Whenever I mention that I used to work as a doorman the reaction is nearly always the same. There is a look, bordering on disdain, accompanied by a dip of the shoulders as if to say so what.
Stating I worked as a doorman is not as most would think, a boast that I was a ‘hard man’. I was then and am certainly now, nothing of the sort. What I did possess and what set me into the world of doorwork, or Licensed Premises Supervisors, as we were later called, was the look. A fifty inch chest, shoulders that needed to be tucked in to fit through a door, a goatee, ear ring and tattoos. I looked the part, even if I never felt it. I also had what people termed as cold eyes. I could stare. I could ‘look’ hard. I never meant to. My blink reflex is not as advanced as most people so I could turn a stomach inside out with a stare. I often did and used this to my advantage more times than I care to remember.
Before I start dispelling the myth of the ‘bouncer’ I will state now what I perceive as the three main types of people who worked the doors, especially in my time. The first type is your archetypal, low IQ thug. They enjoy confrontation, enjoy the image and will look to provoke trouble far more often than they prevent it. These knuckle dragging plebs are actually in a massive minority within the trade but they are the ones people tend to remember. Whenever there is a documentary about the business of bouncers, these are the sort that get the camera time. If there is trouble on a night out you will see them in their element. Horrible, violent men who deserve the flak they get.
The second sort are the ‘lookers’. They spend more time in the mirror and the gym than the dojo,and know that working as a doorman will always attract women. I have seen stunningly beautiful women fall head over heels in love (personally, I think it is lust) with this type. They look the part for sure but when the trouble kicks off they are often the ones who are last on the scene. Women will say they don’t go for the rough guy look, trust me, many, many women do.
Finally there is a third type, the most common type. Big lads who get paid more for stopping fights than they would for barwork. The hours are the same so the logical thing to do is earn more money. I classed and still class myself in this category. These are of course generalisations and it was not uncommon for a doorman to traverse from the third type to the second, and even to the first. It was a seedy world and hard to retain your true self in such a macho world.
I never intended to be a doorman, not for one second. I had a loathing of violence, I had thrown about three punches in my life and to this day, have never taken a full on punch to the head as an adult. Why would anyone want to get punched? What satisfaction is there in that? I was a very introverted child. I kept myself to myself and when I was picked up from nursery school I was usually found sitting under the slide in Rhiwbina nursery reading a book. Socially awkward and incredibly shy. Then I found football. In the first year of junior school I was good enough to represent the school, as a striker. This elevated me to a position within the social network I was wholly uncomfortable with. I could no longer hide in the shadows. In the second year this standing saw me an object of ridicule and I took a real hiding on the playground. It started over a game of marbles but ended with me going home with a black eye, split lip and a pair of pants from the lost property where I had weed myself. When my father got home he was furious. He was an old school valleys boy and the thought of his son getting a beating and actually wetting himself must have cut him to the core. Within a week I was enrolled in my local Judo club. Within a year I was a green belt. I was good. I was deceptively strong even at my size and one thing was for sure, if I gripped hold of you, you were not getting away. It also boosted my confidence and gave me an undeserved and untested reputation as one of the school hard boys. Even at this age I was learning that sometimes the threat of violence is far more effective than the actual event itself.
I entered high school and went through the entire seven years without raising a fist in anger, other than on a rare appearance on the rugby field and one infamous night when Whitchurch High Schools finest defended their honour in the town of Schruns in Austria. Everybody threw a punch that night, it was bedlam. What did happen in high school though was that I made certain enemies. Enemies that would shape my life in a way I could never imagine.
There was one boy in particular who hated me. I didn’t and still to this day do not understand where this hatred came from but at any and every opportunity he would ridicule me and seek to embarrass me within my circle of friends. Many a time I could and probably should have dealt with the issue effectively but I really didn’t like the thought of getting into a fight. Two months on from leaving the sixth form the fight happened anyway. Provoked over a taunt about an elderly Jewish relative I uttered those immortal words that made a Wealdstone deviant world famous only last year, ‘YOU WANT SOME DO YOU’ ? We walked out of the local pub and it was at that stage I realised my error as I was honourable, he wasn’t. On the way out a sovereign ring connected with the back of my head. Thankfully my 1991 perm softened the blow but I was, possibly for the first time ever, truly incensed. A circle gathered and I will state what happened now not to impress as it brings me shame to recall it, but simply to describe my anger at what was the culmination of seven years of bullying.
