Bassist Paulo Xisto Pinto Jr of world famous Brazilian metal band Sepultura has opened a bar in Amsterdam called BR020 (BR for Brazil and 020 for Amsterdam’s landline city code).
According to his bar staff, Paulo had always wanted to own a bar in Amsterdam even though he doesn’t live there. The bar staff play vinyl records, so you can ask to hear something and even pick from the wall (see photo below). My party went for some Motörhead, AC/DC and Pink Floyd.
Sepultura is finishing off a tour next week and the entire band is scheduled to attend the private opening of the bar although BR020 has been open for business since January. They serve one type of beer as their regular beer, a lesser known choice in Amsterdam purely because another beer from the same distributor is the beer the band has on their rider: Czech beer Pilsner Urquell.
BR020 also has a small stage that I’m sure will be put to good use soon enough. They also have a very nice collection of signed cymbals on the wall (see photo).
See also:
Owner Elles Hetebrij of the Hete Brij pub in Zwolle has had it with anti-social behaviour from mobile gamers, and has banned the Scrabble like word game Wordfeud from her establishment, 
The local government of Urk has banned all strippers from the fundamentalist Christian ex-island, 
A tour company in Amsterdam claims it wants to hire alcoholics as guides, 
When the smoking ban for bars was introduced last year, it hit Groningen bar De Balk as hard as any other café. Owner Aethne McGhie, originally from Scotland, turned a storage room into a smoking room, but the result was that the bar area itself looked absolutely dead. Her remaining customers came up with an idea: why not turn things around, move the actual bar into the storage room, and the former bar area into the smoking area. And so it was done. The result is that people now have to walk to the former storage room to get their drinks, but, 
Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban. 
With the ban on smoking in cafés comes the inevitable stink of us non-smokers. We reek of sweat and of not knowing how to have a good time, just the way our Protestant government wants it. A company in Groningen wants to remedy the former. 
