Apr 11, 2020
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Présent dans le n*16 Le Bateau …. :) Il va bientôt sortir …. et j’y suis :) …. abonnez-vous !!
www.lebateau.org
Présent dans le n*15 Le Bateau .... :) Il vient de sortir .... et j’y suis :) .... abonnez-vous !!
www.lebateau.org
An Ode to Le Bateau...
So, I’m lying in bed, a lil’ tipsy because it’s Friday, and I stumble across the below photograph. With it, a wave of nostalgia rolls over me, sadness, happiness, pride, love and grief all hit in an instant.
For anyone unaware, Le Bateau was a dingy basement bar on Duke Street that me and my friends would frequent during our first year of University. It was a fiver to get into the place, but the drinks were so cheap that I didn’t mind paying the entrance (I now contest to this day that I will never pay to enter a venue ever. Fuck that.)
Anyway, Le Bateau holds a very special place in my heart. It, alongside La’go, is one of the first bars I went to during my first outings as a legal drinker. It was the first bar that I ever “pulled” in, and it was the first bar that I ever really, truly felt comfortable in. Me and the lads (Bob, Fran, Dan, other Dan, Joel, Greenbean and Pabz) would pay in at 10pm after Professor Frinks at Bob’s and stay until closing, usually around 4/5am. I’m never usually one to stay in one bar all night, but Le Bateau was different, it hit all the fucking beats. Without trying to sound like a pretentious, over-the-top twat, I really “discovered myself” in Le Bateau. I discovered what I loved and the crowd that I felt loved in.
The music itself was absolutely perfect, from The Cure to Arcade Fire, Bowie to The Talking Heads, it was a proper fucking music bar. Not club, not pop, not electro, just fucking music, proper fucking music. Every night you were guaranteed the worst patron-rendition of “Psycho Killer”, and the night would always end on “Ready to Start”. It was absolute perfection. Seeing our Franny scream “PYSCHO KILLER” at the top of his lungs, then sway arm over shoulder with him to the latter always brings a smile to my face. And there’s nowhere really like that in town anymore, the closest we got was the Cabin Club, but alas that’s also shut down now too, although, that place did feel like ‘the dregs at the bottom of your glass’-kinda bar.
The bar was a dream for a student too. We’re talking a double for £2.50, a pint for sub-£3/£3.50, and a shot for a bullet. What more could you want? As a first year student with not a whole lot of cash, Le Bateau was a lovely little diver bar where you could get sensibly drunk off about £20. Obviously subsidised by the fiver pay in but still, after the first three doubles who even remembers the pay in?
As previously mentioned, it was the first place in town I really felt at home in, and we discovered it as it was on it’s last legs. Of all the times that we actually went to Le Bateau, I don’t remember there ever being more than 20 people in the bar itself, which was obviously what led to it’s demise, but also gave it it’s very distinct charm. A charm which has stuck to me to this day. As a young, naive 18 year old, I remember walking into the bar, paying the fiver entry fee, getting the stamp on my hand, and walking downstairs to the basement to be greeted by the sights of an empty bar, a moderately full dance floor towards the very back of the long, corridor-like room, and a room of empty seats & tables to the right. To me at the time, that was the height of exclusivity. I thought I’d just paid my way into the most exclusive, most cool bar in town.Yet, in reality, it was a bar on it’s ass on the outskirts of the main drinking hub of Seel Street.
But I didn’t see any of that. To me, Le Bateau was the coolest fucking bar in town, and me and my mates were one of a very few clientele to actually be aware of it. And that brash naiveness is what made its closure so hard. Not so much at the time, but now, looking back.
I absolutely loved Le Bateau, and the news of its closure was proper shitty. Like, proper shitty. It was club I really enjoyed going to, and one in which that allowed me to become the person that I am today. Yes there were, and are, clubs that are similar to it, but none of them truly compared, no club or bar has ever made me as truly happy as Le Bateau did. And yes, we probably should have seen the warning signs, but as a ‘new-to-town’ 18 year old, I didn’t see them, so the closure came as a shock.
Now, looking back, I wish that I would have savoured those moments in Le Bateau for all that they were worth. Obviously, at the time, you aren’t to know, you just lap every single moment up as if it’s never going to end. As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I guess the point I’m trying to make with this point, and I realise it’s super fucking long, is that you should appreciate every single enjoyable moment of your life. Le Bateau was such a small part of my 25 year life, maybe 6 months or so, but fucking hell was it good, and I never truly got to appreciate it. I’ve been a La’go regular now for about 8 years and I’ve slowly seen it decline into a run-of-the-mill concert square style bar.
Le Bateau was this little capsule of excellence, and I miss it so dearly, but it was so perfect that I can’t help but look back on it with love and gratefulness and shite. We love it so much, that our group chat on Facebook is named “Le Bateau is Love, Le Bateau is Life”, and whilst we might not cross paths daily like we once did, it’s the one little common ground that brought us all together as proper friends. It’s the one little common ground that keeps us all together. And it’s the one little common ground that’ll stay with us.
So, in the words of the photo below: Le Bateau forever. Forever ever? Forever ever.