Brian Cole
Brian Cole is currently a Senior Fire & Safety Surveyor. His role is varied and has included offering consultancy services to clients such as The Crown Estates and British Airways in recent years. Brian has taken on the task of delivering high-level Fire Risk Management for blue-chip organisations and climbed the ladder of success. His specialised expertise commands a far higher wage than he could have ever envisaged earning a decade ago. But Brian carries a dark secret into this new life that he has created for himself. And this undisclosed reality, which Brian has managed to keep hushed-up to those that he now finds himself working alongside, is that he spent twelve years earning a living being a nightclub bouncer.
Brian Cole was raised as part of a single parent family in a grim suburb of North London, built from mile after mile of post war council blocks. At the age of nineteen Brian was minding the doors to several Irish bars and clubs in and around the North London area. Whatever the whys and wherefores, this lifestyle suited him back then. Nevertheless, continuing to do it for the next twelve years was never part of his master plan.
During this time, Brian and his pals expanded their particular skill-set as they all slithered ever-deeper into London’s vast & violent leisure industry. And now he wants to share some stories of what his daily life used to look like back then and show you the type of struggle that he went through in order to turn his life around – an exercise that was akin to shepherding kittens up the travellator on Gladiators!
The haphazard choreography that Brian has written about shows a severely cropped but gritty account of the everyday perils that he and his associates had to deal with whilst minding local boozers, strip tease bars, brothels as well as some of the swankiest nightclubs within London’s West End. It explains, with the use of rough humour, the every-day violence and subsequent entanglements with the law that ultimately brought Brian right to the edge psychologically.