As he squared up to me I launched a head butt which incapacitated him immediately and probably broke his nose. I had spent the last ten years heading footballs and my neck was like a bulls. As he tried to get up I threw a punch, not to the head but the stomach. Winded, blinded and unable to fight back I pleaded with his friends to end the fight as it was over. All that should happen now was for us to go our separate ways. They should have listened. Goaded and actually afraid of what could happen to him with his friends obviously shocked at the way things had gone, he launched a last attack at me. He also had a perm. Using my judo techniques he was dispatched over my shoulder right at the foot of a pebble dashed wall. At this stage I wanted so much for someone to intervene. This was not honour, it was not a chivalrous code of combat, it was brutal, bloody and totally pointless. Only when I threatened to rub this poor boys face over the the pebble dashed wall did his friends realise it was over.
I was horrified by my actions. I had been provoked, and I had seven years fury behind me but I genuinely though I was better than this. I had learned an unpalatable truth. I may hate violence, I may try and avoid it all costs but I was extremely good at it.
I shied away from the pub scene after this, choosing to work behind the bar rather than prop it up from the other side. A year passed before the Ferguson boys put me in their sights. It was around Xmas time and the younger brother of the Rhiwbina Krays was drunk. He was a doorman in Sloanes nightclub and was begging me to work that night to cover for him as he had seen what I had done the year before and had what people these days refer to as the minerals to do the job. It took me an hour before I decided to say yes.
I was terrified to be honest. I didn’t know what to do, or what to expect. I was scared of being found out as the weedy kid who couldn’t throw a punch. I was unfortunately , very close to that being the exact case. Standing on the dancefloor I watched the revellers dancing and doing what people do on a Saturday night. I was naïve though in so, so many ways. A guy came up to me and asked me what the time was. I saw nothing wrong in this. As I bent my head down I realised I was wearing a short sleeved top and had no watch on. This would have been obvious to the guy asking me for the time. In that split second that seems to last an eternity I brought my hand up in front of my face and felt the glass slice into my hand. To this day the rest of the evening remains a blur but I knew at the end of the night I had acquitted myself well. After a drink in the bar after the club was empty, and bandaging up my hand which to this day still carries the three inch scar, I was one of the boys. This was confirmed when I was given the number of City Security, the firm responsible for the security contracts in most of the cities clubs.
I attended an interview and when asked for qualifications began to reel off my GCSE’s. Neil McNamara just burst out laughing, and asked whether I had any convictions for violence or the like. I said no and that was that. I was given a spot at 9 pm on the door of The Wine Press with instructions to ask for Smiley. Some meetings in life are fortuitous beyond reasonable expectation and this was one such meeting. When I met Smiley I met a doorman who was in my mould. He was a gentleman who could talk the most idiotic of customers into calming down. I served a two year apprenticeship under this man and he is to this day someone I would still fight for. The Wine Press was a complete den of inequity, a place that carried some truly undesirable clientele. Thankfully, this taught me another lesson.
I had been working in Asda during the days as a butcher. I had the massive hots for an older girl who worked on the Video and Games counter. Long blonde hair (which goes against the grain as I am usually a sucker for brunettes), and a gap in between her front teeth that allowed for her to pronounce words with a cute lisp. I was too shy to ask her out and so my crush was just that, a crush. That very first night working in the Wine Press she turned up with her friends. Free from a working environment and encouraged by alcohol she made it very clear to me that this crush was a two way thing. I was amazed and thought that this was the perk of the job everyone was looking for. For the first hour she would not leave me alone but when she went to the toilet her place was taken by a woman who was so exquisitely beautiful I thought she must have walked in with a guide dog to be talking to me. When my crush walked out of the toilet she was confronted with me playing tongue chase with this beauty. I never, ever, and rightly, saw her again. She was a genuinely nice girl.
