Nerd Do Well (36 page)

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
¹⁹
, 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.

Shaun 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
Dawn 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
Dawn 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.