We used to hold a BBQ during the Sunday sessions. One week Clare Bowditch was playing and there was extra fat on the fire because it hadn’t been cleaned properly the week before. The grease built up and it caught fire. I was standing there patting it and was just planning to put the fire out with the lid and tonic water. Danny Rogers came over freaking out. ‘What the hell! It’s on fire!’ And I was saying, ‘yeah, it’ll be okay.’ Meanwhile, Clare is looking over the top of the crowd at this fire raging out of the BBQ. Then Ben, the manager comes over, and sprays it with the fire extinguisher, which was one of the powder types. He’d never used it before, and not only did he spray it all over the BBQ, but the powder went downwind back towards the stage. If you can imagine, Clare’s fans had all been sitting down enjoying an afternoon of tunes, when all of a sudden they’re coated in white powder. It ended up going over all the instruments, and Clare and her band evacuated for ten, while the audience clambered over the stage to get out into the alley. People still tried to buy the sausages though, even after they were covered in toxic gunk.
I also DJ’d there on Thursday nights. I ran the Party and Bullshit night. Towards the end of maybe the last six months there, there was a real problem with the sewage flooding. It would come out of one of the pipes and flow the whole way down the alley where everyone was dancing, which was gross enough. The worst time was when people were having sex on the other side of the gate, rolling around in sewage, with tampons and faeces flowing all around them.
I never actually saw Jerome dancing fully naked on the bar, but I always heard about it. Mostly he was just wearing a pair of boxer shorts and quite often he had this horrible yellow vest he’d put on that was made out of terry towelling. In the early days there were a lot of people dancing with very little clothes on at the bar — any night of the week. Especially any time Jerome came in excited. One time, Kerry, the daytime manager, got behind the bar. She was trashed with Jerome and shook up a lot of tonic water and sprayed it directly into this very unimpressed customer’s face. Jerome was there pissing himself laughing. Then they threw sugar all over the entire bar. That’s when I was working with Danielle. We were semi-unimpressed, but a few drinks later we were okay as well.
There was Nick Casey, Nick Coates, Nick Brown, and I. I think those were the only Nicks. I started after the other two Nicks, but was there the longest. I worked from maybe eight to 10 months in and was there right until the close of Jerome’s, so a good five years — more from laziness than anything else. We played at the final party where people were trashing the fridges, ripping doors off things and taking souvenirs like posts that were structurally important.
I was sad to see the place go but I think it had a good run. It was a place you could drop in any day of the week, Tuesday at 11 in the morning or Monday at 10 o’clock at night, and there’d be people there that you knew having a drink. You’d pop in for a coffee and end up not leaving till well after closing time. I got engaged to my now ex-wife there and we got married up at Sister Bella’s, St Jerome’s sister bar. We separated out the front of Sister Bella’s too. That wasn’t by any planning though… it was a surprise to me.