"Keith Richards!" – A Night at The Bistro with Joe Bear

 

21 July 1990 – Rhyl

Last night at The Bistro was one for the books — a night laced with sweat, nostalgia, and the smell of stale lager clinging to black and salmon walls. But what made it truly unforgettable was running into Joe Bear — legendary Denbigh rocker, local myth, and walking embodiment of Keith Richards worship.

Joe’d just come back from Maine Road, where the Rolling Stones were doing what they do best — making shitloads of cash with sweat and swagger. It was one of the gigs on their Urban Jungle Tour, the Stones deep into their steel-belted stadium rock phase, with Keith prowling the stage like a half-dead pirate god. And Joe? He was buzzing. High on it. Properly alive in that way only a lifelong rocker can be after brushing against the real thing.

Every time I saw him that night — and it felt like I passed him on every lap to the bar or bogs — he was in a slightly worse state than before. Pints turning into doubles, turning into slurring sentences and a slow descent into the usual Joe Bear wobbling stagger. But every single time, without fail, he’d grin, prop up his invisible Telecaster, and rasp:

“Keith Richards!”

Then he'd mime one of those half-shouldered licks, eyes rolling back, lost in the moment.

The Bistro, if you’ve never been, was Rhyl’s dark, sticky womb of alternative music — punk, goth, indie, metal, the occasional trance night if someone forgot to check the playlist. It was the kind of place where the DJ booth was part pulpit, part bunker, and the walls sweated with decades of feedback and body heat. Every corner had a tale. Last night was no different.

By the end of the night — early hours now — I staggered into the toilets in search of a piss and possibly my remaining dignity. That’s when I saw him.

Joe Bear.

Face down on the soaked tile floor, one arm submerged in the blocked porcelain trough, the other stretched out toward the urinal wall like he was trying to commune with the plumbing gods. His eyes, bleary and half-conscious, found mine. He didn’t speak at first. Just kind of blinked.

Then, with the slow, tragic elegance of a fallen hero, he lifted his soaking wet arm from the piss-water, raised it to his chest, and started strumming the air guitar again.

“Keith... Richards...”

he slurred, barely audible over the bass thump still leaking through the toilet walls.

That was it. That was the moment. The full Joe Bear experience — a man half-drowned in lager, piss and rock ‘n’ roll, still worshipping at the altar of his six-string saviour.

He might have been wrecked, but he was glowing with something pure. It wasn’t just booze and nostalgia — it was belief. Joe didn’t just go to see the Stones. He absorbed them. Channelled them. Brought them back with him like sacred fire, only to collapse in the urinal like a martyred prophet.

And you know what?

In that moment — half-dead, piss-soaked, muttering about Keith Richards — Joe Bear was and is a fucking legend.