The Single Greatest Pub in the History of Pubs

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ost people find a pub they regard as the best pub in the world; the difference with me is that I really did. The Shepherds, on the corner of Archway Road and Shepherd’s Hill, in Highgate, London, became a sort of home from home for Nick Frost and me, when we moved into a nearby house in 1999. From the outside, and indeed from within, it appeared to be a somewhat old-fashioned London boozer, lacking any of the gastro pretensions displayed by so many of the area’s watering holes. The carpet was old and sticky, the jukebox a dearth of choice and the clientele an odd mixture of quiet drinkers and rowdy young men.

Behind the bar under the perpetual watch of a grizzled old German shepherd called Bobby was John the landlord, a gruff old Goonens who’d manned the taps in several drinking establishments over his long career as a publican. His wife Bernie, a mercurial Irish matriarch who would glam up for her weekly excursions to Brent Cross Shopping Centre, worked ‘front of house’ with an irresistible charm that made her affection something to strive for and be proud of. Together with their daughters, Michelle and Vanessa, they ran the pub as a family affair, with everyone living on-site. This removed the tension from closing time, since the staff only had a staircase to climb to get home.

Nick was the first to go in, immediately loving the pub’s simplicity, its lack of frills and transparent attempts to claw at custom. Sitting in the corner he would enjoy a few pints while people-watching, becoming familiar with the regulars, an eclectic mix of people whose drinking patterns were often as regimented as they were prodigious.

I initially resisted the idea of going into the Shepherds, dismissing Nick’s persistent patronage as a truculent expression of his tendency to champion the underdog; Panda Pops over Coca-Cola, shop-brand ketchup over Heinz, The Fifth Element oyer Battleship Potemkin. Eventually, though, I succumbed and joined him for an evening session.

That first night, we sat together near the door and watched as the various patrons came and went. After a few visits we began to give them nicknames, to amuse ourselves. There was Rugby Jim, a talkative regular who always switched the TV over to his sport of choice; Pollit Bureau, so called because he looked faintly Russian; Peter Stuyvesant, an always sharply dressed septuagenarian with a walking stick who would usually come in five minutes before time was called. There was White Man-Bruised Man, Fat Eye Blind, and a middle-aged woman with long blonde hair who Nick insisted was a retired stripper (his name for her was Fried Gold).

Thursday night was quiz night, which Bernie would host with show-business panache, even if there were only a few people in. Nick and I joined in one Thursday and did fairly well, probably because there were only three teams. Nevertheless, we decided to make it a weekly engagement, determined to win the first prize of eight free pints or the equivalent in spirits. Not that the prize ever really mattered; it was bragging rights we were after.

Little by little, the Shepherds worked its way into our affections. After about six months we were accepted among the regulars and rarely went anywhere else. We earned the right to call John and Bernie by their first names as well as making friends with the people whose comic monikers became obsolete in the face of their acquaintance.

A few months into our residency, I kicked off my shoes and walked up to the bar in just my socks, a symbolic gesture intended to show Nick just how ensconced we had become. The Shepherds felt like an extension of our own living room, giving a sudden clear definition to the phrase ‘public house’.

We brought our friends to the pub and they brought others. Word spread about the quiz and within a year, Thursday nights were packed with teams eager to participate. Our eulogising of the pub may have contributed at first, but it was Bernie’s irresistible charm and John’s solid management that ensured visitors returned with friends in tow. Closing time was always a sketchy affair and Saturday-night sessions would often extend into the small hours. On several occasions I slept next to Bobby the German shepherd’s eventual replacement, Henry, having chatted endlessly to old John, the gentleman formerly known as Peter Stuyvesant. Despite my occasional naps, John’s company was always entertaining and represented something magical about the Shepherds, which elevates it above any pub I have ever entered before or since.

It had the distinct feeling of family about it, with John and Bernie at the centre of a rare mix of social types and personalities. We tend to stick to our various groupings on nights out, but the Shepherds seemed to affect its drinkers in such a way that everyone soon became friends. Whether it was a cursory greeting or an entire night’s conversation, the connection between regulars was tangible, such was the unifying power of the unique atmosphere. A bit like the Queen Vic in EastEnders but without the constant bouts of murder.