At the end of the evening I had agreed to go home with this girl and I have to stress here, this was very much against my character. We got paid cash in hand and when took our wages at the end of the night Smiley asked me how much cash I had on me. I told him I had about sixty pounds, give or take. He laughed and said I didn’t have enough. I laughed back and said I was driving and besides, the going rate even if I had needed a taxi was only a tenner at most back then. Again he laughed. Not enough money mate. Then it dawned on me. I had been talking to a woman who practiced the oldest profession in the world. NO I DIDN’T go home with her and from that night on I made a vow, which I kept, that I would never take a girl home from work. This served me well and was a principle I never reneged on.
During the next two years I was working up to four nights a week, as the Wine Press had some pretty amazing R n B music being played and Monday night was a spectacular evening. I also decided that my best place was as an actual doorman, as opposed to prowling the club waiting for a fight to start. I enjoyed the fresh air of standing on the door and whatever people think of doormen, the better doormen always wound up on the door itself. This way we could be far more selective of who entered the club. The wine press was a basement club. Walk down a flight of stairs and branch left to a bar area or branch right and head for the dancefloor. Where the stairs branched was the till for paying guests and a big red light. If that big red flight flashed the main door would be shut and you would run as fast as you can into the club because there was trouble. I hated that light. If a night went by without it flashing I was content. When it did you just never knew what awaited you downstairs in the dungeon. Only on one occasion did I have genuine reason to be scared. A party of twenty Ely lads had timed their entrance perfectly, three at a time and making sure a different doorman was on each time a group entered. They had a grudge against a previous doorman who had worked in the club and these were men, hard men and genuinely hard men, not the wannabe gangsta types who walk around these days with their jeans around their ankles allowing the world to see that their tackle is neither large nor housed in clean underwear.
It kicked off and then some. I left the club that night with a white dress shirt soaked in blood. I mean soaked. You could ring it out. That nobody took a fatal blow that night will always amaze me but bones were broken and at times the fighting was savage. Violence was something you became used to seeing, a desensitising of your own moral guidance though it was actually incredibly rare to see anything on the scale I just mentioned. I would say on average, out of a crowd of three hundred perhaps one fight a night may break out, usually over a girl, and usually between two people so drunk they could not really see each other let alone cause any damage. Ninety per cent of door work was preventative and inanely boring. Searching people at the club entrance, spotting signs of inebriation being covered up or drug use. Whilst I know a lot of doormen love their substances and powders, drugs were never my thing. I never tried them and I never wanted to. I was drug savvy though. With the price of drugs at that time, uncovering someone with enough weed for a spliff would result in a chuckle and an admonishing for the carrier prior to confiscation. The police weren’t interested and frankly neither were we. A club of stoners was far easier to control than a club full of alcohol fuelled testosterone high kids. The problems arose on those few occasions when you uncovered pills. This was a no no in any club at the time due to the high profile deaths of teens who had been spiked or taken ecstasy for the first time. You were not depriving a person of a sly smoke now, you were putting a spanner in the smallest cogs of a much larger business and you had to know what you were doing. More than one doorman took a beating outside of work hours for their zero tolerance approach. Don’t get me wrong, I am not naïve enough to think that a club would not allow this to happen. I worked a few nights in a major club in Newport to provide cover and was amazed at the laissez faire approach there to drugs. There were deals taking place in the toilets that Pablo Escobar would have thought big.
The thing is though, ninety per cent of the time the job was, as I said boring or simply disgusting. One evening in the Wine Press the red light of doom began to shine. Rushing downstairs there was no immediate sign of trouble but the DJ motioned me towards a young girl who was visibly upset. Apparently her friend was trapped in the toilet. That evening we had no female door staff working so I had to procure a barmaid to accompany me into the toilets as more than one doorman had become the victim of accusations of physical assault or worse. What I saw staggered belief. A woman who must have been at least twenty five stone had collapsed in the cubicle. She had vomit all over her, she had wet herself and rather charmingly, defecated as well, a rather rancid cherry on a big pile of shit cake. Before we could even begin to think along the lines of yuck, we had to check that she was still alive. She was but the process of dragging her through the fire exit and upstairs whilst calling an ambulance and ensuring her airways remained clear was challenging. This is the sort of thing we found ourselves doing more and more often, first stage triage for the ambulance service.
A lot of people raise the argument that we should never allow any form of drug or alcohol abuse within the club but the reality is, other than being impossible to stop, a lot of the time the imbibing of stupid quantities of alcohol or drugs is taken prior to the persons arrival at the club. When they enter the club the intoxicant is only beginning to take effect, or has yet to have any effect whatsoever. If a clubber is happy enough to insert a tablet inside his back passage or his foreskin a cursory search is not going to reveal the cache. Our role is to act as a security blanket to the clubbers, not to be their moral compass.
