POPULAR Coventry music venue the Kasbah has celebrated its 21st birthday by looking back over some of its greatest moments and achievements.
1. 1999 – The club’s first sell out main room show featured Therapy – 100 per cent rock n roll!
2. 2000 – Legend and rock god Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin gracing the stage. Ginseng tea and Mcvities digestives followed his performance with completely captivating conversation.
3. 2002 – Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe’s first ever set in front of a live nightclub audience.
4. 2005 – Arctic Monkeys sold out the main room in 11 minutes flat. Hottest ticket in town.
5. 2006 – The Enemy signed straight after performing in the Left Wing and Tom Clarke took the title of their first album straight off the walls of the club’s band room.
‘We’ll Live and Die in These Towns’ – which was scrawled as graffiti and is still there to this day.
6. 2009 – Promoters Gamafunkula producing an eye-watering line up with household names including Chase and Status, Jaguar Skills, DJ Fresh, Sigma, Scratch Perverts and Ms Dynamite – to name but a few.
7. 2010 – Paul Weller joining Ocean Colour Scene live on stage in a rendition of Take Another Piece of My Heart. The club was roasting hot but everyone had the chills.
8. 2012 – Complaints from Sidney Stringer Comprehensive regarding the club’s exterior banners advertising Dubstep Supremos’ ‘Knife Party’.
Our refusal to take them down resulted in major coverage from local press and a radio interview explaining that whilst it was a party, all knives were strictly prohibited.
Happily, the club has since buried the hatchet with the school and they now hold their annual teachers’ Christmas party at the Kasbah.
9. 2013 – The club saw the younger brother of Connor Maynard – Jack Maynard – turn up to the front door expecting the VIP treatment, before he was unceremoniously sent to the back of the queue.
Jack decided to take his views to social media and tweet the Kasbah complaining about the way he’d been treated.
Later that week, the club held a night called ‘I love Connor’s Mum’ – whereby it was free entry if your name was Connor, and free entry and free drinks if your name was Connor and you brought your mum.
Neither Connor Maynard nor his mum attended, much to the Kasbah’s disappointment.
10. 2015 – The infamous Ronnie Pickering ‘booking’, which resulted in phone calls, emails and messages from the BBC, ITV and national press – not to mention numerous local newspapers and radio stations.
The Kasbah hoped it would go viral and it did.
The club was particularly pleased with itself as he was never actually booked to appear in the first place.
The team lost count of the number of threats they received for ‘booking’ the bully – the irony.
