Josh Burt

Like all things in life, going to gigs has a sell-by date. I realised this the other week when I went to see a hip young retro soul star and realised that his take on ‘retro’ was almost an exact reworking of my young adulthood. Reality hit that night, like a cold fist of doom. Are you doomed like me? Here are the signs that it might be time to hang up the band T-shirt and stop going to see live music once and for all... You want to stand right at the back When you first went to gigs, you would swarm to the front of the crowd so you could hurl yourself around the moshpit until sweat was literally ejaculated from every pore of your body. It was all about being at one with the crowd. Now you amble in nervously and stand right at the back, as near to the exit as possible, wondering what to do with your hands. You have no idea what to wear Gigs were once freeing and liberating. You could turn up in swimming trunks and a gimp mask and someone would just pat you on the bum and hand you a drink, no big deal. Now you spend hours beforehand dicking around with neck scarves and statement hats, worried that everyone will sniff out the imposter in their midst and demand that the music be halted until you leave. You forget to get smashed beforehand Rule number one of going to gigs is that you Instagram them (obviously). But rule number two is that you swerve the gigantic queues at the bar by getting a few down you beforehand and arriving with enough petrol in the tank to keep you going for

Behold, some cocktails from the past. Some of these would be welcomed back with open arms, others are best consigned to the hungry drains of history. Long Island iced tea   A photo posted by Savannah (@twisted_savvy) on Jun 1, 2016 at 4:01pm PDT For so long, the go-to cocktail for impatient people who just wanted the night to hurry up so they could get plastered and then vomit as soon as it was socially appropriate (around 10pm onwards). The lemon juice and cola was deftly added at the end to distract you from the fact that you’d just asked a barman to pour about 27 different spirits into the same glass for you to drink. Drink three of these and you’ll be speaking fluent Japanese, five and you’ll be naked on a bus crying incoherently. Screwdriver   A photo posted by Catherine Khvan (@catherinekhvan) on Apr 16, 2016 at 1:34pm PDT There’s nothing exactly wrong with a screwdriver, it’s just that calling it a cocktail seems a bit overly grand. It has two elements – vodka and orange, and in most sane environments it’s now known as ‘a vodka and orange’. Some of you might remember it as a key component in an episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ when an American couple orders one, and then Basil gets into a right old tizzy about it. Hilarious stuff. White Russian   A photo posted by Skinny Jeans (@therealskinnyjeans13) on May 31, 2016 at 8:32pm PDT For a while in the late 1990s it was impossible to go to a student house party without some moron wandering around in a dressing gow

Hipsters and millennials are the objects of constant ridicule, but maybe that’s because we see ourselves in them When I was a teenager, if you wanted to get served alcohol you’d go to The Anchor, a once-popular pub that had come to rely on the pocket money of underage school children to stay afloat. There was just one other regular there, a fat old man called Maurice who’d been sitting in the same chair, possibly drinking the same pint, for 900 years. We’d flock in every Saturday night with our freshly gelled hairstyles and our grotesque sense of entitlement, and we’d hog the pool table, shout over the jukebox, get shitfaced and start either crying or fingering each other. Maurice, meanwhile, would sit in this smog-cloud of Lynx and chaos like a hippo stuck in a wheelie bin, thinking the world had ended. Yet whatever living hell he was experiencing, whatever helicopter sounds and explosions were going off in his head, I had literally no sympathy for him. It was our time, our pub, and, if anything, he was the interloper, the one with the real sense of entitlement. Each weekend, he’d puff out his cheeks and look at the ceiling, perplexed at the state of his local, but others his age (with gout and impossible-to-erect penises) had had the sense to relocate. Maurice was marooned on the wrong island because he’d ignored the warning flares and refused to board a series of perfectly serviceable escape vessels. For a couple of years we ran riot at The Anchor, then many of us went on

Obviously the most overt sign that you’re in a London speakeasy is that you found out about it and went to it, because you’re cool or because you know cool people, or because your inner compass somehow locates hip unusual places without you realising. But once you’re inside, if you’re in any doubt that you’re literally drinking on the edge of the edgiest edge, here are a few things to tick off… The staff look like they’re in fancy dress Over the last few years the trademark look of the professional barman has veered dramatically from Tom Cruise in ‘Cocktail’ to Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘There Will Be Blood’, or, in extremely cool bars, Christian Bale in ‘The Machinist’. It’s quite a stark shift. Other influential bartending style icons can be found in Charles Dickens novels, French folklore, wartime, or ‘The Addams Family’. If they’re a guy, expect braces and a beard the size of a garden hedge, if they’re a girl, look out for a pudding bowl haircut and sooty eyes, or some kind of knotted headscarf and the reddest lipstick you have ever seen. There are just numbers next to cocktails Here’s a fact: pound signs are for squares, losers, and geeks. A cool cocktail bar has no time for this kind of colonial bullshit, actually putting the items on the menu into the local currency. No, your cocktail is just ‘8’. Eight what? Pounds, probably, but you could try bucks if you really wanted to. Or Prussian Francs, which aren’t a real thing. During Prohibition, sales of wall-mounted moose head

