Cleethorpes, Stockton-on-Tees and Whitehaven. “It’s the same people in the street, with different accents. We’ve met people in Scotland and thought, you’re just like us.”
It’s a telling touch that Penfold and his band have formed a bond with a young group from Dundee called the View, who are in the first throws of bona fide success. As a result, Dundee’s music scene is suddenly in the spotlight. It’s a routine you will see played out across the country, from the “Sunderland Sound” of a while back to the scouring of post-Arctic Monkeys Sheffield. If a band from the area can make it big, everyone from Terry to the zombified teens insist, a glut of Medway talent can follow; from Sittingbourne 16-year-olds the Suggestions to Chatham’s What Would Jesus Drive?, or even a Tap’n’Tin Records artist, such as mildly gothic troubadour Lupen Crook.
The twist with the Tap’n’Tin, though, is that its singular set-up and gleeful lack of cosmopolitan affectation have already struck a chord with some established artists. Members of Primal Scream and the Charlatans have played unpaid gigs here as indie supergroup the Chavs, while the pub practically has a working relationship with Pete Doherty. When the then Libertines singer had a stint in jail in 2003, Tap’n’Tin staff arranged to send him extra pens and paper so he could continue to write. Upon his release, Terry collected him from Pentonville and drove him straight to the pub so he could play a show with his band (later rated by NME as the year’s best gig).
“He’s a sensitive, touchy-feely guy, and this is a touchy-feely venue,” shrugs Terry. “It’s not overly commercial, and I think he buys into that. When he played here the other day, we had people queuing outside who had come all the way from Belgium and Italy.”
Rather than just a place for locals to let off steam then, the Tap’n’Tin is now, for some, a marquee destination. Look hard enough, and it is possible to pick out a type of romance, an off-kilter Englishness to not just the building, but the setting too. Aaron Dollimore says he can’t relate to Doherty’s lyrics about “sailing the good ship Albion off to… wherever”, but maybe he’s lived here too long to be distracted by the Napoleonic sea forts, Georgian navigators and the thought of square-rigged ships cruising the Medway.
Today, Terry talks of opening another pub in the Tap’n’Tin mould, perhaps in London, perhaps in a small university town. You can’t help wishing it’s the latter. He says the memory that will stick with him the longest isn’t of any wild show, but of a tall Chinese girl with several cameras loitering outside the pub one morning.
“She asked, in broken English, if the Libertines played here. I said yeah. She kept saying, ‘Me photograph space!’ We had to take her upstairs at half-past nine in the morning and switch all the lights on to let her take photographs of the pub,” he smiles. “Then she just vanished into Chatham.”
www.tapntin.co.uk/
Chas'n'Dave on the 15th December.
Bergerac.
December 8, 2007
Estuary English
Once known as the birthplace of the chav, Chatham is now the unlikely centre of a new music scene, with the help of an idiosyncratic pub, Pete Doherty and a singular vision of Albion
Ben Machell
The odd thing about the trip from Victoria station to Chatham is that it hardly takes any time at all. And it’s not as if you go particularly fast. Compared to the swish Eurostar trains that used to limber up on the same stretch of track, you just dawdle, but still in 40 minutes you suddenly arrive at a town that feels as if it has as much to do with London as deep-sea fishing has to Birmingham.
The central wedge of an unlovely conurbation on the banks of the Medway, Chatham can’t boast a medieval cathedral like its neighbour Rochester, or a league football team, like the other neighbour Gillingham. The naval dockyards here shut nearly 25 years ago, so now, along with the Charles Dickens theme park, they operate as a faintly optimistic tourist destination (“Rope has been made at the Dockyard for nearly 400 years – and now it’s your turn,” it offers enticingly). What the town does have over its neighbours, and for that matter, the rest of the country, is the Tap’n’Tin pub. It’s two minutes from the station. Walk past Wickes, go under the road bridge and it’s opposite the off-licence with a handwritten sign advertising cans of “Strong Beer” for a quid.
