Intake Club Mansfield
It is unusual to start a eulogy by saying the departed was not special, but in Robert Foster’s Vice article ‘What Kind of British Pub Do You Belong In?’ The Intake is squarely pegged as a ‘Provincial Alternative’ bar. These are defined by the beards flowing like the Monster Energy, the music coming soundly from the left side of the periodic table, and, most importantly, being welcoming and friendly to anyone respectful. Indeed, of the ten pub-types Foster lists, the Provincial Alternative is one of only three he identifies as having a real element of community spirit.
The fact that there are hundreds of joints like The Intake across Britain does not make the Intake any less special to the people of Mansfield, or its closure any less sad. Another name struck off a dwindling list.
It always felt like everyone at Intake knew each other. Even though I was not privy to this feeling, having cleaved too closely to my old school clique and never really spread my social wings, it never felt unfriendly.
Darkness and metal might not strike the outsider as particularly welcoming, but this could not be further from the truth. At Brunts I fell in with 'sweaties', a collection of greebos, metalheads and goths given that name due to the insistence of some in wearing heavy black coats or band hoodies even at the height of summer.
I didn't share their taste in music, or even listen to much music at all. They didn't care. Just as it was nothing to them how much you were or weren’t interested in sports, going out or the gym. They knew they were weird, that really we all are, and they didn't judge. This same attitude carried through to The Intake.
Inside the Intake Club
My experience of The Intake was perhaps not a typical one. At school, I was friends with Tom, the eventual owner, and my own personal memories and relationship with the place are inextricably mixed up with the fact that I only lived one street away and was an old friend of the proprietor. I can describe, for example, the Intake's small back office, boasting the building's only (barred) window, its computer with the side off usually running some MMO, or a browser somehow managing tabs into the thirties. The office is adorned with band photos, some signed, and artwork by Morten Larby, a beloved regular and friend who was tragically killed some years ago in a collision on Water Lane, aged 19. The Intake held his wake. The office is also where, more recently, we've watched torrented episodes of Banzai and bet drinks on the outcome.
What Mansfield loses by this closure is easy to state: it loses its primary live music venue, and perhaps its only viable one at all. This time, it seems, there is nowhere waiting in the wings, as The Intake itself was when the Town Mill closed. I've been to a gig at the Old Ramme but the interior space is small, fits a DJ but could not hold a band, while the outdoor space where the gig was held is only really an option in summer. I am not forgetting the Black Market, but while Intake may not have been in the town centre it was hardly Warsop. Still, Sugar Ape Mansfield has just said they've got a new venue, so perhaps my doomsaying is premature.
The biggest band Intake ever hosted was probably Hayseed Dixie, the US bluegrass AC/DC tribute band who once opened the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. The real value though was to local bands, to smaller groups touring the country, and mostly to the attendees who had a cheap, friendly and safe place to see live music at the end the week, an alternative – or compliment to – the town centre's clubs.
What the regulars lose is something more, something harder to define despite the hundreds of other places like it. It is the inner circle poker/ring of fire nights with half price drinks; the get-togethers at Christmas when everyone is back in town; the free triple-whiskey-and-coke on my birthday, unasked for. It is a group of friends trudging down a silent street through a foot of snow towards a snowball fight in the flat, unspoiled expanse of the car park and a lock-in; it is the sparsely-attended Christmas Eve session that served as a launch-pad for '[Noddy] Holdering', and the best Christmas morning I've ever had. It is the floors that sometimes stuck like Velcro, the bathroom mirror so plastered with band stickers you couldn't see yourself, the graffiti on the green-room walls, the hole punched in the plasterboard of the gents’ room being covered over with a print of the Banksy Batman picture for months before being patched. It is the building itself, the low profile and saw-tooth roof and huge canopy extending out the front of an old hosiery works; the fake séances to spook the more suggestible held in the cavernous black chill of the empty gig room, an empty wheelchair careening across the room, and pretending to find nothing when in the resulting search you find the hiding accomplice who pushed it. It is drinking a can and a half of blackcurrant cider to get in the right mindset to write this and genuinely tearing up at this point; the walk home up Garnon Street never feeling quite the same after Notts County Council replaced the orange sodium streetlamps there with the sharp, cold LED ones; it was going home and lying in bed, the room reeling and spinning above you behind the darkness the ringing still in your ears and feeling blessed that your friends still apparently cared despite how little you saw them now. It was Death Marley; it was the ring of empty Jager bottles lining the room; it was the owner once seriously considering a Spice Girls night with a tribute band and everything.
It was Intake.
Last night at The Intake takes place at The Intake Club on 4 June 2016. Facebook event.
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