A backpacker sports bar chain named after John Belushi, whose entire public persona was consumption, and who was killed by it
Belushi’s in Shepherd’s Bush holds a 3.9 from seven hundred and forty-eight people. It is a sports bar attached to a hostel, it does cheap drinks and big screens, and it is named after John Belushi.
John Belushi died in 1982, aged thirty-three, of a speedball – heroin and cocaine – in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont.
The persona and the man
Belushi’s entire comic identity was excess. Bluto in Animal House, crushing a beer can against his head. The Blues Brothers, in the Ray-Bans, unkillable. The Samurai. The Cheeseburger sketch. He was, on screen, a man who consumed everything in front of him and got up again.
And off screen he was doing the same thing, and it was not funny, and it killed him before he was thirty-four.
The chain is named for the persona. Obviously it is. Nobody opened a bar in tribute to a man’s overdose. It is named for the beer can and the sunglasses and the toga, and it is selling exactly the version of him that the audience wanted and that he could not stop performing.
The backpacker bar as a genre
It is a real and specific thing and it should be understood on its own terms rather than sneered at.
A hostel bar exists to solve a problem: a building full of people, aged twenty to thirty, from fourteen countries, who arrived alone this afternoon and do not know anybody.
The bar is the solution. It is loud so that nobody has to be witty. It is cheap so that nobody has to worry. There is a pool table and a screen and a drinking game, and within two hours a group has formed that will travel together for a fortnight.
The Prat’s sociology desk regards this as a genuine and undervalued piece of social engineering, and notes that no venue in either of these surveys performs its actual function more efficiently.
The 3.9
Which is a low score, and which is – as we argued at the Wetherspoon up the road – largely a function of who is allowed in.
A venue that filters nobody gets reviewed by everybody. And a venue whose customers are, by design, drunk twenty-three-year-olds who have never been to London before is going to collect a certain number of one-star reviews written on a phone at four in the morning by a person who cannot find their passport.
Verdict
Cheap, loud, genuinely useful, and doing a job that no other venue in this postcode wants to do.
Go if you are twenty-four and alone in a city. It is what it is for. And spare a thought, at some point in the evening, for the man on the sign, who was thirty-three.
Shepherd’s Bush Empire, next door
Worth noting, since you are here. The Empire on the Green was built in 1903 by Frank Matcham – the same architect who built the London Coliseum, the Palladium, and the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, where we established that polar bears once swam in a hundred-thousand-gallon tank under the stage.
Charlie Chaplin performed at the Empire in 1906. The BBC bought it in 1953 and used it as a television theatre for forty years. It is now a music venue.
Matcham built for spectacle and his buildings have survived by being endlessly repurposed – a circus becomes a casino, a theatre becomes a TV studio becomes a gig venue – and that adaptability is the only reason any of them are still standing.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