Our visits to the Shepherds quickly became habitual, eradicating the need for any other social meeting place. Why go anywhere else, when we had the single greatest drinking establishment sat almost literally on our doorstep? Edgar became increasingly exasperated at my and Nick’s reluctance to forgo the succour of our beloved local in favour of the bright lights of Soho or even nearby Islington where he lived at the time. It became something of a sticking point with friends and girlfriends that we never really wanted to travel beyond the tobacco-stained walls of this unassuming pub and the argument always returned to our dogged, one-word defence - why?

Friends who visited the pub usually fell under its spell and joined us even if it meant a cab, bus or Tube ride, particularly on quiz night when the bar would heave with teams from all over London. We made new friends and found ourselves welcomed deeper and deeper into John and Bernie’s affections. Spaced had started to air on Channel 4 and Bernie was extremely proud that a couple of ‘her boys’ were on television. As our faces became more recognisable, the pub was a haven from the unnerving sense of visibility that accompanies working in the public eye, since nobody in the pub apart from Bernie seemed to give a shit. This feeling of safety attracted other actors and musicians who loved the sense of normality that pervaded, and the pub soon felt like a small creative hub, bustling with comics, actors and musicians eating toasties, feeding the fruit machine and playing killer up at the dartboard.

In 2001, the then fairly fledging indie outfit Coldplay performed a small acoustic gig in the corner one evening and raised £300 for the Whittington Hospital baby unit. I had become friends with singer Chris Martin a year or so before through my new girlfriend, Maureen, who worked as a publicist for Sony Music. I had accompanied her to a showcase gig at the Millennium Dome, where she was presiding over press duties for the band Toploader who were headlining the event. Coldplay were on the bill, and after the show, Chris sidled up and expressed an affection for the sketch show Big Train, in which I had appeared in 1998. This pleased me enormously since I had already bought his band’s first album, Parachutes, and seen them perform a set on the indie stage at the V Festival earlier that year.

I liked Chris immediately. He was friendly, funny and infuriatingly self-effacing, something he remains to this day, despite his band’s phenomenal success. He invited Maureen and me to the closing gig of their tour at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, which we gladly attended. At the after-show party, I escorted Chris to a nearby cash machine where he admitted he had just wanted to take a breath from all the attention he was getting at the party. It’s funny in light of what was about to happen to think of Chris struggling with the notion of success at such an early stage in his career. Parachutes had done well both critically and in terms of sales, but the band was only a promising proposition at this point and a somewhat unlikely candidate for global domination.

That night Chris came back to our Highgate home and watched This Is Spinal Tap with Maureen and me, cementing what was to become a lasting friendship. Chris began to join us at the pub, which delighted Bernie no end, since the band’s rise was meteoric from this point. Their second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, debuted on the Shepherds’ jukebox two weeks before it was released into the world, and to this day, Bernie and her family feature regularly on Coldplay guest lists.

By now, Nick and I were helping to mark the Thursday quizzes in the kitchen out back, such was our deep affiliation to John and Bernie. But mostly, life for us at the Shepherds consisted of Nick and me simply sitting and discussing the world while sipping pints or ploughing pound coins into the Simpson fruit machine. Ideas were born and plans were hatched as we luxuriated amid the matchless comfort of our surroundings. On Monday nights, we would sit up at the bar and watch University Challenge with John, usually the sole customers. We would throw out answers at the TV, usually falling short of

anything Jeremy Paxman would accept as correct. On the odd occasion that we came good on a starter for ten, John would look at us both with an expression of admiration and declare us to be a couple of geniuses.

One of our frequent topics of conversations in the Shepherds was what we would do in the event of a full-scale zombie apocalypse. We would discuss the hypotheses in great detail, tracking our movements from witnessing a stray deadhead in the garden, through running along the rooftops of Archway Road to Pax Guns in order to retrieve a brace of ordnance, then commandeering a vehicle to take us to our choice of hideout. These varied from abandoned castles to Wembley Stadium, the centre of which Nick insisted would afford us a clear view of any stray zombies that breached the perimeter and give us a workable farm space to grow crops for sustenance.

