Saturday 24 June
Oscar saves the night
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for - new-look New Top Gun revealed! My first impressions of the new bar area are very favourable. They’ve achieved a good balance between space and function which makes the area very customer-friendly. The new bar and pool table area is particularly nice - you feel part of the whole place, yet sufficiently secluded from the main action to get the impression that you’re in a bar within a bar. The new area blends in nicely with the front section, and the central dance floor and raised level is an intelligent touch. If no-one’s dancing, the area becomes part of the bar; if there are lots of Sweet Young Things who want to dance, it provides plenty of space without interrupting the flow of people on either side. Here’s what it all looks like:
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A vew of the extension from the cash-desk corner
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Looking down the extension and into the orginal bar
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The new pool table and bar
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Alas, all good things come to an end. And so it is that, as a mock-hippy troupe of juvenile musical wannabes unpack their kit and set it up on the band rostrum, I finish my drink and walk out of Top Gun. As do several other customers, who would otherwise stay for another hour or so. “If I want this kind of rubbish I’ll take one of the city buses and listen to the buskers”, I say to one of the guys as we both depart. “I’m going down to Ace Hardware to buy a pair of those industrial noise-muffling earpads”, he quips back.
Seeking haven in My Bar, I chat with a couple of the barmaids and order a snack. As I’m hungry and don’t want to wait ages for my food, I order a prawn cocktail tout simple and settle into my favourite place by the disco floor. It’s just after ten o’clock when the DJ strolls in and takes over Mission Control. And then it happens. Pure cacophony. What he’s playing isn’t music, it’s a dull reverberative heavy thumping noise, like a demented jack-hammer - and the volume is so loud that it’s physically painful to listen to.
By ten twenty I’ve had enough. And I still haven’t got my snack, that was ordered more than twenty minutes ago. There are less than a dozen customers in the bar, sitting and talking or watching the sport on TV - no Sweet Young Things, no-one dancing, no one paying a blind bit of notice to the music. As I storm out of the bar, hungry and disappointed, I reflect that a bar manager in Blok M is a person with an infinitely long learning curve. They are slowly, but surely, driving away from Blok M their prime customers because of a totally misplaced belief that expats actually like this kind of music. Many of us are just too polite to complain, and we’re voting with our feet.
It’s still quite early, so I trundle up the street to D’s Place to see what’s happening in the upstairs bar. With a sinking feeling of déjà vu - or more accurately, déjà entendu - I hear a demonic ga-thumping ga-thumping noise even before I open the street door. I mount the stairs, but as I turn the corner to enter the bar the noise becomes utterly deafening. As in the other places, the bar-disco is almost empty at this time of night, yet the noise still blares out. I turn round and go straight back out into the street.
So D’s Place wins the Reveller’s coveted Golden Earplug award, and the upstairs bar is reinstated on my list of “never go near the damn’ place again” establishments.
So off down the street to Oscar to see what’s doing. What a pleasant relief! The band is having a break, and there’s a bit of tuneful background music that doesn’t obtrude but helps to set the tone. The band comes back on stage, and they’re good. They’re professionals, with a good repertoire and a real sense of rhythm, and they launch into a series of tunes that I recognise, and get my foot tapping. There’s something relaxing about Oscar, and always has been. It attracts a particular type of customer, and there’s the kind of easy familiarity that I like.
In fact, of all the established bars on the street Oscar is the only one that’s stuck to its colours and not gone mindlessly trendy. Which is good news indeed, as I hear on the grape vine that the new bar that’s opening shortly, One Tree, is also - wait for it - going to feature a bar, a resto - and live music. As my good friend Jakartass would put it, “Ho bloody hum”.