Competition from the Nightingale
1981
"The Nightingale, which was in Camp Hill then (1969), moved to outside the Villa Ground, by the Holt pub (in 1975), for years, then (in 1981) they moved to Thorp Street, so I had to decide what I would have to do to keep the punters coming out of town. So, in the Grosvenor, I painted the disco black, put up iron bars like grills, and turned it into a seedy place for the leather guys, put a dark room in the back with shutters, so there was a gap".
"One story is that one Saturday night I was standing by the disco console by the shutters, and about fifty people had gone through there, and I was thinking, it must be f****ing packed in there, so I went in, and it was empty! Someone had found the door to the gardens, and everybody was shagging down in the gardens, leant across the swimming pool, swimming in the pool, all in the bushes down the bottom of the garden!"
Contributed by: Keith Campbell, 58