However, this scenario did rely on us being able to get our hands on a vehicle, which we could get into and start without an ignition key. This meant, realistically, the most feasible plan was to remain in the area and the most obvious place to hunker down was the pub. With heavy, bolt-locking doors, thick windows obscured by always drawn curtains which stopped just above head height, to allow light into the bar, survivors could easily move around inside without attracting the attention of the walking dead, stumbling about in the street outside. Aside from an enormous supply of fear-anaesthetising booze, the pub was well stocked with frozen food, and the sandwich toaster alone would provide tasty snacks, as long as the electricity stayed on.

The idea was so inviting, we half hoped the recently dead would start returning to life and attacking the living, if only to give us the justification to remain in the Shepherds all day, every day, without feeling guilty.

Not surprisingly, aspects of our extended fantasy made it into the screenplay for Shaun of the Dead, as Edgar and I readily ran with the dead ball, feeding it into the storyline as the solution Shaun proposes in his attempts to save his loved ones. Edgar’s own annoyance at our lack of social imagination became the source of Liz’s frustration with Shaun, positing the pub at the very heart of the film as the cause of distress and the answer to their problems. Although causing the downfall of the group, the pub does ultimately facilitate their survival and proves a better solution to that of the rival group, who are eventually whittled down to just one.

Shaun of the Dead was written during the height of our love affair with the Shepherds. Its influences on the film are numerous and not just in terms of the plot. The landlord and lady in the film were called John and Bernie, the jukebox had a tendency to self-select if it got bored of underuse and Ed’s improvised descriptions of the locals were lifted straight from our early days as strangers in the lounge bar. We might even have kept the pub’s name were we not in need of a plot point that provided Shaun’s team with a gun. Calling our screen pub the Winchester enabled us to mount an old-fashioned rifle over the bar, which, at a crucial point in the story, reveals itself to be a fully working firearm. By sheer coincidence, the next pub down from the Shepherds on Archway Road is called the Winchester, but it has no relevance or connection to our film, despite what you might have heard.

The Shepherds gave us our central location and character motivation, and served to consolidate the film’s singularly British identity, having such an iconic national staple as the local pub at its heart. Parts of the film were conceived and even written within the Shepherds’ walls and a tour of the cellar, laid on by a very proud Bernie, enabled us to design a climax that permitted Shaun and Liz to make a credible escape from the burning building above.

In 2002, John and Bernie retired and moved back to Ireland, having decided to leave their pub-running days behind. The last quiz was perhaps the most crowded I have ever seen and chairs were brought down from John and Bernie’s living space to accommodate an excess of hopeful teams.

On their last night, the locals old and new gathered to give the couple a rousing send-off. To ensure their memories of the place remained ever-fresh, we commissioned Stuart Free,is a talented local artist, to paint a picture of the pub which they could take with them to Ireland. Stuart’s paintings centre around buildings and architecture that people see daily and barely glance at. By painting them in sharp detail, he reveals complex and beautiful urban images, finding aesthetic wonder in even the shabbiest shopfront or graffiti-scrawled cafe. His rendering of the Shepherds completely captures the heart of the place in bright angular reds and blacks, set in contrast against the bright green of a nearby tree. Looking carefully, one can notice a number of clever in-jokes. At the doorway, in handsome repose, sits Henry the German shepherd; above the door a sign which read ‘Hot and Cold Food’ is altered to read ‘Hot and Coldplay’; and barely visible through the window a young man in a baseball cap sits at a table with his girlfriend, nursing a pint. The painting was presented to John and Bernie at the end of a wonderful and poignant evening and hangs in the hallway of their home just outside Dublin.

The pub changed hands and became the Boogaloo, a self-proclaimed juke joint that skews towards a younger, more fashionable clientele and which has honoured the site by becoming a hugely successful and popular hangout with regular quizzes and live music, attracting a whole new raft of punters and artistic types. In fact, the venue seems to be a magnet for artistic significance, far outstripping any of its neighbours in terms of contribution to the cultural history of the area.

Never since have I felt such a connection and affection for a pub as I did with the Shepherds and I miss it even now. I don’t ever go into the Boogaloo, not because I object to it in any way - from what I hear, it’s brilliant - rather because to drink within those walls again would be like going out on a date with a beloved ex and her brand-new boyfriend or, worse still, making love to an ex and finding it hard to concentrate because of all the new moves she’s picked up since you were last together. The building didn’t fall down when it stopped being the Shepherds but then it was never the building that stole my heart. It was the unique and alchemical combination of people, atmosphere, simplicity and spirit (as well as wine and beer).

