Tacos Kokopelli, formerly Alley Cat Café, this Friday celebrates its 18th birthday, quite an achievement for a hole in the wall joint still in its original 2005 location. LengPleng sat down with co-founder Mark Eastty to talk about origins and the contribution the venue has made to the music community in Phnom Penh.
So how did it start?
The Alley Cat Café started basically when my landlord wanted to move out of the house I was living in – he was living where the bar is, I was living in the tower bit behind. If he rented that space out I didn’t really fancy having to walk through somebody else’s house to get to mine; it was all right when it was the landlord, but it would be weird if it was someone else. Dallas [Fellowes] was also staying there at the time, after his bar in Sihanoukville had closed, and he was cooking some damn fine Mexican food. So we thought all right, there wasn’t too much going on in the Mexican restaurant scene back, let’s make a Mexican bar. Dallas and I had both been in Cambodia for about three years.
It was a very different city then.
A totally different city. When we started out there were no other businesses in the alley, so it was pitch black. We had a little painted sign outside with one fluorescent bulb above it, so if you looked down the alley you could kind of see a little light, and if you were intrepid enough you might go down the alley and see what was there. But the regulars knew where to find us.
And the name?
It was called Alley Cat because we were down an alley and we had a cat, so that was a bit lazy. And we went for café because it was somewhere between a bar and a restaurant.
Initially it was a rather simple little Mexican café, all rattan furniture like all the other places at the time. The walls were decidedly plain in the early days – you can still see the original blue tiles in an ornate old-fashioned Chinese style where there’s bits of cover missing from the wall. Behind the bar, all that was blue tile originally. Then slowly over time it built up, and of course Dallas painted murals on the walls.
How did live music come to be such a part of the story?
There was live music involved even in the early years. The one that I will always remember from that time was Johnny Haze, who also went by another name which I always forget. In those days we had no PA, just a normal sound system for playing music, but that wasn’t really a problem for Johnny, he had a booming voice and would strum a guitar until his fingers would bleed. We had some great nights with him banging out the tunes to a properly full bar with no amplification whatsoever, and always rocked the place pretty damn well. Then he left for a while, toured around Africa, and unfortunately when he came back he passed away. There’s still a picture of him up in the bar. Jet Odrerir would have also played very early on – I don’t think we ever had the full band Betty Ford and the GT Falcons, due to size restrictions and the fact that they didn’t play very often.
The music really kicked off at the fourth anniversary party, in 2009, when a very early version of the Cambodian Space Project played, using a karaoke box speaker, a $20 one from the market, which was all I could get on the day. There’s a poster from that event on the wall hanging behind the bar. Later in the evening the name CSP was brainstormed at table two in a conversation about strapping a rocket to a tuktuk. That was the catalyst for us to get a proper sound system, better speakers and so on, and it generated more interest in live music from our customers.
Not the first CSP gig in December 2009 but soon after in early 2010
So we started to get other acts in as well. I couldn’t possibly remember everyone who played and when, but I can reel off a few. Conrad Keely, a fantastic musician. Jigsaw Collective, a massive band including a tuba that somehow fitted inside the tiny space. Batbangers – a great gig when they first hit the scene, back when they were more rock’n’roll. Kampot Playboys. Grass Snake testing out their revival. The Wanderlusters. Moisty Atsushi. Roxanne Dumont.
The Sundowners came along in 2013, and that ramped it up even further – it’s currently the longest running open mic in Phnom Penh. It has been great to see lots of people start at the open mic and then on into playing all over the place, Brooke Palmer and Penh Pals being recent examples of that. Joe Wrigley who hosted Sundowners for a long time. The Sock Essentials. Gareth Bawden and the Green Leaf Motif. The Uncomfortably White Brothers.
Unsure who all these skinny people are.
It quite an achievement to still be standing, and in the same place.
Yes, I really don’t think anyone in 2005 who came along to our opening party thought that they might be going to the 18th birthday party – I still do know a few people who were at the first night, we’ll see how many turn up.
You were also the host for the filming of the Cambodian Space Project video for Have Visa, No Have Rice in 2014.
That was a hell of a drunken event. We do get asked how often we have bands up on the mezzanine balcony and the answer is: never again. That was definitely a one-off, it’s the hottest place in the bar and people were melting up there. I think it was August, not exactly the coolest part of the year.
Perhaps a tourist will walk in one day and say, oh my God, I’m in the Visa video.
They’d just have to slam down a few drinks and wave a baguette in the air to feel like they were really part of it. And then enjoy some dessert – cake was what everyone needed to sober up after four hours of freeflow drinking – we did free drinks because it was four hours of listening to the same song again and again and again and again, and looking like you’re really enjoying it for the first time, which we managed to everyone pretty much doing – as you can see in the video.
We also have another claim to fame in the Phnom Penh music world – back in the early days there was a Khmer fellow who lived in the alley who got turned on to rock’n’roll from our playlist, and even borrowed some CDs from Dallas. He was a friend of Oscar, the drummer who later set up Oscar Bar (now Oscar’s on the Corner) – he introduced Oscar to rock music and the rest is history.
Photo credits: Mark Eastty and David Flack
The 18th anniversary party will be marked on Friday night with a Sundowner open mic from 5 pm hosted by Sunday host Scott Bywater, followed by Green Leaf Motif and Boxchords. Coming later in the month will be David Zdriluk plus The Sock Essentials on 22 December, and on New Year’s Eve the traditional annual listening party for the RadioOun.com Top 100 songs of All Time poll, followed by the Sunday Sundowners open mic.