At the South end of Main Street there are two shiny new red cashpoint machines lodged inside a hole in the wall. To the casual passer-by they symbolise the withdrawal of money and the dreariness of wondering whether or not you are overdrawn, but there’s a whole generation of us who have far more exciting memories of that particular portal. Friday nights in the ‘90s were not complete unless you were standing in a long queue waiting to get inside the closely-guarded door of Cool Blues. The huge bouncer known as ‘Big Dave’ (not even sure if his name was actually Dave) would eye you up and down and decide if you’d be allowed to enter; boys had a much harder time of it than us girls but basically, if you could walk in a straight line then the hallowed cave of wonders would be yours to explore. It was a late-night place and the final stop for most, unless you were really hard-core and would go on to Chimney Corner after Cool Blues had shut. Evenings would usually start with a stint in the Admiral Collingwood listening to Melon Diesel before they were called Melon Diesel. All the girls would debate about which band member they fancied most, the groupies would sit on low stools at the foot of the make-shift stage and gawp up at Dylan. The pre-Casemates pre-Ocean Village days meant that everyone in Gibraltar who was on a night out would end up in Cool Blues as it was the only place to go. The interior had large framed photos of jazz musicians and saxophones and other arty black & white images; lots of mirrors and chrome. A long bar ran down the length of the main room where Stu The Barman, skinny and bespectacled, would serve the mob and then go around collecting glasses at great speed, stacking them up into a tall, teetering tower and wind his way through the crowd never once dropping them. In the middle of the dance floor a spiral staircase led upstairs and there were always some pervs who made it a point of standing underneath so they could look up the girls’ skirts. Inside it was night-club-dark but outside on the patio was where everyone could see what you really looked like in the light; it was also somewhere to sit down and talk away from the pumping loud music. Our favourite spot was the wall, now all beautifully restored, plants tended to, but in those days the shrubs would be dotted with fag butts and empty glasses. Our group would sit along the ledge and people-watch until a song would come on that forced you to leap from the wall and storm the floor. ‘I Like to Move It’ long before it was made popular by the Madagascar film; the theme tune to Ibiza Uncovered; Don’t Stop Wiggle-Wiggle or Mambo No. 5 were dance-floor-fillers. Deepak would show off his dancing skills and whisk round any willing females Lambada style; there were people that you only knew from the Cool Blues dance floor. At approximately 3.30am the DJ would ‘slow things down’ and the smooching records would come on (whatever happened to the slow dance?) Cue to either make surreptitious eye-contact with someone who had taken ones fancy or head for the patio and pretend to be in deep conversation with your friends.
In the 1996 General Election I was a counting agent along with my other Gibraltar National Party colleagues. We had a meeting room in the old Ministers Restaurants underneath Ince’s Hall and would run back and forth from the John Mack with our collected data so it could be inputted into a computer. Half-way through the count when we started to flag a few of us nipped into Cool Blues for a sharpener, it was perfectly positioned as a suitable stop-off point. We weren’t the only people who had taken liberty of the bar and others were in there drowning their sorrows. We all had a quick boogie and a couple of drinks and got back to counting, not a care in the world. Another memorable evening was an event that sent shock waves around the Rock. It was a ladies-only show with male strippers brought over from the UK. The star turn was a black bloke known as ‘Billy Hot Rocks’ whose act finished off with him doing the splits naked. There were letters in the press, people standing outside with placards, all trying to stop the British Knights performing. None of it made any difference and the show went on. I witnessed that spectacle through cringing and narrowed eyes but most of the other women loved it. There was a row of girls who stood on the bar and got so excited that the whole thing collapsed and they all fell off, nobody was hurt. My abiding memory of that night was the owner himself dressed in nothing but a fig-leaf g-string.
I am not sure exactly when or why Cool Blues closed but the stories live on. A friend of mine recently told me how she stormed in there one night to retrieve her 15-year-old daughter who had pretended she was staying the night round at a mate’s but instead had got dolled up and gained entry. The poor girl was dragged kicking-and -screaming out of the door. The twentysomethings of today remember having their birthday parties in the club, all chicken nuggets and chips or cheap burgers washed down with Fanta and a Disney film soundtrack. For the rest of us it’s where we strutted our stuff, snogged people we shouldn’t or threw up far too many times in the toilets. Those same people will now be opening bank accounts and depositing debentures all in brightly-lit surroundings with not a hint of King Africa to liven things up a bit. I wonder how many of us will stand in the queue, deposit slip in hand, and think back to those heady nights. THE ROOF, THE ROOF, THE ROOF IS ON FIRE!!!!
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