The clientele didn’t alter entirely after the change-over. Old John continued to prop up the bar and David Soul, who had come in a number of times before the era ended, reportedly still drank there, perhaps because of the easy-going nature of the other punters that allowed him to be just another guy at the bar rather than Ken Hutchinson, although I couldn’t help smiling when he walked in, recalling the big poster of him and Paul Michael Glaser that dominated the wall of my bedroom at Nan’s house. Strange that a number of childhood obsessions should converge on the same location, but that’s the great thing about pubs: all life is there.

Meeting the Maker

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haun of the Dead was released in the UK in April 2004 and premiered in America six months later, after an extensive press tour in the US which required Edgar, Nick Frost and myself to visit seventeen cities in eighteen days, including our first visit to the San Diego Comic-Con, where I met Carrie Fisher and Lou Ferrigno.

Leia and the Hulk weren’t the only heroes I was lucky enough to meet that weekend. Both legendary make-up FX guru Greg Nicotero and Darn of the Dead actor Ken Foree (whose name we used for the electrical shop in which Shaun works) were in attendance and we had heard both had seen the movie. We met Ken first, an imposing bear of a man, busily signing autographs for the fans who lined up to meet him. We approached him fairly gingerly and introduced ourselves. Much to our blushing delight, he stood up and embraced us with alarming enthusiasm, which sent us giddy. This man was Peter Washington from Darn of the Dead, the tough, resourceful SWAT team member who ultimately rejects suicide in favour of kung fu kicking his way through a crowd of hungry zombies to join Gaylen Ross’s Fran aboard a helicopter for the film’s hugely affecting and open-ended conclusion. We were beside ourselves with geekish glee as we made a date to meet him at our screening later.

Then we met Greg Nicotero, acolyte of the great Tom Savini in his youth and now a renowned and respected FX technician in his own right, having founded the KNB Effects Group with Howard Berger in 1988 and emerging as one of the most prolific and successful companies of its kind in Hollywood. Greg not only worked on one of my and Edgar’s all-time favourite horror comedies, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, he also worked on and appeared in Romero’s Day of the Dead, playing one of Captain Rhodes’s military goons who, crucially for me as a fan, winds up in Dr Logan’s lab as the conscious decapitated head.

Both Greg and Ken were hugely supportive of our film, which meant the world to us. To have the approval of these two men, both of whom had made a big impression on us growing up, was, as another tragic mother killer said, ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’.» The only greater honour we could have possibly received was bestowed on us a few months prior to Comic-Con, when I picked up the phone to George Romero in the kitchen of my north London flat. His voice sounded distant but familiar as he told me how much he had enjoyed Shaun of the Dead, and a huge wave of relief and pride spread through me. He seemed genuinely enthused and flattered that we had written him this cinematic love letter. Amid my ecstatic joy at receiving his approval, I offered him an apology, the response to which I will never forget. It went something like this:

Me: George, I gotta say I’m sorry about the whole speedy reanimation thing. I know in Dam it takes Roger at least thirty minutes before he comes back, but for narrative purposes we had to have Philip reanimate almost immediately, so that bit was a little different...

George: You know what, Simon, I didn’t mind.

A year later, Edgar and I boarded a plane bound for Toronto, heading for the set of Land of the Dead, George’s fourth instalment in his series, which as I write boasts six chapters, completed by Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead respectively. The situation had arisen entirely through happenstance. Greg Nicotero, who was overseeing the make-up effects for the film, had mentioned in an interview that he thought Edgar and I should make cameo appearances in Land of the Dead as zombies. This quickly got back to George, when a journalist asked him if it was true, and George replied in characteristically laid-back fashion, ‘Sure, I guess.’

So on a misty night, in an enormous rail depot just outside Toronto, Edgar and I met our hero in the flesh for the first time and were overjoyed to notice he was wearing a Shaun of the Dead badge on his jacket.21

The next day, we reported to the make-up trailer to have our zombie make-up applied. Both Edgar and I had been head-cast at the KNB workshop in Van Nuys, California, a few months before so that Greg could prepare our latex facial appliances personally. Knowing how much of a fan of Day of the Dead’s Bub I was, Greg had found the original moulds for Howard Sherman’s make-up and modelled them on to my head cast so that the face he glued over mine was that of my all-time favourite zombie.

