collette murphy

Years in there? I guess I would say '79 to '83 or '84. I went in to see Carol Burns to get free drinks. 

Your feet sticking to the floor is my main memory of it really I suppose. The darkness. The crowds. The big scary Hells Angels. Although I was never scared of the Hells Angels because I only really started going in there when the Molineux Hotel Friday Night Rock Disco stopped. Do you remember those? Because the Hells Angels used to run those.

They knew we were all underage in there. And they knew we were convent girls and so you were safe. It really felt a very safe place although you could have dropped through the hotel floor at any time cuz it was just a wreck. I can remember going to the Molineux discos when I was 14. Half a mild for 12 and a half pence. And when that closed, then it was the Tavern. 

I was underage going in there too, and my older sister threatened to tell my mum and dad. I carried on going in there but then happened to bump into a fella that she had been at school with, and he threatened to tell Maureen, my sister, that I'd been in there. Every time I went in I had to buy him a pint so that he wouldn't tell her that I was in there. Honest to God. And I mean, he was four years older than me, and he had loads more money. I was sixteen and earning £20 a week or something and he was twenty. Every time I went in if he was in there my heart would sink because I'd got to buy him a pint. To my knowledge he didn't tell her.

Everybody was in the same boat. I don’t think there were the haves and the have nots in the same way that you have now. We were all from similar backgrounds, we'd all grown up together, we all knew each other. A lot of us knew each other from school, and if you didn't you just knew that people were the same as you and they were just struggling to get a start somewhere. Getting those little bits of jobs, like Carol working behind the bar and Doc working behind the bar, so it’d get you through. I worked on the market on a Saturday just to make my money up. I'd worked on the market since I was thirteen, fourteen. I carried on doing that when I got a full time job, because you had to.

Later I was working at John McLean and Sons which was the head office of the housing division for Tarmac. I was an office junior who was going to be a legal secretary or something. I didn't really understand what the job was when I took it. I was just glad to get a job, because nobody had jobs in 1981. I did that, then ended up going to college. I didn't mind college per se, but I couldn't do shorthand so I ditched that. I used to leave college at lunchtime and spend Thursday afternoons in the Tavern. I had to leave my job before my report came back to them.

The Tavern was quiet in the day, but at night… the noise! The jukebox was fab. Freebird. Led Zep. The Allman Brothers. I think – particularly when you were underage – because you weren't allowed in there and because your parents would have had a fit if they'd known you were going there, of all places, it just felt the most daring thing ever. It was dark. It was mean. When you go in and you don't know anything, and you're sixteen and naive, and you find out it’s full of friends. Yeah, it was great.