maggie leo

I’m Maggie Leo – I was Maggie Kitchen back in the day – and I first drank down the Tavern in the early ’80s, when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. Drank there for maybe three or four years.

That first time I went was with Fiona Corbett. A Saturday afternoon. We’d been debating whether we should be going in the Tavern, because we’d heard about the music and the look of people going in there, and it was a case of Look, we can’t go in because we’re too young! Then she spotted somebody she recognised and they took us in and that was it! 

We never looked back!

We’d go there every Saturday, and I drank Strongbow. I couldn’t drink anything else. There must have been a hundred people easy, that first time. It was heaving. So many people, who all seemed enormous next to me. You had to squeeze through the crowd to get in. I got lost! I don’t even remember drinking in there. It was just the music and the people and the fact you stuck to the carpet if you went too slowly… yeah… and the smell… It was dark as well, quite dark, so you didn’t know what you were going in to. And it was a bit of a life-threatening situation going to the ladies. They were pretty grim, and the stairs were quite steep! There’d be queues of people on the stairs.

If you looked old enough, you weren’t challenged. I’ve got a sister who was a year younger, and she was drinking at fourteen in most places, because she looked older than I did. It was two years before I got really challenged in the Tavern. I was seventeen then, and I swore till I was blue in the face that I was nineteen. There was a new manager, and he’d found out that his best barman was only seventeen. And seeing as we knew each other…he might have been trying to put two and two together!

The jukebox? White Rabbit. Kansas was always on. Wayward Son. Boston, More Than A Feeling. And when they got the video jukebox, it always seemed to be flaming David Essex on it. Winter’s Tale. Because whoever had money – obviously, the girls – would want to see him twinkling away.

Whenever I was in there, there wasn’t much trouble. And if there was trouble, it was the Subway Army causing it, not people that drank in the Tavern. Even with the Hells Angels in there, if there was any bother with them it was within themselves rather than with other people. I felt very safe there. Although I do remember one of the Hells Angels getting his willy out and sticking it on my sister’s shoulder!

I was a hippie-rocker. Kind of a blend, you know… it was heels, very tight jeans, hippy blouse, an Afghan… but then I got on the back of a bike to go home! When lads were seventeen, they got a bike. They didn’t bother with cars. It wasn’t a way of life, it was just how it was. It was still off the back of Led Zeppelin and Woodstock, really. Everybody was like that.

The Tavern used to shut at 3pm, and open back up at six, I think. In the summer, there were impromptu singalongs on the man on the horse. If anyone had a guitar, you’d get a loaf of bread and some chips, and all sit round the man on the horse, eating chip butties and singing Stairway to Heaven. I remember that a lot. In the winter, we’d go home, come back up on a nighttime, and catch the last bus home.