Over the course of a week, the Tap’n’Tin can attract a few thousand visitors, but just labelling it a pub seems like underselling the place. Within the premises, you’ll find a small launderette, a hairdressers, a tattoo parlour and a sweet shop filling out the nooks and crannies of its dim, three-storey interior; like some perfect student union with a touch of Gormenghast castle. Pete Doherty is a habitual patron and performer, while its 1,000 person capacity and a large live music room has seen the Tap’n’Tin become the focal point of the Medway music scene, the pub running its own record label (Tap’n’Tin Records) and online radio station. It’s the kind of extraordinary operation that could only spring up in an ordinary British town. It would swiftly be devoured in a big city centre, but thrives when set against the humdrum that accounts for much of modern British life.
“Twelve years ago, I found myself in Beijing building an Irish pub,” explains John Terry, 61, the Tap’n’Tin’s softly spoken owner. “I hated the whole experience. It was shallow, scratch-and-sniff stuff, just buying memorabilia and sticking it on the walls. I’d had this property for some time, so when I came back, I thought I might as well whittle up a pub as I’d like to see it.”
A Rochester native, Terry’s business background has a rugged glamour that would shame any City CEO. Starting as a carpenter, he ran an engineering company before relocating to Archangel to arrange timber sales from Russian growers to British companies, after which followed time in Eastern Europe and China. He even “had interests” in nightclubs in Maidstone and Gillingham. Today, he operates the Tap’n’Tin from a cosy annexe above the beer garden, and says that the idea of installing the launderette and other amenities came from seeing a shop in Russia selling used carburettors and bananas; in-demand goods sold under one roof.
“And what’s better than a pub with a launderette?” he grins. “We get a lot of soldiers who sling their wash in and have a drink, while students from Greenwich, Kent and Canterbury Christchurch university campuses will have a haircut and a game of pool.”
Opening eight years ago, Terry realised he should book some live music when drinkers kept dancing on the tables to the jukebox. The first gig was by Billy Childish, the Medway’s resident artist/poet/punk-rock musician, and an act mirroring the pub’s own meandering pursuit of a muse. The Tap’n’Tin has accommodated art installations, prayer meetings and, now and then, bouts of wrestling.
“The wrestling was a shock to me,” admits Terry. “I walked into the pub and saw a crowd shout and scream while two people fought on the canvas. A lot of what goes on here, I find out about later.”
All this, added to the regular doling out of free hamburgers and a refreshingly broad age-range (an elderly regular in a thick woolly jumper drinks real ale and chats to the heavily tattooed and pierced twentysomething barwoman) makes it feel like some otherworldly Utopia compared to the recurrent chain bars or beer-branded music venues of higher-profile towns and cities.
Chatham is no City of the Plain, but by mid-afternoon on a Thursday, one man is content to take a pee in a pedestrian shopping street. Walk on, and beneath an intimidating overpass, there’s a mural of a seaside scene with Polish graffiti scrawled across it. Joe Dollimore, the 18-year-old drummer of local band Underground Heroes, who are headlining a Hallowe’en party at the Tap’n’Tin tonight, has just been accosted in the town. “I was walking down Chatham High Street and someone said, ‘Give me your money, then,’” he says. “He was wearing tracksuit bottoms and an earring, sitting on a BMX and just expected me to give it to him.”
Back at the pub, his older brother and the band’s singer, Aaron Dollimore, shakes his head. “People who have actually heard of Chatham think it’s famous as the home of chavs,” he mutters. Even their record company decided to play up the Chatham connection, marketing the four-piece as “chav punk”, although the reality is that they’re no more chavvy than any group of lads from any small town or unglamorous hinterland. They cite the Jam and the Specials as influences, admitting more of a connection with Paul Weller’s Woking or Jerry Dammers’ Coventry than Pete Doherty’s imagined Arcadia.
“Chatham is a shithole, though,” the elder Dollimore continues. “There are about six pound shops in the High Street. The clubs play rubbish music. There’s a place called Amadeus, and it was voted Nuts magazine’s ‘horniest club of the year’, which sums it up really.”
All of which, they freely admit, adds to the importance of the Tap’n’Tin. Not just as a spot to drink, or play music, but as a place where anyone can duck out of the parochial grind. From the balcony overlooking the walled beer garden, the pub’s stout, sturdy brickwork lends it the feel of a fort, standing Alamo-like against the pound shops, sad clubs and buses to Borstal.
