By Default
10 years ago in February 2016 I opened the Behind This Wall bar on Mare Street.
It was the final form of a project that had been gestating in basements and rooftops for 5 years prior. A collaboration between myself, Silvija Duoblyte and Elliot Barnes. Silvija was an early supporter of the project and had attended every single one of our club events before creating herself a full time role for our 2015 summer terrace takeover. Elliot was a drummer in a band; he and I had both eagerly shared a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and thought it couldn’t be that hard to make furniture.
We’d come off the back of a successful four-month pop-up, building a small community out of the parties. Dots were joining between design, music and drinking where previously there had only been records and lengthy sessions between the club and my living room. I took a loan from the bank (thinking 15% interest seemed like a great deal), pooled it with the left-over cash from the pop-up, and secured two £25k investor bites on a business plan I’d assembled from an online template.
A DJ from the terrace crew had an architect friend who translated Elliot’s ideas into drawings – and told me not to pour concrete over the manhole at the back of the space. I bought a Silverline drill (to save money) and and began a four-month back-and-forth between the site and Travis Perkins on Dalston Lane. Sometimes you can have anxiety-led imposter syndrome, sometimes people who know a thing or two really see through you: I must have tickled the staff in Travis Perkins pink.
Miraculously, with more friends and family – combining legitimate and semi-legitimate skills – we were ready to open by the end of January 2016. Our soft launch day had me collect DJ Stingray from King’s Cross around 2pm, go to NTS with him for 4pm, be at the bar for opening at 7pm, then onto the Pickle Factory for a BTW club-night with the aforementioned masked sensei. I DJ’d the closing set and did a short back to back with Moodymann who’d been hanging out in the green room all night. The next morning I was on top of the mountain: what could possibly ever go wrong?
Naivety, affirmation, optimism. These are often the things you need to get started on your dream. I always wanted to open a space. A space with tactile things and a welcome atmosphere, a warm home away from home. The idea is so beautiful, what could possibly go wrong? The reality, spun over a decade, is that for all the wild nights and magical moments amongst the best people, there’s an enormous amount of grind to keep the show on the road.
Naivety, affirmation, optimism.
Stubbornness, nihilism, madness.
Some of the best advice I ever had was ‘don’t do the same thing forever’ from a still-spritely octogenarian relative. “Do something for 7-10 years then change track. Freshen it up. You can stay in the same area but you need to re-skill. Challenge yourself.”
Behind This Wall has survived because each stage has always felt like a step towards something else. The club night became the bar. The bar became a record label (briefly) in 2017. In 2019 we developed our CBD Honey syrups behind the bar. Each leg laid the foundation for the next.
Covid, and fatherhood, changed everything.
And now my change of tack is Sonic Tonics: born of the bar, which was born of the club, which was born of the blog. Each stage a meandering journey on a little curiosity; why can’t we do that?
And that is what is in a name. Depending on the day you ask, you’ll get a different explanation. There’s a line in Heroes by David Bowie:
“Standing, behind this wall”
Except there isn’t.
That’s what I mistakenly heard and decided to sing. Taking something and planting your own energy into it.
What’s Behind This Wall? Hope, naivety, optimism.
A platform, a ripple, a community.
The legacy of the bar, of running an idiosyncratic, independent space for a decade, is not one for profit of a financial kind. But it can be one for this, it can simply be;
love,
Alex^x