The drug scene is horrible in every sense but clubbing and the taking of drugs was so intertwined there was little anyone could actually do. Even the police with full powers of arrest and the ability to be armed with debilitating sprays and other equipment from their bat belt were as good as helpless. Seconded to work a ‘Time Flies’ event in City Hall we searched everybody coming through the doors but we knew that for every item we would find ten times that would make it through.
Another horrible aspect of drug culture was the feeling of invincibility it gave to the user. When a fight would break out, the levels of endurance shown were far beyond what you could realistically expect to deal with. Even broken bones that should prevent further aggression proved to be futile in some cases, but what could you do. You were paid to do a job and you did that job.
The most commonly used drug amongst doormen was steroids. It went with the territory as the bigger doormen tended to get the better jobs. I have to confess even I took one tablet. My old training partner had acquired a bag of ‘roids’ and after much debating I took a tablet. I vomited it back up a minute later. Not the scene for me at all and this road I knew was a dangerous one to embark upon. Never mind the obvious risks involved such as steroid rage, sterility and bitch tits this was, for someone who loved sport, a cheats way to attain results that could never be balanced in my own mind. I only trained for between a year and eighteen months but packed on a few stone in muscle during that period. I was already struggling to get clothes to fit me, especially in the thigh area, so my brief spell of weight training was over.
I did encounter several incidents of steroid rage and it was truly frightening to behold. This above all else was reason enough to never touch the stuff, but the extra capacity to train allowed for ALL muscles in the body to increase, including the muscles surrounding the heart. That only a few doormen die of heart attacks each year surprises me but the long term use of steroids is something for which there is no real adequate academic study when it comes to bodybuilders. A lot of people deny they take them but the old style anabolic steroids were so effective and carried so many side effects it was obvious who was ‘natural’ and who wasn’t. I am happy my nipples still stay roughly where they should!
So…… two years after starting in the Wine Press the company I worked for lost the contract for the club. Still employed by City Security I was asked if I fancied working in the Students Union. I managed a year, give or take there, but it was far worse than town. The thing with town was that people who went there were experienced in ‘going out’. Some of the behaviour in the Students Union showed the levels of immaturity you now had to deal with. This is not so much a criticism as an observation and one that is wholly understandable. Students were often away from their home town for the first time and many had studied so hard to get there, that Fresher’s Year was seen simply as an exercise in excessive behaviour. There was little in the way of hard core trouble, if any, but the number of incidents of stupidity caused by drink and drugs rose exponentially. Whereas in town you were on your toes as adults fought hard, here the opposite held true. Your issues were simpler things like people being so inebriated they couldn’t walk, falling asleep at the bar or stripping off! It was child-minding. Nothing more, nothing less. I shouldn’t have taken it for granted, I should have had enjoyed the rest break. What followed next was shocking.
Bridgend, suicide capital of the UK. There are two good things about it, the road out and, ok, there is one good thing about it. A new club was being opened and the owners wanted a fresh set of faces that could help out on the door. I was selected as one of them. I had to pick up a new doorman on the scene, who I will refer to simply as Mr B, on the clubs opening night. At the time I was driving a Vauxhall Cavalier. Mr B was the biggest man I had ever seen. I had to open the window just so he could let his shoulders relax. this was the ultimate steroid head. He was an Essex lad. Now for those who remember the story about the ‘Essex Boys’, immortalised in the film ‘Rise of the Footsoldier’, they will recall the three lads who were shotgunned to death in a Landrover. Mr B was ill that night, or there would have been four. This showed the lunacy of the role I was playing. I still liked the comfort of my feather pillow and writing poetry, this man should have been killed! As it turned out he was a really decent guy, not my first choice as ‘Call a friend’ if I had gotten on Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, but a good laugh and very down to Earth. We paired up with a few local bouncers, two of whom were infamous brothers in the Ogmore Valley. One was a killer, he had served time for it, the other more a lothario but remarkably large. There was a top football boy called Robbie who I hit it off with straight away and a rather weedy looking kid who ran the security firm down that neck of the woods.