If ever there was a moment for making use of the ESTB, it was now. To have stepped from the device into my living room made up as Bub, as I watched Day of the Dead at the tender age of sixteen would have been so much fun. Well, at least for the future me. The younger me would have probably fainted or else ruined a perfectly good pair of skin-tight black jeans.

Working with Romero was an extraordinary pleasure and it was hard to not gush every time I sat next to him at the cluster of on-set monitors referred to quaintly as the video village. I wanted to tell him exactly how much his work had meant to me over the years and the effect it had had on me as a person let alone as an artist.

When it came to shooting our scene, the enormity of the moment did not escape me or indeed Edgar. Rather than just be random faces in a shuffling zombie gang, George had given us our own specific moment. In a bustling shanty and allegorical township in the shadow of an exclusive fortified apartment complex called Fiddler’s Green, a busy marketplace offered various zombie-based entertainment for anaesthetised survivors looking for a thrill. One such attraction gave the chance to have your picture taken with a zombie. Edgar and I, in full KNB zombie make-up, complete with scleral contact lenses and fake teeth, dangled from chains, gnashing and moaning at grim fun seekers as they posed for photos. Internally, I couldn’t help but once again channel Howard Sherman’s Bub, even between takes when it felt somehow easier to remain in character. Masks are extremely powerful dramatic tools for actor and audience alike, since they completely alter the wearer both visually and, to whatever degree the actor permits, psychologically. Remaining in character was thus almost inevitable while literally wearing someone else’s face, albeit rubber and not an Ed Gein-style trophy.

When George approached us after the first take with notes, I did, however, snap back into human mode, because I wanted to listen carefully as he explained a few beats he required us to hit for the shot and I didn’t want to look like a knob.

As he walked back to the video village, I couldn’t help turning to Edgar and saying, ‘We just got directed by George Romero!’ It was a heck of a moment for both of us and its significance sent us into terrifying zombie grins of geekish joy. The same man who had instructed Bill Heinzman (the first and fastest of George’s zombie children) to stagger across Evan’s City Cemetery in 1968, inspiring Russell Streiner’s Johnny to utter the famous line ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara’, had just instructed us. In geek terms, it doesn’t get much cooler than that.

In terms of my childhood zombie love and my eventual participation in a zombie movie of my own, I could not have hoped for better closure on this particular chapter of my life than the world premiere of Land of the Dead in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 2005. The event was attended by a host of luminaries from George’s zombie anthology, all of whom I was thrilled to meet.

Before the film began a speech was made in George’s honour and a poll was taken among the crowd to determine exactly how many people in the audience had participated in a George Romero film. Edgar and myself rose to our feet, along with the other alumni whose faces we knew so well, to receive a round of applause from the assembled zombie fans who had turned out. Quentin Tarantino, the man responsible for the film that played an important part in my bonding with Nick Frost, playfully insisted we ‘sit our punk asses down’ since our film was a rip-off of Romero, not a Romero original. After reminding our tormentor that we were in fact in the film we were about to watch, he shut up and we legitimately enjoyed a few moments as bona fide members of the Pittsburgh zombie massive.

The next day, Greg took Edgar, Quentin and myself to the Evan City Cemetery where the opening sequence of Night of the Living Dead was filmed and where I enjoyed the bizarre and fun experience of playing zombies with one of myall-time favourite directors.

After the cemetery, we moved on to the Monroeville Mall, the main location for Dam of the Dead. Despite inevitable modernisations, much of the mall

remained recognisable from the film, particularly the utility areas and the boiler room, which echoed with the exact same whine of machinery that underscored David Emge’s wordless battle with a dead janitor.

On the roof of the building, we stood where Ken Foree had kicked his way to safety and taken off into uncertainty with Gaylen Ross and grinned from ear to ear at being given access to such an auspicious location. It may seem strange to some that two grown men could derive such enormous pleasure from standing on the roof of a shopping centre in suburban Pittsburgh, but Edgar and I, it’s fair to say, were standing on top of the world.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 836