As the evening wears on, a young crowd starts arriving for the Hallowe’en party. Many have opted for the full zombie look, others, through generous use of fake blood, just appear to have been caught up in the Chatham chainsaw massacre. Some are students, though many, like Underground Heroes, are audibly Medway natives. There’s an enviable sense of communality too, big groups of boys and girls mingling merrily, shouting to attract the attention of new arrivals, comparing costumes and sharing cigarettes. In the upstairs gig room, the bands and their friends prepare punch, pouring bottle after bottle of vodka and fruit juice into a huge plastic bin. The DJ checks his sound effects, cueing a track of bloodcurdling screams. It’s exciting and eccentric; home-brewed fun with an intensity you’d not find after a month of trawling the bars, clubs and parties of Hoxton.
“It’s a letting-off of steam for a lot of people,” explains George Penfold, the Underground Heroes’ effete guitarist. He warns that gigs at the Tap’n’Tin can be boisterous affairs by metropolitan standards, and he’s right. A packed room of snogging, drinking, yelping zombies is marshalled by a fat, bald teddy boy who doubles as compere, introducing the bands with a snarl. Anywhere else, and he’d seem like a novelty, but here you’re inclined to take him very seriously. Following local support band the Ruskins (“The girl that I like can f*** right off”, a lyrical highlight), Underground Heroes lead the Hallowe’en crowd into a frantic danse macabre.
“If you went to a Kooks gig in London, people would just be looking to see who had the skinniest jeans,” reflects Dollimore. “It would be all, ‘Look at my shoes, but don’t get them dirty.’”
But, as he’s demonstrated, the nation’s music scene doesn’t start and end with big-name bands playing the capital. Beyond the Liverpools, Manchesters and Glasgows, we’re a nation of overlooked towns. “When we’re on tour, a lot of the places we play aren’t much different from Chatham,” Penfold says, listing visits to Cleethorpes, Stockton-on-Tees and Whitehaven. “It’s the same people in the street, with different accents. We’ve met people in Scotland and thought, you’re just like us.”
It’s a telling touch that Penfold and his band have formed a bond with a young group from Dundee called the View, who are in the first throws of bona fide success. As a result, Dundee’s music scene is suddenly in the spotlight. It’s a routine you will see played out across the country, from the “Sunderland Sound” of a while back to the scouring of post-Arctic Monkeys Sheffield. If a band from the area can make it big, everyone from Terry to the zombified teens insist, a glut of Medway talent can follow; from Sittingbourne 16-year-olds the Suggestions to Chatham’s What Would Jesus Drive?, or even a Tap’n’Tin Records artist, such as mildly gothic troubadour Lupen Crook.
The twist with the Tap’n’Tin, though, is that its singular set-up and gleeful lack of cosmopolitan affectation have already struck a chord with some established artists. Members of Primal Scream and the Charlatans have played unpaid gigs here as indie supergroup the Chavs, while the pub practically has a working relationship with Pete Doherty. When the then Libertines singer had a stint in jail in 2003, Tap’n’Tin staff arranged to send him extra pens and paper so he could continue to write. Upon his release, Terry collected him from Pentonville and drove him straight to the pub so he could play a show with his band (later rated by NME as the year’s best gig).
“He’s a sensitive, touchy-feely guy, and this is a touchy-feely venue,” shrugs Terry. “It’s not overly commercial, and I think he buys into that. When he played here the other day, we had people queuing outside who had come all the way from Belgium and Italy.”
Rather than just a place for locals to let off steam then, the Tap’n’Tin is now, for some, a marquee destination. Look hard enough, and it is possible to pick out a type of romance, an off-kilter Englishness to not just the building, but the setting too. Aaron Dollimore says he can’t relate to Doherty’s lyrics about “sailing the good ship Albion off to… wherever”, but maybe he’s lived here too long to be distracted by the Napoleonic sea forts, Georgian navigators and the thought of square-rigged ships cruising the Medway.
Today, Terry talks of opening another pub in the Tap’n’Tin mould, perhaps in London, perhaps in a small university town. You can’t help wishing it’s the latter. He says the memory that will stick with him the longest isn’t of any wild show, but of a tall Chinese girl with several cameras loitering outside the pub one morning.
“She asked, in broken English, if the Libertines played here. I said yeah. She kept saying, ‘Me photograph space!’ We had to take her upstairs at half-past nine in the morning and switch all the lights on to let her take photographs of the pub,” he smiles. “Then she just vanished into Chatham.”
www.tapntin.co.uk/
Chas'n'Dave on the 15th December.
Bergerac.