It was like the Wild West. For the first six months every weekend would be a fight from beginning to end. I started at nine and was the main doorman. I was strict and upset all the local girls as there was no way anyone would get in on my guestlist. I learned my lesson that very first night in the Wine Press after all. Respect my mind you had a chance, stare at my trousers and offer me sex, no chance. In those six months a horrible realisation dawned upon me. I was actually a hard man, through chance rather than design. I did a lot of damage, always in self defence I hasten to add, and after six months things began to calm down. Then there was the night I met Kevin Kitten. Clearly drunk, I saw him stick his hand up a girls skirt outside the club whilst in the queue. That was not on. He was turned away and I advised him that if the young girl wanted to press charges I would stand as a witness. This clearly irked him. For the next five hours he stood on the other side of the road drawing his finger across his throat. I even took the rather cowardly option of stepping inside the club for half an hour to try and defuse the situation.
I came back out and he was still there. The brothers offered to kill him but I actually thought they may and besides, he was now standing on the bonnet of my car. In a scene that would have been comical had it not been so serious, I walked towards him, and him to me. The macho standoff. All that was missing was a poncho and a Spaghetti Western soundtrack playing in the background. We stared and I looked at his shoulders. Any punch begins at the shoulder, look for that slight movement and you can counter. I could if needed, hit hard, but I always hit fast before grappling any opponent. Looking at the shoulders was a mistake as this kitten could bite, literally. The pain as he bit into my shoulder was searing. What a twat. One throw later and there was a flapping arm so no punches to worry about from him and then I kicked him. I could kick a football a long, long way. If his leg had been a football it would have sailed all the way to Rest Bay. Instead it just crumpled. Fight over. Then the police came over. I was bleeding but he was literally broken. I had never been in trouble with the police, ever. I was terrified that I was going to get done for this though, as I knew I had injured him, whether it was deserved or not. The policeman leaned into me and whispered ‘Well done son, he’ had that coming for months’. Now, in the bouncing world this was a great victory that would be celebrated. I cried all the way home. I hate violence and the need to excel at it on this occasion still haunts me to this day for I know what I can do if pushed to the limit. Biting was that limit.
This incident, other than a mass brawl with Maesteg Celtic Rugby Club, which was a bloody hard night, was the last notable action I ever saw as a bouncer. I was going one of two ways, a world where I would be rich and dead within five years or the path that was marked for me, hard bloody work, poor pay but self respect. That week I applied to join the RAF.
I quit the doors a few weeks later, the trouble had been quelled and the buzz had gone. We were now expected to escort ‘famous acts’ onto a stage to perform in front of ever diminishing crowds. My very last night as a doorman saw me fight off the appreciative masses of all thirteen fans as Black Lace belted out Agadoo and pushed their pineapples from a tree. It was over.
The truth is that everything above is true, totally. There is also a whole lot I left out too, the private parties we provided security for and the escort runs you carried out for faces from time to time. I worked in all the major clubs in Cardiff at some point, and a lot of the lesser ones too.
Could I do it again? Possibly, in the right environment and in the right circumstances but I am 42 this year, not 22. As fast as I think I can still close space, there are kids a whole lot faster and besides, I hate fighting and today is a whole lot more violent than those days.
I don’t carry many scars and my injuries were slight compared with some. A few glass wounds, a bite mark, and one broken leg. Thirty people fighting on the stairs in Astoria when they all tumbled at once, on my leg. It snapped cleanly thank god. The biggest injuries I carried were the times I was verbally abused and called stupid, thick or beefcake, a name that haunted me from my schooldays. I am an intelligent, articulate man, I did what I did because I had to.
For all those who have preconceived ideas of the Neanderthal thugs we were as doorman, you very rarely saw us when you were sober. We were, to paraphrase Jack Nicolson, ‘the truth that couldn’t be handled’. You needed us. We saved you from the nasty people on more occasions than you could ever dream of. For every drink that was spiked there were a hundred that were prevented. For every fight your friend got into there were twenty we stopped without you knowing. We were intuitive, instinctive and wise to what we did. There are always rogue doormen but for most of us, we covered your arse when you couldn’t stand, we put you in taxis when you were going to walk home alone because your best friend had snogged the man you wanted that night. We were doormen once, and young.
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