Harry's game still a real winner

Sep 28 2009 By Peter McCusker, The Journal

HARRY Costigan's love of music got him into the pub business and music and pubs still play leading roles in his life, as Peter McCusker discovers.

IN the 1960s at the Majestic dance hall on Clayton Street, Newcastle, workers from the surrounding shops and offices would dance their lunchtimes away to the hits of the time.

In their midst, giving his all to Stevie Wonder, Motown and the early Beatles, would be 14-year-old schoolboy Harry Costigan.

"As a young man my life revolved around music. I just loved music. I was fortunate enough to go to school in Newcastle – I went to St Mary’s in the city – but I wasn’t interested in school and at lunchtimes, when I was 14, I would use my dinner money to get into the Majestic, now Carling Academy.

"Between 12.15pm and 1pm the shopworkers from Woolies and Jacksons the Tailors would all go for a dance. The 60s were fantastic times.

"My love of music grew and it has been the main influence on the rest of my life. Motown, Soul, Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison. I just love music."

Now 58, Costigan is one of the most well-known and respected pub and club owners on Tyneside. His company Home Grown Leisure operates theme bar Buffalo Joe's next to the Swing Bridge on the Gateshead side of the Tyne.

A second venture, Leopard Leisure Leased, currently operates four pubs across the region, including the Hotspur and The Empress in Newcastle and he plans to double that number in the coming year.

In recent years Costigan has taken up leading positions on the British Beer and Pub Association and the Newcastle licensing committee and his vast, hands-on experience of the pub trade gives him an authoritative insight into the city’s nightlife.

"I have been drinking in Newcastle city centre for a long time and it’s a safer place to socialise now than it ever has been. We have the rules and regulations in place and, as licensees, we now know how best to handle people.

"When bouncers – as they used to be called – first appeared on doors, they were more interested in preventing people from getting into a venue, whether it be the wrong shoes or the wrong clothes, and this would set the tone for the night.

"If you start off getting upset by the bouncers then there’s a fair chance you’re going to be upset for the rest of the night. We now do all we can to ensure our customers are looked after during a night out."

He cites the strides that have been made with the city's Best Bar None scheme, now in its fourth year, whereby licensees can apply for accreditation by proving their venues are safe and secure and that they promote responsible drinking.

There are now over 70 member bars locked into the scheme, run by Safe Newcastle, a grouping of emergency services, the health authority and Newcastle City Council.

Costigan believes the changes to the licensing laws in 2003 when the Government decided we should be more like the Europeans and introduce 24-hour drinking have helped.

This has seen the number of licenses granted in the city double to 200, but with only one 24-hour licence having being granted and that to a supermarket.

"It has been good for the city, we don’t have any bars which are open around the clock, and it has spread the people around, people no longer congregate in one area when the pubs and clubs close."

But he adds: "Unfortunately there are some people who do not behave properly."

And he believes many of the city’s late night problems are the result of supermarkets selling cheap alcohol.

"If we have someone in our premises who has plainly had too much to drink, we will politely inform them of that fact, offer to get them a taxi home and say they are welcome back at any time in the future.

"We are heavily regulated and it is an offence to sell alcohol to someone we believe is already drunk.

"But there are no such regulations levied on supermarkets. You can go to the supermarket, get 24 bottles of Bud for £5.99, get tanked up and then go out on the town. But if that person gets into trouble then everyone thinks it is to do with the pub.

"There is an issue in our society to do with alcohol abuse, but this alcohol is not coming from the pubs."

His views on the subject have been strengthened by visits to hospital A&E departments.

"To see the doctors and nurses being protected by security staff is unbelievable," he says. "Between 11.30 and 2am 90% of the admissions are drink-related and of these, 95% are domestic violence incidents which have been fuelled by drink bought from a supermarket or shop, the other 5% are random attacks on the city’s streets and from my experience not one incident had occurred in a pub."

Costigan opened his first bar, Buffalo Joes, in 2001, while still working for the Hartlepool-based Pubmaster chain.

In 2003 he became a millionaire, along with 13 other Pubmaster workers, when the company and their shares were purchased by Punch for £1.2bn.

"I had spent 22 years in the pub trade and over that time I had worked really hard so I took it easy for a while."

It had been quite a journey from dancing his lunchtimes away as a 14-year-old schoolboy in the Majestic.

He recalls: "I left school at 14 and started work as an apprentice engineer at Pearson Machine Tool Company Limited in Walker, while going to Gateshead College. I was a DJ at the youth club and lived for the music."

At 18 Costigan joined the Impulse Recording Studio as a mobile DJ, which saw him working seven nights a week at venues across the North East.

Over the next few years he became a fixture in the North East’s tin pan alley where he became friends with members of Lindisfarne and recalls fondly Andy Hudson of the Newcastle Big Band and one of its star performers Gordon Sumner, aka Sting.

In 1977, aged 26, he borrowed £10,000 from Barclays, without any security, and within a couple of years had established Lamplight Entertainment as one of the largest disco operations in the region, with 25 mobile units covering a patch down to Leeds across to Carlisle and up to Edinburgh.

He became acquainted with the people at Camerons Brewery in Hartlepool as a DJ at some of their events and impressed them so much that in 1981 he was asked, and agreed, to become the manager for the brewery of its Bigg Market nightclub Reflections, situated underneath the Pig and Whistle.

He continued to manage Camerons outlets and in 1986 he helped launch the Tap & Spile brand for the pub chain.

As a cask ale devotee Costigan was the ideal man to launch the concept and within 18 months it was winning awards and had been rolled out across the region.

When the Pubmaster chain spun out of Brent Walker in 1995 Costigan became an area director responsible for hundreds of pubs.

In 2004 he teamed up with his former boss at Pubmaster John Sands, a former Journal Business Executive of the Year, and they performed a rescue act for the banks on the Wessex Tavern chain of 30 pubs.

With Buffalo Joe’s now solely in Costigan’s hands under his Home Grown leisure operation, having bought out his two former business partners, Costigan has set his sights on developing pub operation venture Leopard Leisure in which his son and daughter are actively involved.

Despite the current downturn in the licensed trade with the smoking ban, cheap supermarket alcohol and the recession all culminating in a spate of pub closures, Costigan remains optimistic.

"The pub trade is having a hard time. There is more competition and more regulation, but I have seen hard times like this before. There is still a need for good pubs and there always will be.

"If I was starting off now there is still no other business I would go into.

Away from work and music Costigan devotes lots of time, money and emotional energy on Newcastle United.

Mike Ashley used to frequent Costigan’s bars, but these days his welcome may not be so warm.

Costigan says: "There are a plethora of problems with Newcastle from poor- performing footballers to an owner who has never understood Newcastle and still does not."

He is a social and sociable man, with an infectious laugh and a real flair and passion for what he does.

And that love of music first publicly demonstrated on the Majestic dance floor over 40 years ago has never left him.

At home in his garage is his record collection of 12,500 seven-inch singles and 4,000 albums.

"If I do retire I may spend some time in my garage going through my records," he said.

But he has become such an important part of the life of the North East pub business that is hard to imagine him retiring for a long while yet.

Page 2: The CV