As previously mentioned, being a bartender isn’t nearly as fun as it looks, and one of the reasons for that is that they have to deal with people – namely, the general public. Everyone knows that the general public is a spinning lottery full of freaks, weirdos, sex pests and Campari drinkers. We put it to a small mob of barmen (and women) to tell us the question that chills their bones on a lively Friday night. For job security reasons, they all asked to remain anonymous. 'Lemonade spritzer, please!' 'Spritzers, shandies, they’re the bane of my life!' says our Anonymous Woo Woo Maker. 'Hard-working manufacturers have spent their lives crafting their drinks to taste a certain way, then some punter comes along and chucks a load of lemonade into it. My heart breaks a little bit every time.' 'How was your day?' 'Believe it or not, I can’t stand small talk,' says our Anonymous Long Island Ice Tea King, 'but if someone is alone at the bar waiting for someone, they’ll often think it’s okay to kill time by boring the barman with their mundane stories. What they don’t realise is that I’ve got about a thousand things to do – those tiny cherries don’t chop themselves in half!' 'What time do you get off?' 'Because you interact with people, because you’re in front of them, and because you’re doing them a great service, some idiots will assume you’re fair game,' says our Anonymous Maker of Old Fashioneds, 'but you’re not. I might smile when I take your order, but don’t take that to automat

You probably think serving up stylish cocktails for a living is one extended good dream, with the occasional crazy weekend and free access to the best sex you can imagine. In some ways, you’re probably right—there are some crazy bartender tales to be heard. But in many ways, you are also very, very wrong (think: crazy cocktail trends, loads of confusing bartender tools, etc). Being a bartender can suck; read on to find out why.   They have to deal with drunk people You might think that you’re really funny and charming when you’re drunk, and in the company of other drunk people, maybe you are. Maybe it really is cool, the way you get a little sassy and up the volume of your voice by a couple of decibels. But to the put-upon bartender, run ragged by the boozing crowds, you’re an absolute nightmare.   Photograph: Shutterstock       They have to work weekends A bartender’s working life is the mirror image of yours. You live for the weekend, when you can take your bra or underwear off and throw your head back in wild abandon, while the bartenders puts their business suit on and go into work. The bar is their boardroom; you are their client. Nothing about this metaphor is fun.   They get awful song requests, even though they're not the DJ Drinking tends to make us sentimental, which in turn makes us long to hear shitty songs like “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” or “November Rain.” And instead of keeping our requests to ourselves, we plead with our bartenders to blast these u

You probably think that serving up stylish cocktails for a living is one long lazy float down the Nile, with the occasional banging weekend, and free access to all of the best sex you can imagine. And, in some ways you’re probably right. But, in many ways you are also very, very wrong. Being a bartender can suck balls, and here’s a small list of why that is. They have to deal with drunk people You might think that you’re really funny and charming when you’re drunk, and in the company of other drunk people, perhaps you are. Perhaps it’s groovy the way you go a bit boss-eyed and up the volume of your voice a couple of decibels. But to the put-upon bartender, run ragged by the barking hounds, you’re a bloody nightmare.   Probably should've stopped serving this guy after he did that wee in the plant pot.Photo: Shutterstock   They have to work weekends A bartender’s working life is the reverse mirror image of yours. You live for the weekend, when you can take your bra or underpants off and throw your head back in wild abandon, while the bartender puts their business suit on and goes into work. The bar is their boardroom, you are their client. Nothing about this metaphor is fun. They have to deal with competitive colleagues flaring next to them They just want to calmly pour you your drink and get on with earning a crust, but the doofus next to them is throwing limes behind his back and catching them in glasses of ice, and then pouring shots from ridiculous heights while people gi

It’s a rite of passage for every new generation of Londoner to wait for 15-20 years before they start moaning about how great everything used to be, and now, having been here for almost precisely 17 years, it’s my turn. I was once a regular at all of the below places, where I’d pick up hearty lunches or flagons of ale for tuppence before jumping on a horse-drawn omnibus back to my £10-a-week townhouse right next to Buckingham Palace. Or something like that. Anyway, here are three brilliantly cheap Soho venues I dearly miss. Café Emm, Frith Street CaféEmm was quite simply the greatest restaurant of all time, if you happened to be a restaurant novice in your early twenties with barely any money. The portions were bloody enormous, the food was entirely edible, and for a while it was the perfect date restaurant if you wanted to impress a chick by showing her a massive fishcake. Then a few years ago, for no good reason, they shut it down. Now it’s probably a tattoo studio or a bar where they put balsamic vinegar in cocktails. Gossips, Dean Street If you want to spend the night in a good basement club in the middle of Soho these days, you’ll first have go through a full prison-grade cavity search and fork out a grand for a table. Not so in the early 2000s, when you could stumble into Gossips on Dean Street to do some drunken interpretive dance to The Who and barely break a twenty. Older readers might even remember the days when legendary DJs like David Rodigan or Tim Westwood used

Until January last year, I was just another guy in his thirties living in London – it was an absolute breeze, a really excellent, no-worries, alcohol-fuelled breeze. Then I had a baby (or, to be more specific, my wife did while I watched) and the wind changed – I realised that bringing up a child in London actually makes you worry about lots of things. Here are just a few of them.  Can we honestly afford to live here? Every time you step out through your front door in London, it’s like subjecting your pockets to a million little hands all grasping for money. Between ridiculous things like food and travel, sometimes I find I’ve burnt through a £20 note before I’ve even reached the end of the street. And you know what else costs money? Kids. The numbers just don’t add up. Will he get bullied by a kid called Noah? Being bullied is always horrible, but in the old days at least the daily rigmarole was doled out by dreadful kids with tough names like Dean or Barry. But getting a kicking from a lad called Noah? I don’t know if you can ever bounce back from that. Are we just showing him loads of things he’ll never have? If you stand still in the middle of a London street for more than 30 seconds, all of the houses in your eye line will have gone up by five grand. Are we setting our little cherub up for massive disappointment when he realises he’ll have to live in a wheelbarrow by some bins when he moves out? What if we lose him on the Underground? We’ve all got off the tube at the wr