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Legendary London rock bar The Crobar is closing its doors due to issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic, it has been announced.
The bar opened in Soho in 2001 and was loved by bands and music fans alike, with Dave Grohl a frequent visitor who hired out the space to host a Foo Fighters’ Wembley Stadium after-party there in 2008.
The bar’s owners made the announcement on Facebook earlier today (September 20), confirming that The Crobar would be “unable to re-open at its current location”.
“If the insurance companies had paid out, we could have paid the rent and the staff’s wages and survived,” they wrote. “If the landlords had given us a rent discount or holiday, we could have survived. Sadly, our idiot government did not make either of them do what’s right, and now the bar and music industries are in tatters.”
They continued to note that The Crobar was not the only space affected, but that “years and years of hard work by pub, bar and venue owners across the country have been destroyed in the blink of an eye”.
The owners continued to say that, while the bar would not re-open in its current location, they planned to re-open a new Crobar with both a bar and a live music venue. “It will require crowd funding and I suspect it will be a year or so before opening will be viable, but fuck the greedy insurance companies, fuck the greedy short sighted landlords and fuck our brainless government,” they wrote. “We will be back!”
Other artists who visited Crobar over the years include Slash, Alice Cooper, Slayer’s Kerry King, Gwar, and pop stars Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
In July, the UK government announced a £2.25million fund to help grassroots venues through the coronavirus pandemic. The first 135 recipients were announced in August when the fund was also increased to £3.36million.
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