The Garage: A 1980s Nottingham Music Haven

In the 1980s Brian Selby was quite the man about town in Nottingham. Not content with his growing Selectadisc record shop empire and his new American-themed Hockley eatery Zuckermans, in 1983 he decided to invest in opening a new nightclub and music venue.

The space Brian took over was located at 41 St Mary’s Gate, a recently closed reggae club called Ad-Lib. He decided to rebrand it as The Garage and early flyers for the club ran with this theme, with the club’s logo featuring two Firestone tyres.

The club’s basement floor had quite the heyday in the 1960s, in its original incarnation as The Beachcomber Club. On 14 January 1967 they welcomed The Jimi Hendrix Experience along for Jimi’s first appearance in the city (the band would also go on to play both the Sherwood Rooms and the Theatre Royal later that year). The support act that night was Jimmy Cliff & The Shakedown Sound. Sometime in the 60s the Ad-Lib club opened above it and over the next few years they merged into one venue.

The opening night of The Garage was on Friday 7 October 1983 and featured the bands American Actors and Red Go Red. In a world before the internet, entry tickets were sold in person at both Selectadisc and at the venue itself. It cost just 50p to get in and entry included a free drink. Following this over the next week they put on acts like The Milkshakes, Loose Hearts, The Linkmen, The Howdy Boys and Fatal Charm. 

The club was open from 10pm-2am every night except for Sundays and, unlike many late night hotspots of the era, this was a ‘dress down’ venue with no membership required. There were two rooms of music and the décor of the club was notable for having black and white artwork on the walls. They also had a smartly dressed elderly doorman and Maître D’ known as Basil 'The International Scene Man', who came as part of the deal when Brian bought the club and always had a bag of sweets to hand out to punters. 

Between 1983-87 The Garage regularly put on live nights with touring bands, usually on Wednesdays and Thursdays, including; SPK, H20, Billy Bragg, The Redskins, Perfect Crime, Serious Drinking, Marc Riley, Half Man Half Biscuit, The Long Riders, The Mekons, The Membranes, The Three Johns, Ted Hawkins, Tones On Tail, The Wedding Present and The Jesus and Mary Chain. 

Legend has it that footballer Kevin Keegan once turned up with an entourage and wasn’t allowed in for being too smart. Joe Strummer also once went in as a punter on a Friday night and was so impressed that he busked outside the venue the night after.

However, the club was perhaps best known and loved for its weekend club nights, offering up an eclectic mix of tunes from garage rock to reggae to pop, rock, house music and more besides. Perhaps most famously in the mid to late 80s it became known as a haven for early lovers of house music and launched the career of DJ Graeme Park. Graeme was working in Selectadisc at the time and DJed there from the opening night until 1988, when he moved on to become a dance music legend as resident at Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub.

“I didn’t really want to DJ at first, but I also didn’t want to say no to Brian,” Graeme told us in an interview last year. “After my first gig at the Garage I got paid £25 and it was all mine. Soon after I left being in bands behind to give it a proper go. The club scene in the late 80s brought everybody together and it just didn’t matter if you were gay, straight, bi or whatever. I lived in Nottingham at such a pivotal time in my life between the ages of eighteen to my mid-twenties. I didn’t go to university, but Nottingham is like those years to me.”

The first manager of the club was Philip Mulhaire. ”We were just making it up as we went along,” he explained. “We wanted The Garage to be a haven for anyone who didn't fit in at the big clubs in Nottingham with their smart dress codes and meat market ambience. You could get gloriously lost in The Garage and people often did.”

In 1987 Ian Gardiner (who later went on to run Dubble Bubble, The Lofthouse and now Fisher Gate Point music and arts hub) took over as manager, initially working for Brian Selby before buying the club off him and rebranding it as The Kool Kat. He told us:

“The Garage was unique in its time in that it catered for two sides of the youth cultural divide having two separate dance floors. Upstairs the vibe was cool, danceable, jazz-tinged post punk and in the basement there were indie rock-based stompers. In between were the bars where crowds happily mingled together, lots of relationships blossomed and many heads were opened by the mixing of cultures.”

The venue was later transformed into the Lizard Lounge in the 1990s and operated by Andy Bentley. Finally, it was re-branded as BZR, which closed in 2015 after an incident at the venue where two people were stabbed. In 2021 it was converted into an office complex and renamed as The Garage Studios, which it remains as to this day.

Our thanks to John Flood, Jim Cooke, nottsmusicarchive.com and jimihendrix.com for help with this article. All photos were given to us by Dorothy Selby, Brian’s widow, late last year. They were commissioned by Brian Selby and we believe they were taken between 1983 and 1987 by photographer Bryn Jones. We hope they bring back many happy memories to anyone who attended.